The facility also houses the largest zoological collection amassed by one person: Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937), a banking scion said to have almost exhausted his share of the family fortune in an attempt to collect anything that had ever lived. Today the vast majority of Wallace’s birds repose at a branch of the Natural History Museum, London, located 30 miles northwest of the city, in Tring. ![]() His field notebooks and thousands of preserved skins are still part of a continuous voyage of discovery. Much of what Wallace had accumulated was sold to museums and private collectors. Inspired by bird of paradise sightings-and reputedly while in a malarial fever-Wallace formulated his theory of natural selection.īy the time he left Malay, he had depleted the ecosystem of more than 125,000 specimens, mainly beetles, butterflies and birds-including five species from the bird of paradise family. Decked out in strange quills and gaudy plumage, the male has developed spectacular displays and elaborate courtship dances whereby he morphs into a twitching, lurching geometric abstraction. An evolutionary theorist, he was first upstaged, then totally overshadowed, by his more ambitious colleague Charles Darwin.īeginning in 1854, Wallace spent eight years in the Malay Archipelago (now Malaysia and Indonesia), observing wildlife and paddling up rivers in pursuit of the most sought-after creature of the day: the bird of paradise. What piqued my curiosity and prompted a recent trip to London was that Wallace, a magnificent Victorian obsessive, embraced spiritualism and opposed vaccinations, colonialism, exotic feathers in women’s hats, and unlike most of his contemporaries, saw native peoples without the gaze of racial superiority. The anorak who set this mystery in motion was Alfred Russel Wallace, the great English biologist, whose many eccentricities Johnson politely sidesteps. Johnson’s chronicle of an unlikely crime by an unlikely crook is a literary police sketch-part natural history yarn, part detective story, part the stuff of tragedy of a specifically English kind. Indeed, about two-thirds of the way through The Feather Thief, Johnson turns anorak himself, chasing down stolen 19th-century plumes as relentlessly as Herbert Mental stalked the eggs of birders. Kirk Wallace Johnson’s new book The Feather Thief is a veritable Mental ward of anoraks-explorers, naturalists, gumshoes, dentists, musicians and salmon fly-tyers. The term derives from the hooded raincoats favored by trainspotters, those solitary hobbyists who hang around railway platforms jotting down the serial numbers of passing engines. “Anorak” is the colloquialism they use to describe someone with an avid interest in something most people would find either dull (subway timetables) or abstruse (condensed matter physics). The British generally adore and honor eccentrics, the barmier the better. He reaches in a third time and carefully withdraws two hard-boiled eggs, which he keeps.Īs it turns out, Mental collects eggs. He pulls out another bag and discards it, too. He pulls out a white paper bag, examines the contents and discards it. Sneaking up behind him, Mental stretches out a hand, peels back the flap of the man’s knapsack and rummages within. Presently, he gets down on all fours and, with great stealth, crawls to a small rise on which a birder is prone, binoculars trained. ![]() ![]() ![]() In a memorable TV sketch, the character zigzags through a scrubby field, furtively tracking something. Of all the eccentrics cataloged by “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” the most sublimely obsessive may have been Herbert Mental.
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