This Natural History Museum Heist Rivals the Louvre Robbery

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TThieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre this weekend in a brazen heist involving an electric ladder, glass cutter and high-powered scooters. They were in and out of the iconic museum in 8 minutes. But in 2009, a 20-year-old American citizen committed a theft near London that rivaled that of the Louvre. But his target wasn’t jewelry. They were birds.

The Tring Natural History Museum, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of London, is home to zoological marvels, including stuffed mounts of extinct animals, rare books once consulted by Victorian explorers and fanciful fleas dressed in traditional costumes purchased in Mexico around 1905. But Edwin Rist was interested in the museum’s birds.

Rist was a flute student studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London and an avid maker of hand-crafted fly fishing lures. He had written a well-regarded book about the hobby when he was 15. Like other enthusiasts, he had learned that rare bird feathers, collected during the Victorian era, were highly prized and could fetch good prices. In 2009, Rist visited the Tring Museum posing as a photographer capturing images of the facility’s rare bird specimens for an assignment. He took photos of hundreds of preserved bird skins as well as the museum’s halls and doors. Later that year, he carried out a plan that had been months in the making: steal some of the more exotic specimens the museum held to sell their feathers – or make elaborate fly-fishing lures from them, which could command even higher prices.

In June of that year, Rist gave a concert in London and then took a train to Tring. He broke into the Natural History Museum with a large suitcase, gloves and a glass cutter. Rist came away with 299 bird specimens, mostly males of tropical species – among them quetzals, cotingas and birds of paradise – with bright feathers used to attract mates. Some of the skins had been collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who constructed the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of the biologist who would become the father of this theory.

Rist initially escaped the crime. It was only a month after the robbery, while he was selling feathers on eBay to finance his purchase of a gold flute, that investigators arrested the young American. The museum was able to recover 174 specimens intact, even though Rist had removed the identification tags from most, thereby decimating their scientific value.

Fined more than £125,000 (the amount he had earned selling feathers), given a 12-month suspended prison sentence and placed under supervision for 12 months in 2011, Rist went on to graduate from the Royal Academy. He now lives in Germany, changed his name to Edwin Reinhard and continues to play flute in orchestras there. His story inspired The feather thiefa 2018 true crime book written by Kirk Johnson.

You can catch a glimpse of Rist/Reinhardt on his HeavyMetalFlute YouTube channel.

Main image: Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia

• Bob Grant

  Published on October 21, 2025

  Bob Grant is the associate editor of Nautilus.