He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Berlin, and the USC Annenberg Center.

His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. Johnson is the author of To Be a Friend Is Fatal and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. Currently-lives in Los Angeles, California.The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature. In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief … Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins-some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them-and escaped into the darkness. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the CenturyĪ rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

The feather thief