The feather thief or the strangest museum theft

The thief did not take from the museum a rare, extra-large edition of J. J. Audubon's Birds of America ($11.5 million at Sotheby's). I passed by rare stuffed dodos and those same Darwin finches. He needed feathers from birds of paradise. For what? The quirks of evolution, a strange, quirky hobby and a destructive obsession are intertwined in a story that is perhaps best described as a "scientific detective story." A rare but bright bird among the subgenres of literature!