The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
By Kirk Wallace Johnson. Published by Viking, 2018; $16.20 hardbound, $13.99 Kindle.
Just in time for summer reading, this engaging true-crime thriller is actually three books in one. As the title implies, this is based on one bizarre crime: on a June evening in 2009, 20-year-old American music student and accomplished fly tyer Edwin Rist smashed an alley window and hoisted himself into the renowned British Museum of Natural History at Tring with a singular purpose: to steal some of the world’s rarest old birds to finance buying a gold flute. This may seem an odd way to finance a $10,000 instrument, yet individual skins can sell for $2,500 or more in an underground fly-tying market bordering on the fanatical. After his arrest, Rist estimated he’d made northward of $165,000 selling feathers to private collectors as well as through niche fly-tying forums and on eBay.
According to its website, the museum’s avian skin collection is the second largest of its kind in the world, with almost three-quarters of a million specimens representing 95 percent of the world’s bird species. Included are nearly seven hundred skins collected by Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy during the sixyear voyage of the HMS Beagle and, more importantly for Rist, the extensive collection of Alfred Russel Wallace that included rare originals needed to complete authentic Victorian flies. At one point in the book, when Rist is in his late teens, his mentor gives him a bag of Indian crow and blue chatterer feathers worth $250, enough to tie about two flies.
Like any of the world’s most precious substances, the feathers for classic fly recipes are expensive — and usually illegal to purchase. About the only legal sources are great-grandmother’s Victorian bonnet, complete with a flame bowerbird’s carcass, or the zoo, where perhaps a resplendent quetzal died of natural causes.
To understand the arcane world of showy feathers from rare or endangered birds such as these, Johnson first introduces readers to a broad historical stage, one in which the sun never sets on the British Empire, and the greed for the exotic went unquenched, much like the sport-hunting to near extinction of the buffalo in our West. Women’s fashion fueled the slaughter of tens of thousands of exotic birds from the Malay Peninsula and South America for their intensely colored and sometimes iridescent feathers. Those same feathers were also thought to be best for catching fasting Scottish salmon as they came back from the ocean to spawn. Books such as George Kelson’s The Salmon Fly included the most precious materials — think orange and black seal’s fur — to build an engaging watery fusillade ensuring a hungerless salmon would strike. The second section goes into detail about the heist itself — how it was planned and what was taken. Science lovers will be particularly bereft when they realize Rist destroyed the tags on the 299 skins he stole. The tags told where and when the specimens were collected, as well as other critical data, some written in the hand of Wallace himself. As ornithologist Jessie Williamson wrote in her review of the book, “It’s hard to overstate the tragedy of destroying irreplaceable scientific objects. Natural-history collections are vital to our understanding of biodiversity, evolution, and environmental change, and they only grow more valuable with time. In the late 1960s, museums were critical to discovering the link between the pesticide DDT and eggshell thinning.”
Yet for what a British judge deemed “a natural history disaster of world proportions,” Rist did no jail time after pleading an Asperger’s defense, which leads to the last and most incredible section, in which the author literally goes on a quest for justice worldwide to find and return all of the stolen skins to the Tring. After tracking Rist to Dusseldorf, the author sets up an interview with the thief, complete with a non-English-speaking clandestine bodyguard outside his hotel room. Besides this dazzling piece of journalistic bravado — at this point, the cops had closed the case — Johnson also interviews a South African who is sure the rapture is forthcoming, a Norwegian, code name Goku, who may have been an accomplice, and a tough American ex-cop who now hosts a salmon-fly-tying forum.
Engaging, infuriating, and horizon expanding, this is one for your nightstand, and it is a book that will become a classic of fly-fishing literature.
— Jim Burns
Tying Small Flies
By Ed Engle. Published by Stackpole Books, 2017; $24.95, softbound.
