The Feather Thief: Obsession, Natural History

Kirk Wallace Johnson (amazon.com); Ashley Wells, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

I'm no Wallace (Charles Darwin)

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, 20-year-old American flutist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History.

Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring Museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the deadly men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian sport of salmon fly-tying and -fishing.

Beauty, Obsession, the Heist of the Century

Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins.

Some of them had been collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them -- and escaped into the darkness.

Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist.

He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins?

In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation.

The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession and man's destructive instinct to harvest/steal the beauty of nature. More

“Absorbing...Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.”

 —Christian Science Monitor

A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

• DE-extinction: Scientists want to make Jurassic Park woolly mammoths a real thing (The Atlantic)
  
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• Top level UN team meets Burma/Myanmar leader about Rohingyas
• Trying to recover from my obsession to kill animals for sport

Native American structures, GIANTS (video)

Jim Vieira, Megalisthomania (Facebook) via ZEG TV Hidden from the Public, 2018; Xochitl, Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Giants are real. They are documented in Buddhist texts as asuras, rakshasas, yakshas.

 

Real Giants Exist...These Discoveries Prove It

 

Giants on Record (Jim Vieira)

Hidden in local U.S. archives and dusty Smithsonian reports are accounts now nearly forgotten by North American historians and scientists.

Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman wrote Giants on Record: America's Hidden History, Secrets in the Mounds and the Smithsonian Files. These accounts document giant skeletons (7 to 9 feet tall) discovered all over the USA, many buried under earthen mounds.

Some photographs still exist but, curiously, the skeletons do not; they have been covered up and hidden away in Smithsonian repositories "being worked on by top men" not on public view:
 

 
Over 1,000 accounts of 7-foot and taller skeletons have been unearthed from ancient Native American burial sites over a 200-year period in North America.

• WARNING: Reports of giant skeletons to officials with be met with SEIZURE and THREATS to you and your family. DOCUMENT IT, and keep quiet about the location.

Spanish covered the world's largest pyramid in Native American Mexico at Cholula.

Lost Race (Pat Chouinard)

Scientific journals, photos, newspaper accounts, town and county histories, letters, diaries, and Smithsonian ethnology reports have carefully documented this.

These giant skeletons have been reported from one coast to the other, many east of the Mississippi, in old newspaper reports and in modern police and university files, which are quickly covered up as the Smithsonian carts away the physical evidence.

Giant taken by US forces in Afghanistan

They have strange anatomical features that are now called anomalies such as enormous skulls, double rows of teeth, jawbones so large as to be fit over the face of the finder like a helmet, and elongated heads. They have been documented in virtually every state.

• Jim Vieira's talk removed from Net (TEDxShelburneFalls) 
• Giants on Record: Jim Vieira, Hugh Newman (Facebook) 
• Jim Vieira at CONTACT in the DESERT June 1-4, 2018 Jim Vieira is a stonemason, author, explorer, and host of the History Channel shows “Search for the Lost Giants” (2014), “Roanoke: Search for the Lost Colony” (2015), and “Return to Roanoke: Search the Seven” (2016). He is the co-author of Giants on Record with Hugh Newman. 
• Ashfield's Vieira brothers back on History Channel 
• Giants on Record: America's Hidden History, Secrets...
• VIDEO: Mysterious Stone Chambers and Giants 
• Stone Builders, Mounds, the Giants of Ancient America...
• I spent $20 to find out that Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman...

• PHOTOS: Steve Quayle keeps track of giants

"Becoming Los Angeles" (photos)

NHM.org (Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging); Crystal Quintero, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly

(Thomas Ueda) Tom takes a selfie stick on a visit to the Natural History Museum of L.A. next to USC

The permanent exhibition "Becoming Los Angeles" tells a 500-year story about how Southern California went from tiny pueblo to sprawling metropolis. Becoming Los Angeles unfolds in six major sections:

• The Spanish Mission Era
• The Mexican Rancho Era
• The early American Period
• The emergence of a new American city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• The Great Depression
• World War II to the present

Here are just a few of the exhibition's highlights:
 

The Spanish ["Concentration Camp"] Mission Era 

After colonizing Mexico, Spain continued to the frontiers of North America and established California's 21 missions, founded between 1769 and 1833, as revenue generators and military outposts.

 

 

The Mexican Rancho Era

Mexican independence from Spain changed the way Californians traded with the world and also triggered permanent ongoing environmental change. The cattle ranching industry affected the land in many ways: livestock fed off local and exotic grasses, spread the seeds across the region, and changed the plant life of Southern California.
 
The Early American Period
When California became part of the United States, Los Angeles shifted from Mexican ciudad ("city") to American city.

During the mid 1880s, early city infrastructure and government services began to emerge. This shotgun, made in 1847, belonged to Swiss immigrant Charles Louis Ducommun, who trekked across the country on foot and built a successful business in Los Angeles, which allowed him to invest in the railroad, agriculture, and oil industries.

The New American City (Late 19th Century/Early 20th Century)
One of the earlier start-up businesses in Los Angeles was the Auto Vehicle Company, which manufactured this 1902 Tourist automobile, the only survivor from the car's first year of production.

