![]() ![]() Then came the millenary feather craze that almost wiped out the exotic birds themselves before women themselves began the pushback that lead to the legal protections that have become the bulwark against extinction. ![]() ![]() The next chapter examines the museums that gathered and preserved these kinds of amazing collections for posterity-particularly the Tring Museum of uber-rich Walter Rothchild. The book opens with the crime, but then backs WAY up to the real beginning of the story-the amazing life and collecting expeditions of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s contemporary, who overcame huge personal disasters to become one of the greatest names in biogeography. This sounds to him like a story ready made to get his mind off a messy war and its tragic aftermath, and he jumps into it. One day he learns that one of the most promising up-and-coming fly-tiers of the younger generation (and a virtuoso classical flautist to boot) stole a massive number of irreplaceable exotic feathers and skins from a major natural history museum in England. The author, a journalist who survived the Iraqi War with a bad case of PTSD, finds solace in fly fishing. ![]()
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