Q: How many flies can dance on the head of a pin? A: One, as illustrated in Ed Engle’s Tying Small Flies. They don’t actually dance — in fact, they’re stuck there for display purposes with some kind of goop — but the pictures of tiny flies and the hooks on which they’re tied are among the more mind-boggling aspects of this valuable book, originally published in 2004 and now reissued by Stackpole Books, along with its companion volume of 2005, Fishing Small Flies.
One of the things that makes it valuable, even though much has changed in the fly-tying world since it was first published, is the kind of thinking about flies, fly tying, and solving fly-fishing problems that it exemplifies. Engle originally started tying and fishing small flies because he was trying to match the hatches on his home tailwater river, Colorado’s South Platte. But then, he says, “I found myself fishing small flies not only because they caught trout, but because of their elemental simplicity.”
If you tie small flies you know that once you get used to the tying proportions and just being able to see the tiny small hooks, actually tying the fly is not difficult. You just can’t tie that much stuff on a small hook, Techniques for tying the few materials that you can attach to the hook are pretty basic. At first I tried to complicate my small-fly designs because they just seemed too simple, but I ultimately came to appreciate that very simplicity. It means that there is that much less between me and the trout. Tying small flies and fishing them is fly fishing stripped to its bare essentials. There’s no room for fluff, no way to fake it, and there is nothing added. It’s the trout and me with as little in between as possible.
There is, of course, a whole school of thought that advocates a kind of radical minimalism in trying and fishing artificial flies. Bob Wyatt’s controversial What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths (2013) and Morgan Lyle’s Simple Flies: 52 Easy-to-Tie Patterns that Catch Fish (2015) in one way or another reflect that kind of thinking. Tying Small Flies could be read as a precursor of that school of thought, but to do so would be to ignore the tenor of Engle’s prose and his approach to angling, both of which are pragmatic, not in the least dogmatic.
You don’t need to tie flies below size 18 or dedicate yourself to radical minimalism to see the value in remembering from time to time that “elemental simplicity” defines some of the most successful fly designs of all time, from Frank Sawyer’s original Pheasant Tail Nymph, to the classic Catskill dry fly, to the Clouser Deep Minnow. Often we tie flies for our own aesthetic appreciation and the enjoyment of mastering difficult skills — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but fly fishing is or can be a simple sport, and the fish seem to lack an aesthetic sense and can be unimpressed by a tyer’s skills, esteeming presentation, rather than cleverly tied representations. It helps to step back occasionally and think about what’s really essential in fly design. I have a friend who not only leaves the wings off small mayfly dun imitations, but also leaves them off large mayfly spinners, arguing that at dark, fish can’t see them and instead just key in on the bodies. Tying Small Flies can help any tyer do what he does: refocus on what’s “elemental” — what works.
That, I think, is the role that the many fly patterns offered here can play, whether it is someone’s intention to get into actually tying small flies or not. They compile a series of ideas about what’s essential in a fly pattern and how to realize it on a hook. Some are just cool patterns in their own right, too. I’m not a small-fly tyer myself and likely never will be, but I’m a fan of soft hackles, and I’m tempted to attempt a size 20 Micro Soft Hackle, tied with a partridge aftershaft feather, despite my aging eyes.
As Engle frequently notes, the idea of tying small flies is scarcely new and has an honorable provenance in the works of Vincent Marinaro and Ed Shenk, derived from their experience fishing the spring creeks of the Northeast and fostered by Arnold Gingrich’s promotion of the “20/20 club” — the fellowship of those who have caught a 20-inch fish on a size 20 fly.
However, as he also notes, what “small” means has changed, and hook sizes never have had any stable meaning. What was seen as “minutiae” in Marinaro’s time, half a century ago, was pretty big when Engle’s book came out and size 32 hooks were available. Also, it is notorious that the designated size of hooks can differ significantly from brand to brand for larger hooks, even varying within brands, and the differences become even more acute for size 20 hooks and smaller. Advances in tippet strength and the proliferation of synthetic materials have made tying and fishing small flies easier and more feasible, and they have continued to do so since Engle’s book was published in 2004. That’s good, but it renders obsolete the research and the work of description and analysis that Engle did in chapters dealing with the hooks and with the threads then available.
