On the evening of July 23rd, 2009, a man named Edwin Rist began  a carefully-planned heist.

His target was a museum that he’d  scoped out over several weeks. But his prize wasn’t jewels, or art,  or the Declaration of Independence.

It was birds. Dead ones, specifically. He was after preserved tropical birds, held in a museum called the  Natural History Museum at Tring, a sub-branch of the London Natural History Museum.

He managed to steal nearly 300  taxidermied birds that night. And while the collection has  enormous scientific value, Rist wanted them for a much stranger reason. [intro music] Okay, before we can really unpack how  bananas this entire situation was, let’s start by talking about  the museum that got robbed. The Natural History Museum  at Tring was founded in 1892, as the private museum  collection of Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Baron of the Rothschild Estate.

It was a home to the weird and interesting  objects he collected in his spare time, as rich Victorians would often do. When he died, he donated the building and his collection to the  Natural History Museum in London, who use the Tring building as a sort  of satellite campus of the main museum, largely focused on taxidermy. The public-facing exhibits contain all  sorts of animals, from mammals to reptiles.

But the behind-the-scenes collection is where  this museum’s notoriety really comes from — it’s one of the most complete and  comprehensive collections of taxidermied birds in the world. The Tring is home to more than  one million avian specimens, including 750,000 taxidermied  skins, 300,000 egg clutches, and thousands of skeletons, nests,  and fully mounted display birds. They have specimens representing 95%  of the known species of birds on Earth!

Most of these are kept behind the  scenes, and will never be put on display. And while that seems a little stingy, there’s a perfectly good reason  that the museum needs so many birds. A lot of the research I do is  about the evolution of the anatomy, the morphology, ah the physical bird.

And there's just lots of questions you can't  ask about bird biology from wild birds. And the museum, natural history museums, and the collections that they have gathered provide an important context for studying that.” That’s Richard Prum, an ornithologist and  evolutionary biologist at Yale University, and head curator of vertebrate zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. We wanted to talk to him about this story, and not just because he’s a bird guy.

But we’ll get to that. We also wanted to know what goes  into keeping a museum collection, because there’s a lot going on  behind the scenes in a museum. And a big part of that work is  making sure that researchers have really good records to go with  every object in the collection.

We are eager to make sure that the  specimens themselves are preserved, but without the data associated with them,  they become just sort of curiosities. What we really need to do is preserve as well  the data of the original place in the world where the bird was from, the date, and all the other information  that comes with that specimen. And in most bird skins, that's a little paper tag that's tied onto that particular specimen.

And then in our case, in most collections now, the ah data from the labels is computerized and a large database that's searchable  so we can find all of our birds that were collected on a particular date or in a particular county or nation ah or of a particular family or genus, all sorts of ways that search the data. And that's part of our job to make  sure that both the bird specimens and the data associated with them  are preserved to the best we can. Without that data, the birds aren’t  nearly as valuable to researchers.

Like, you can’t study bird  variation across locations if you don’t know where any  of your birds came from. But this collection isn’t just important  for what it means to modern scientists. There are incredibly important  historical objects in these shelves, too.

Some were collected by famed and in  some cases controversial naturalists like Alfred Russell Wallace, James  Cook, and even Charles Darwin. We have specimens from all of  these eras and personalities. And of course, many of them contributed overwhelmingly important  discoveries to science itself.

And many figures that we know well, Charles Darwin and and Alfred Russell Wallace um and you know ah Bates and companies  that began their scientific careers through collecting of biodiversity  and in far-flung continents. This is ah both you know ah a  fascinating piece of scientific history and part of our culture and our cultural legacy. In many cases, this was an  exploitative relationship with the different countries that they worked in.

But in all cases, ah it was um ah  the primary mission was trying to   create a permanent record of biodiversity. So these collections are important  resources for researchers, and they’re also valuable historical objects. There were calls to move the collection  to London going as far back as 1969, but whether due to cost or logistics,  they remained in Hertfordshire.

And in an ironic twist, a  curator at this same museum ad published a report on the  dangers to collections like his own, citing theft as a concern. Four years later, he’d be proven right. Edwin Rist was an American student at  the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying the flute.

But music was just one of his passions, and his other had to do with rare birds. That’s what led him to the Tring  on the night of June 23, 2009, carrying wire clippers, a diamond-tipped  glass cutter, and a suitcase. Somehow, the guard on duty didn’t  notice the alarm that Rist activated when he shattered the museum’s window.

Nor did he see Rist clamber in  the window on the CCTV cameras covering the museum’s exterior. And the cases holding these  precious birds weren’t locked. So Rist was able to fill his bag with his bounty, and escape the way he came in.

Bafflingly, even though the  broken glass was discovered and the collection inspected the next day, the museum staff didn’t realize  anything had been taken. They checked only their most  conventionally valuable items, and when they saw all were  present, they called it there. It was a full month later when a curator was showing a visiting researcher the collection that the empty drawers were discovered, and there were a lot of them.

