This Green Earth - April 16, 2019 - Kirk Wallace Johnson

During the first half of the show, Nell and Chris were joined by Kirk Wallace Johnson, the author of The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.  They learned the story of the 20 year old flautist Edwin Rist, who committed one of the most unusual crimes of the 21st century by stealing 299 bird skins from the British Natural History Museum.  This theft destroyed an important ecological record gathered by Darwin's peers, disturbing an entire portion of the earth's evolutionary record.  Listen in to learn why and how he did this, and the fate of these irreplaceable feathers.