Anyone intending to tie small flies these days will need to do their own research on hook availability. Size 32s have gone the way of the Walkman, though it’s claimed that the Varivas 2300 Ultra Midge hook is the equivalent of the old size 32 TMC 518, and the Partridge K1A has disappeared, as well. (Interestingly, it’s tenkara anglers and the websites that serve them than seem to have the best leads on really small hooks.) There are plenty of hooks available down to size 26 (Tiemco seems to have the most), but chances are, you won’t find them in your local fly shop, if there still is a local fly shop: demand drives supply.
On the plus side, there are more fly-tying threads available today that claim to be available in small sizes than there were in 2004. I say “claim,” because what’s on the label and the actual size, compared with other threads, can’t be given much credit. Back in 2004, Engle found that Danville’s waxed Flymaster 6/0 “ties like a 10/0 thread,” for example. Because, as he says, the “ought” system is “totally arbitrary,” he advocated that tyers do their own research on this topic, and since in the interim, the denier system hasn’t caught on, that’s true today, too.
There probably are times when every angler could benefit from tying small flies and having them available on the stream. I know folks who swear by Engle’s Secret Weapon pattern during a Blue-Winged Olive hatch — a fly tied improbably with an all-white body and wing. But there also are times when every angler who ties flies could benefit from stepping back and thinking about what they’re doing and what’s essential in the design of the flies they usually tie and fish. Whether you need a magnifier to tie a size 10 Green Drake or can tie a size 32 parachute as if it were a size 10, as I once saw Ed Engle do at a show, you can learn something from the way he thinks about and ties small flies.
— Bud Bynack
Fishing Small Flies
By Ed Engle. Published by Stackpole Books, 2017; $24.95 softbound.
If I’m fishing a river that flows slowly and placidly, such as Hot Creek, Hat Creek, or the Fall River, I like to use midge patterns when there’s no obvious hatch. Coupled with a long, light leader, these tiny flies improve my rate of success in drawing hits from trout that have learned to be wary in such waters. I suspect this is because the flaws necessarily inherent in an imitation of a bug are much less obvious when that artificial is exceedingly small.
But often, too, on these waters, if insects are hatching, they’ll likewise be small in size, and to do well, the angler needs to be able to imitate the bugs and fish them intelligently.
Ed Engle’s instructional book, Fishing Small Flies, was first published in 2005 and has recently been reprinted by Stackpole. In my opinion, not much has changed in the fishing of midges and other small imitations between then and now, which means Engle’s advice remains spot on. And there’s a lot of advice in this book, ranging from tackle selection, reading rise forms, small-fly nymphing and dry-fly techniques, playing and landing fish, and ways to match the life cycles of the important small-fly hatches: BlueWinged Olives, Pale Morning Duns, Tricos, midges, and microcaddises.
Engle includes plenty of excellent drawings and sharply focused black-and-white photographs that illustrate tactical problem solving, plus color photographs of patterns that have proven their worth. A significant percentage of the information was new to me, so yes, Engle has taught an old dog some new tricks. In all, Fishing Small Flies is an informative, impressively readable book that is based upon the author’s deep experience as a fly fisher and guide. It has value whether you are new to fly fishing or have been doing it for decades. In an almost throwaway line in a section on presentation, Engle says “The trick is to keep learning.” That’s a truism for our sport and, frankly, one of its joys.
— Richard Anderson
Classics Revisited
By Michael Checchio
Striper: A Story of Fish and Man
By John N. Cole. Published by Little Brown, 1978, and Lyons Press, 1989.
Fishing Came First
By John N. Cole. Published by Lyons and Burford, 1989. Both are available used.