In total, Rist stole 299 birds belonging to  sixteen different species and subspecies. And he didn’t just let them all sit around. Over several months, he meticulously  sold this trove in small pieces, in some cases literally cutting them apart or  plucking individual feathers off the skins, to be sold to his adoring customers.

So what did all these people want with birds? I’ll tell you,  but first, a quick ad break. Thanks to Brilliant, the interactive  online learning platform, for supporting this SciShow video!

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You’ll also get 20% off an  annual premium subscription. Rist’s customers were hobbyists in a  niche art practice of Victorian fly-tying, where feathers from specific birds were  used to make lures for salmon fishing. The lures themselves are intricate and beautiful, and Edwin himself was a renowned lure-tier, often appearing at conventions and expos  to practice the art in front of a crowd.

The funny thing is, most people who make  them now don’t even use them for fishing. And, the salmon don’t seem any more fond  of these lures than standard feathers, so it’s doubly pointless. The community uses the same “recipes” that were written down in the Victorian days, which was a time where taxidermied  birds were all the rage.

Women wore them on their hats, and  their feathers were used as decorations, and yes, even fishing lures. Today, some of these birds are  endangered or even extinct in the wild, and way more are internationally protected. Meaning that their feathers are hard to come by, since getting them from currently  living birds is a no-no.

So anyone who had a trove of these feathers could make a fortune if they  knew who to sell them to. Which Rist very much did. And here’s where Richard Prum re-enters the story.

Prum heard about the theft when the news broke, and got personally involved right away. Anyway, I became very interested  when I found out that, ah many of the specimens were birds that I had particular research interest in, having worked on the physics and  anatomy of avian structural colors, optical colors made by feathers. I've worked on a lot of birds, really beautiful  birds with lots of interest to the public, and including Cotinga, Vivid blue and various birds of paradise, all sorts of iridescent birds, et cetera.

And then I don't remember exactly the details, but it soon became clear that all of  these specimens that have been stolen or most of them were of particular interest to a very specific community of  fly fishermen or people associated with fly fishing in the preparation of lures  or flies for trout and salmon fishing.” So he did what any scientist would do: He went to a local fly fishing conference, looking for the stolen birds. He even managed to track down one  man who’d sold a skin that matched   a species that had been stolen in the Tring heist. While the bird was already  gone by the time he got there, he’s confident that it was one of  the missing birds from the Tring.

With hundreds of other birds in his possession, Rist was poised to make a fortune selling them. His ill-gained treasure included cotingas,  Flame Bowerbirds, Resplendent Quetzals, and several types of birds of paradise, many of which were so rare in the fly-tying world that a single feather could be worth thousands. Rist sold these feathers in small amounts, often pretending to have found  a single skin at a yard sale, or claiming that he was selling the birds on behalf of a private collector  who wished to remain anonymous.

Over a span of thirteen  months, he continued to post more and more feathers for sale  on his favorite message boards, while also offering full skins  to individual collectors. He also sold items on eBay under  the username Fluteplayer1988. Thanks to leads from Prum and  others involved in fly-tying, including a man identified  only by his nickname “Irish,” British authorities were eventually able  to uncover the identity of the online user who had sold so many museum-quality birds.

Rist was arrested on November 12, 2010, just one day after his final lot of  feathers was posted online for sale. His remaining birds were confiscated. He’d plucked many of them and sold the feathers, and he also removed the identifying labels  from the birds he hadn’t yet destroyed, meaning that of the 299 he stole,  only 102 still had research value.

Many of these birds were irreplaceable, both as scientific objects and as historic ones. And now, instead of furthering  our understanding of ornithology, many of the specimens sit in private  collections of random people, taken apart piece by piece and  twisted into salmon fly fishing lures that will never be used. The same ornamentation that these birds evolved over millennia  to attract mates and show off, has captivated humans for just as  long as we’ve known they were there.

From the Victorian and Edwardian fashion  trends, collectors and their curio cabinets, and now these fly tiers, there’s  a long legacy of humans being just as enamored with bird feathers  as the mates they evolved to attract. “Birds are beautiful because  they're beautiful to themselves. that they are aesthetic agents in their  own ornamental and social sexual evolution. And as a result of the kind of choices they make, we have a complicated history  over millions of years of the elaboration of an aspect of the  plumage that functions particularly not just in the material world, to  protect from predators or to fly, but in the subjective experiences of other birds. That is, they function in  mind, the minds of other birds.

And as a result, they are  amazing to study scientifically. ut the same features that make  them amazing as scientific examples of non-human beauty ah make  them attractive as art forms, as materials for derivative art forms  by you know human cultures forever.” It’s sad that these feathers, which  exist to spread their species, are the very thing that makes them  so tempting for humans to exploit. Ultimately, Edwin Rist’s love for fishing lures  made from rare birds left him on the hook, and the only thing that he caught was ... himself. [ OUTRO ]