The Great Depression

Fast-forward into the 20th century to see the 1939 City Model of downtown Los Angeles, built as a Works Progress Administration project. It has been outfitted with touch screens, which feature interactive slideshows and narrated stories of downtown L.A. landmarks, including Pershing Square and Chinatown.

  

World War II to present 
This strikingly designed section features everything from World War II fighter plane models to vintage graphics and an engine emblematic of America's growing industrial power.

Come experience more about L.A.'s colonists and settlers, Native Americans, rancheros, citrus growers, oil barons, boosters, radicals, filmmakers, innovators, and more! To plan a visit, click here.
 

Spotlight: Scarlett O'Hara's Dress on View
Scarlett O'Hara's famous "Barbecue Dress" from Gone with the Wind is on public view for the first time at NHM. The dress will be displayed in Becoming Los Angeles for a six-month run beginning December 2014, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of film's release. This newly conserved green-and-white dress worn by Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) to the barbeque at Twelve Oaks Plantation in Gone With the Wind will be featured in a specially made costume case near the exhibition's other Hollywood treasures.

Teachers and educators 

The NIH has closed the Lando Hall of California History for renovations and eventual installation of new exhibits. All are invited to explore Becoming Los Angeles as well as the Gem and Mineral Hall's Gold Rush exhibit. More

The Silk Road (Natural History Museum)

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Natural History Museum (nhm.org)

Exploring the Silk Road

Tour the Silk Road (nhm.org)

Take a journey exploring the traded goods and ideas of the world’s cultural superhighway -- one that took Buddhism out of India (Gandhara and Magadha) into Central Asia (Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, the other 'Stans), ancient Greece (Bactria/Persia, Sogdiana, and the greater empire), and finally into China. Join the Natural History Museum for the Traveling the Silk Road Lecture Series to experience the sights, sounds, and tastes of the ancient route! More

• 

  Old Buddhism in Uzbekistan, new Googoosha

  Bactria - Ancient History Encyclopedia
• The Sogdians in China: A Short History
• Sogdiana - Ancient History Encyclopedia
• BBC: Popstar President Googoosha a.ka. Gulnara Karimova: Corruption in Uzbekistan (Central Asia's largest country, near Afghanistan)
• Monks' Footsteps: Uzbek Buddhist monuments
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Historical Sketch of Buddhism in Western Asia

(BerzinArchives.com) Historically, Buddhism was found in all five former Soviet Central Asian Republics that constitute West Turkistan: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan [and, of course, Afghanistan, which the former USSR failed to conquer]. It initially spread in the first century BCE from Gandhara (Indo-Pakistan) and Afghanistan to the kingdoms of Bactria and Parthia [The remains of two Parthian Buddhist monuments each have been found in Turkmenistan at Mary (Merv) and near Ashkabat; Buddhist caves have also been found near Ashkabat]. Turkmenistan and northeastern Iran constituted the kingdom of Parthia; while southern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and northern Afghanistan constituted the kingdom of Bactria [The remains of Bactrian Buddhist monasteries have been found near Termez in southern Uzbekistan at Kara Tepe, Fayas Tepe and Dalverzin Tepe, and the remains of a reliquary at Zormala and of Buddhist wall murals at Balalyk Tepe, both in the Surkhan Darya region. Remains of a Buddhist monastery have been excavated at Ajina Tepe in southern Tajikistan.]

Atheists on Twitter; Science and Religion

Text: S.J. Velasquez (Pew Forum, Religion News Service)

P.Z. Myers' Twitter bio reads, "godless liberal biologist." The avid atheist is far from alone in the cyber world. He has more than 7,700 followers, who subscribe to his atheism- and evolution-themed Internet updates.

When Myers led about 300 like-minded evolutionists to the Creation Museum, thousands more followed along via the Internet, avidly anticipating each 140-character "tweet" about the Kentucky center, which renounces evolution in favor of a Bible-based view of natural history.

"It's a very peculiar medium," Myers said of Twitter. "I can also see that it is quite useful." Complete story (Mayrequire registration)

• Buddhism coverage (pewforum.org)

Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?
On August 7, Francis S. Collins was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the new director of the National Institutes of Health. At the May 2009 Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics, and public life, Collins (the former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian) discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), discussed how the brain reacts to spiritual experiences.

"Missing link" primate likely to stir debate

LiveScience.com, MSNBC

Scientists announce 47 million-year-old find

VIDEO: "Missing link" in human evolution? (5/19/09): discovery of 47 million-year-old fossil researchers say is the oldest evidence for human evolution

A discovery of a 47 million-year-old fossil primate that is said to be a human ancestor was announced Tuesday at a press conference in New York City.

Known as "Ida," the nearly complete transitional fossil is 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution.

It shows characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans), said Norwegian paleontologist Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum. More>>

Human Search for Missing Link

The problem with understanding human origins has been a shortage of fossil evidence -- until now.

Darwin and a fossilized skull (news.sky.com)

Billions of humans and humanlike creatures have lived on this planet, but our knowledge of human pre-history is based on only about 5,000 individuals. And these finds have been scattered randomly through time, sometimes with gaps of hundreds of thousands of years -- and none of them look much like any of the others. Scientists say our own relatively short-lived civilization would be extremely unlikely to yield any fossil record at all. More>>