Read for another parenting discord book club! I remember hearing the This American Life episode about this a while back, and it's an interesting story... like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, this is an investigative nonfiction where the author becomes a character in it, in this case KWJ tries to find the unrecovered skins. As a one-time fly tier (shout out to ten year old me copying my dad's hobby dabblings) and biologist by training, this scratches a lot of itches for me.

There's something interesting about how predominantly male the fly-tying community is (while Johnson does say something towards the end like "researchers and scientists holding specimens to answer future questions vs the men and women who consume and collect in the legacy of Victorians" or some such, I... really don't remember any female tiers mentioned unless anonymized, and I almost feel like maybe it's because the obsession for rare feathers (to tie for a sporting hobby) hearkens back to Imperialist days where consumables were seemingly abundant and could be plundered from anywhere in the world. And while my brief stint tying was with commercially available products... I feel like it's pure decadence to try to get endangered plumages when dyed hackle feathers can do quite a bit?? Like if you use fancy materials, I'm guessing you're not going to put your extremely-valuable fly in streams looking for salmon.

I also feel prompted to try reading The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction again because it's where I found out about Alfred Russel Wallace.