USC Belser Book Club: "The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Welcome all nature lovers to the Belser Arboretum Book Club! Please join us, and share this announcement with your fellow readers.

Meet Sunday, October 12 2025, at 3 p.m. in the Arboretum's Outdoor Classroom.The Bloomwood gate opens at 2:30 p.m., so please enjoy a walk before we begin.

PLEASE REGISTER in case we must change venue due to weather.

Discussion led by Jory Fleming

Jory Fleming is a geographer and educator, broadly trained in climate science and environmental management. He teaches geography at USC and works at the Central Midlands Council of Governments on environmental programs. Jory lives with several disabilities, including autism. In his spare time, Jory loves birds, bugs, board games, and Scottish country dancing.

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist 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 men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some 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 the beauty of nature."

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We'll have snacks and beverages, and you're welcome to bring your own.

Note that trails are natural and hilly, and restrooms are not available.

Please leave pets at home.

Host or Publisher W. Gordon Belser Arboretum