When I first moved to California from the East Coast, I was eager to fly fish for stripers in San Francisco Bay. After all, these California stripers and I shared am unbreakable bond. We hailed from New Jersey. In 1879, 132 fingerling striped bass were shipped by rail to California from the Navesink River, a tidal estuary in New Jersey, for transplanting in San Francisco Bay. Three years later, another bucket of fingerlings from that estuary made the coast-to-coast trip. Within two decades, the mass of the species heretofore unknown in the Pacific Ocean totaled 1.2 million pounds. Striped bass have expanded their range to Southern California and as far north as British Columbia. They move in broad strokes, like Snooki from The Jersey Shore. As a fly fisher, I was entirely self-taught. And in those early days, when I, too, lived at the Jersey Shore, I struggled to learn how to wield a fly rod in the Atlantic surf. A trout stream was child’s play compared with the breakers at Corson’s Inlet. Even harder for me to figure out was the seasonal movement of striped bass up and down the coast and why some of them held over in the bays, estuaries, and tidal creeks year round. I knew little about their life cycle, habitat, and breeding grounds.
In those days — this was in the 1970s — I hungered for books for a better understanding of the sport and quarry I had taken up. While there was much in print concerning trout, there was precious little on stripers in the years of my fly-fishing apprenticeship. And then in 1978 a book came out called Striper, written by a fellow named John Cole. Like me, he was a newspaperman. And like me, he was pretty bad with a fly rod. His book gave me hope.
Striper: A Story of Fish and Man is both a natural history and a memoir. Told in alternating chapters, Cole’s narrative gives us the story of striped bass from their Ice Age origin to their struggles to endure modern-day environmental challenges such as acid rain. There is much in Cole’s book about the effects of pollutants on these fish and on their spawning grounds. But Striper also tells the story of a man, a society blue-blood (Yale, Upper East Side) who turns his back on country-club life to become a commercial fisherman on Long Island during the postwar years of the 1950s.
When the book came out in 1978, Cole was already a bit of a legend in journalism circles. A crusader and gadfly, he was a cofounder of the Maine Times, a feisty alternative weekly born in the tumultuous days of the mid-1960s that took on Maine politicians and environmental polluters. Under Cole’s guidance, the newspaper dispensed with much of the routine fodder of small-town newspapers in order to focus on important issues that weren’t getting enough attention, such as deforestation and Maine’s juvenile-detention system. Cole went head to head with Governor James B. Longley, whom he regarded as a demagogue. And when an oil refinery was proposed next door to Acadia National Park, Cole sent a reporter to New Jersey to show what refinery pollutants could do to the environment.
Incredibly, Cole had his first flycasting lesson indoors. It took place inside Maine’s historic senate chamber, under its soaring dome. The year was 1968. Senator Joe Sewall, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, kept a fly rod in his office. Cole, a bait fisherman since boyhood, asked Sewall how anyone could fish “with such a long and ungainly stick.” So the senator escorted the reporter into the empty senate chamber to show the greenhorn how it was done. Sewall then invited Cole for two days of fishing at a salmon club on the Upsqualitch River in New Brunswick. Cole blew every cast, but the hook was set.
As he recounts in a later memoir, Fishing Came First (1989), Cole fell in love with angling from an early age. Summers in the Hamptons were a respite from the misery he had to endure at boys-only boarding schools. To his parents’ dismay, he chose fishing Long Island Sound over clay tennis courts and sailing races at Devon. On the eve of his graduation, he got kicked out of his prep school for breaking curfew (caught with a bottle of champagne, returning from a country-club dance.) But he managed to squeak into Yale, where he majored in booze and coeds. About to flunk his freshman year, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and saw combat in World War II. Four years and 35 missions later, he returned to Yale, got his diploma, but skipped the gown-and-mortarboard ceremony so he could take a summer job on Fishers Island among the country-club set, who were still acting as if the New Deal had never happened. Cole’s job was to pilot the club’s yacht, a 90-horsepower speedster, a holdover from Prohibition days. One fine afternoon, Cole sent such a high wake climbing through the moored yachts and yawls (“towing a Rockefeller brother on water skis”) that he managed to upset and smash a twelve-hundred-dollar Dresden china set resting on a tea table on an anchored yacht. Living free in a house on the water, given carte blanche at the club bar, and mingling with “long-limbed college girls who knew the rules of summer romance,” Cole was in his element.
