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21 " (For all the 007 references, though, the British press neglected to mention that Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.) "
― , The Feather Thief
22 " the eyes of the law were trained on rhino horns and elephant tusks, the birth of the Internet was bringing together a small community of obsessive men addicted to rare and illegal feathers: practitioners of the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. "
23 " And now here you are, your fate depending on Sacha Baron-Cohen’s cousin. "
24 " On July 1, 1858, a letter from Lyell was read before the society: “These gentlemen, having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry.” Lyell then shone the spotlight on his friend: an abstract of an essay Darwin had written in 1844 was read first, followed by a summary of a letter Darwin had sent to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1857. Wallace’s paper was read last, almost as an afterthought. "
25 " In one such call to arms, at an 1897 Audubon lecture held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the ornithologist Frank Chapman spoke of the Birds of Paradise piled up in milliners’ workshops: “This beautiful bird is now almost extinct. The species fashion selects is doomed. It lies in the power of women to remedy a great evil. "
26 " The earliest recorded use of feathers for fishing occurs in the third-century-A.D. writings of a Roman named Claudius Aelianus, who described Macedonian trout fishermen who tied “crimson red wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles.” And while the practice assuredly continued over the coming millennia, no texts on fly-fishing survive from the Dark Ages. Fly-tying didn’t reappear until 1496, when Wynken de Worde, a Dutch émigré running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London, published A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, which included crude “recipes” for a dozen trout flies, one for each month, known by fly-fishing fanatics as the “Jury of Twelve. "
27 " But the more I found out, the greater the mystery grew, and with it, my own compulsion to solve it. Little did I know, my pursuit of justice would mean journeying deep into the feather underground, a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists. From the lies and threats, rumors and half-truths, revelations and frustrations, I came to understand something about the devilish relationship between man and nature and his unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost. "
28 " William Blacker’s 1842 Art of Fly Making, "
29 " The Salmon Fly, "
30 " Who would steal a bunch of dead birds? "