The premise sounds almost like a riddle: a book club for people 55 and older, meeting in a suburban park building on a Tuesday evening in October, opens with a short walk outside to look at birds and then sits down to discuss a true-crime book about a man who stole birds from a museum. But that is exactly what Montgomery Parks has scheduled for October 20, 2026, from 6 to 7:15 p.m. at the Sligo-Dennis Avenue Local Park Activity Building, 10200 Sligo Creek Parkway in Silver Spring.
The club is new. Montgomery Parks describes it as a community that celebrates the beauty of literature and the outdoors, and its reading list is built around nature, wildlife, conservation, and environmental issues. Membership registration is free. The October meeting is one of several programs the county park system has lined up for Birdability Week, which runs October 19 through 25, 2026.
Birdability Week is an annual celebration of birders with disabilities and other health concerns, and an occasion for sharing resources and ideas that help the birding community become accessible, inclusive, and welcoming to everybody. The national organization Birdability describes it as an annual collection of events held the third week of each October, drawing inspiration from other inclusive celebrations such as Black BirdersWeek, Latino Conservation Week, and Let's Go Birding Together. This year's theme is "Bird Where You Are" -- an invitation, in the organization's words, to notice the birds around you in whatever way works best for you, and a reminder that you don't have to bird a certain way, know every species, hike long distances, or keep up with anyone else to be part of the community. The organization's 2026 artwork features a White-breasted Nuthatch, a bird known for the habit of climbing headfirst down tree trunks.
Birdability itself grew out of a specific frustration. Virginia Rose, who lost her ability to walk after an accident at age 14, started birding in 2005 and went on every Golden Gate Audubon Society walk she could manage. After a series of unexplained, painful falls, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012. She kept trying to take part in group birding trips and Christmas Bird Counts, but soon felt like a burden to herself and others and realized she couldn't keep up. She stopped joining group outings. Birdability was founded in 2016, with occupational therapist and birder Freya McGregor as co-lead, and has since partnered with the National Audubon Society. Among its tools is a crowd-sourced map that lets anyone document and view the accessibility features of birding locations.
That mission lands on concrete ground at Sligo-Dennis. The park has a playground, a soccer field, basketball and tennis courts, and a permitted ballfield. The activity building has a kitchen and is near the playground, basketball courts, tennis courts, and permitted ballfield. The park sits along Sligo Creek Parkway, a road and stream-valley parkland whose origins trace to 1927 and the establishment of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. The paved Sligo Creek Trail that runs alongside it is level and ADA accessible, and much of it passes through tree-filled parkland -- reasonable ground for a birding wander that doesn't require anyone to keep up.
The book on the table is The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson. It is a New York Times bestseller, and it tells a story that is, as NPR's reviewer put it, one weird-but-true story. The book leads readers from nineteenth-century scientific expeditions into the jungles of Malaysia to the "feather fever" of the turn of the last century, when women's hats were trimmed with ostrich and egret plumes, and into the feather-dependent Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and its present-day practitioners, many of whom gather online in something called "The Feather Underground."
The crime at its center took place at the Natural History Museum at Tring, a suburban outpost of the British Natural History Museum in Hertfordshire, one of the world's great repositories of exotic birds. Edwin Rist was a 20-year-old American student at the Royal Academy of Music in London and a gifted flautist -- and also a champion salmon fly-tier. Accounts differ on the exact date of the break-in; National Geographic describes it as one night in November 2009, while other accounts place it in June. What is not in dispute is the scale: Rist broke in, stuffed a suitcase with nearly 300 of the rarest and most dazzling species -- the magnificent riflebird, the resplendent quetzal, the superb bird of paradise among them -- and vanished. The figure most often cited is 299 bird skins.
The motive was feathers. Fly-tying had become an obsession, locking Rist in a kind of arms race with other practitioners of the art: the more exotic and spectacular the feathers, the greater the prestige, and the more money to be made selling them. National Geographic reported that a set of ten feathers could fetch $50, and that the flawless, untouched specimens in the museum's drawers could each be sold for at least a thousand dollars. Detective Inspector Fraser Wylie of the Hertfordshire Constabulary said at the time, "This is a very unusual crime."
The aftermath is its own kind of tragedy. Of the 299 bird skins Rist stole, only 174 were found in his apartment still intact, and of those only 102 retained their labels. Without the labels identifying exactly where the birds had been captured, the specimens were no longer of scientific value. NPR's reviewer noted that by the end of the book, readers may come to understand why it matters, ecologically speaking, to care about what happened to what Johnson calls "the missing birds of Tring." Rist was eventually caught, and the judge gave him what National Geographic characterized as no more than a slap on the wrist. According to Johnson, he was later living in Germany and performing as a flautist under a different name.
Johnson came to the story by accident. In his prologue, he describes standing waist-high in the Red River of New Mexico, having taken up the meditative sport of fly-fishing while suffering from PTSD as a consequence of years of aid work in Iraq. His guide began talking about his own hobby of Victorian salmon fly-tying -- ornate flies that are more art form than fishing tool, composed of iridescent jewel-toned feathers plucked from some of the rarest birds in the world, like the Indian crow and the king bird of paradise -- and then told Johnson the bizarre story of a master fly-tier named Edwin Rist. Johnson's reaction, as he later told National Geographic, was that it was "impossibly strange." He said: "I found it so bizarre as to be captivating. It struck me as impossible to hear about a museum heist of dead birds carried out by a student flautist to meet the insatiable demand of salmon flytiers and not want to learn more." Finding out more led him on a years-long quest.
That is a lot of ground for a 75-minute meeting, which is part of the appeal of the pairing. A club that reads about conservation and wildlife can spend an evening on a book about what happens when the desire to possess beautiful feathers outruns every other consideration -- and then walk outside beforehand and look at living birds in a county park, where the point is to notice them rather than to collect them. The birding portion is weather permitting; the discussion moves indoors either way.
The club's calendar continues past October. On November 17, 2026, the group meets virtually on Zoom to discuss Evergreen: The Trees that Shaped America by Trent Presler. December 15 brings a year-end wrap-up at the Sligo-Dennis building, and on January 19, 2027, the club returns to Zoom for To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey. Free membership registration through Montgomery Parks keeps members updated on the meeting schedule, book information, and club announcements. Questions about the program go to the Program Access Office at 301-495-2581.
The October meeting is free and open, but it asks for that membership sign-up, and the birding portion depends on the weather. For anyone who has ever wanted to sit in a park building in Silver Spring and argue about a Victorian feather heist with other people over 55, this is the evening for it.