But there was friction at home. Fed up with his son’s carousing, his father kicked him out of the family’s Upper East Side home because he didn’t measure up. “The only two things you care about are fishing and fucking,” complained his father. “Well, at least you got them in the right order,” said his son. And thus the title, Fishing Came First.
His earlier, bittersweet memoir Striper tells how he backed out of the traditional career path available to a society blue blood for a grubby job hauling up striped bass in nets from the waters of Long Island Sound. Cole was looking for “authenticity” in those postwar years, and he longed to return to the scene of his summer glories. So in Striper, Cole hooks up with his friend Jim, another dropout trying to keep it real, and together they chop wood and mend nets through the winter, equip themselves with a dory, truck, and commercial haul-seining gear, and hit the water come spring. Sometimes they score, but most days they fail to bring up enough bass “to pay for the gas.” So they leap at a chance to crew for Ted Posey, a legendary commercial fisherman on the sound. Cole sticks it out for six years, but always he hears the siren call of his old life at his grandmother’s mansion in East Hampton. The book ends in Maine, where Cole has found a new house and a new career.
(A pair of anecdotes that did not make it into Striper: he briefly partners in a sport-fishing charter operating out of Montauk with his boyhood friend, the writer-naturalist Peter Matthiessen, who also worked as a seine fisherman and who wrote a fine book about it called Men’s Lives. And Cole befriends an obscure painter named Jackson Pollock, but, low on money, sells a Pollock painting before they fetch millions. Ouch!)
Striper is a book rich in natural history and personal anecdote, as is Fishing Came First, written a decade later. The essays in this second memoir waltz through time, from Town Dock at East Hampton (1939) to Garrison Bight in Key West in his sunset years, and from salmon trips in the Canadian Maritimes, Iceland, and Alaska to tarpon flats in the Marquesas and Florida Keys. In between fishing trips are accounts of his youthful escapades, his days as a Maine statehouse reporter, and his many warm friendships. We meet plenty of fine fishermen, such as his brother-in-law, the Texas writer John Graves (author of Goodbye to a River), as well as a turbaned Sikh real-estate developer named Pritam Singh, who lives to fly fish. And then there is famed Florida Keys fishing guide Jeffrey Cardenas, who, with the patience of a saint, tries to help old man Cole catch his first tarpon. Cole’s descriptions of the natural world are ravishing, but he writes about himself with understatement and self-deprecating humor. And he does finally manage to catch a tarpon.
East Coast stripers have come back from the brink since Cole’s days covering Down East politics. Cole sold his share of the Maine Times to his partner Peter Cox in the midseventies, wrote a Sunday column for the Boston Globe, freelanced for magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and Field & Stream, and continued to write books on Maine life, conservation, and fishing (Tarpon Quest, 1997). He died of cancer at his home in Brunswick, Maine, at age 79. The New York Times said in its obituary that Cole “sought to protect every inch of the state, from the rocky seashore to the roaring Allagash River.” He never lost that keen sense of humor or his appreciation for the ineluctable power of the natural world, and his books are a joy to read.
Down by the River: A Family Fly Fishing Story
By Andrew Weiner, illustrated by April Chu. Published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2018; $17.99 hardbound.
Elsewhere in this issue of California Fly Fisher, Hogan Brown discusses the need to get kids interested in angling, and his strategy to do so revolves around getting them comfortable with simply being outdoors and having fun on the water. Another way to achieve the same end is by having kids identify with and even emulate a character in a story. Children’s books are especially adept at this, and Down by the River, written by Andrew Weiner and illustrated by April Chu, uses the character of Art and his first fly-fishing outing to reveal the pleasures of our sport. Lessons on angling and behavior are gently presented, and Chu’s drawings easily charm the reader. In all, it’s a nice way to begin introducing kids to fly fishing.
— Richard Anderson
