The interest had carried over into his professional life. In the early 2000s, he made a name for himself arresting obsessives who raided eggs from the nests of endangered species, blew out the live embryos, and mounted the hollowed shells in personal collections. He also investigated numerous cases of “bird laundering”—stealing protected birds of prey from the wild and passing them off as the offspring of captive-bred raptors. McWilliam had developed a nearly unmatched expertise in the birds of Great Britain.
McWilliam was a burly man with arched eyebrows, deep-set blue eyes, a broad nose, a square jaw, and a thatch of tousled gray hair that was thinning on top. One unruly strand often dangled down the center of his forehead. His owlish features, accentuated by square-framed spectacles, suggested a keen intelligence and sense of humor, and his powerful physique gave him the appearance of a man not to be trifled with. He had the grace and the quickness of a former athlete, though a modest paunch had crept up on him since the end of his rugby-playing days. He listened intently as the Counter Terrorism officer characterized the case.
“We’re not quite sure what we’ve got here,” he said. They had stopped a passenger bound for South Africa with a fourteen-hour layover in Dubai, he explained, and then recounted the body search and discovery of what the passenger had claimed were duck eggs.
“Describe the eggs,” McWilliam said.
As his colleague detailed their size, colors, and patterns, McWilliam knew that the passenger had been lying. The eggs, he was all but certain, were those of the peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on the planet, a denizen of all continents except Antarctica. The strong and solitary raptors—with an average wingspan of forty inches, sooty black feathers around the head and neck, blue-gray wings, a black-barred buff-white underside, bright orange-yellow eyes, and a sharply hooked beak—nest in rock quarries and on ledges in the cliffs of England, Wales, and Scotland, and are relatively easy for a backcountry bird-watcher to spot. But the species nearly died out in both Europe and North America during the 1950s and 1960s as their prey—chiefly wood pigeons and pheasants—became riddled with organochloride pesticides, most notably dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT.
First synthesized by an Austrian chemist in 1874, DDT came into widespread use during World War II as a lice-killer, after the compound was discovered to have pesticidal properties in 1939. Allied doctors successfully dusted thousands of soldiers, refugees, and prisoners with a powdered form of the chemical; none suffered ill effects. Buoyed by the conviction that the compound was harmless, governments and industries began promoting liquid DDT (dissolved in oil) as the perfect way to kill off agricultural pests and yellow-fever-carrying mosquitoes. But when inhaled, ingested, or absorbed by the skin, liquid DDT worked its way to organs that stored fat—such as the liver, testicles, and intestines—and built up with deadly effect. Even a tiny amount, three parts in a million, was capable of disintegrating healthy cells in humans. DDT also passed easily from mother to unborn child, and from species to species.
During surveys in the 1950s, English ornithologist Derek Ratcliffe began to notice dwindling peregrine populations and strange behavior among the remaining birds. Some mothers even seemed to be pecking apart their own eggs. When Ratcliffe, acting on a hunch, later compared newly laid eggs to those in a museum collection gathered before 1946, when DDT was introduced to the United Kingdom, he discovered that the new eggs weighed 19 percent less than the old. The mother peregrines, he realized, hadn’t pecked their eggs to pieces. They were feeding on the remains of thin, brittle eggs that had collapsed beneath their weight during incubation.
Laboratory tests at Cornell University would show that DDT increased the size of peregrines’ livers, stimulating production of an enzyme that defends the organ against foreign chemicals. This enzyme in turn caused a plunge in female peregrines’ production of sex hormones, including estrogen, which regulates the amount of calcium stored in bones. Less calcium in the females’ bodies resulted in thinner, more fragile eggs.
The result was, as Ratcliffe wrote in his book The Peregrine Falcon, “a spectacular crash of population with a speed and on a scale seldom found in the vertebrate kingdom.” By the early 1970s, only 250 breeding pairs of peregrine falcons were left in Great Britain. The losses were even steeper in North America. There, the New York Times reported in 1970 that “all peregrine eyries in the East and in the Upper Mississippi Valley, where once the bird flourished, were empty. In the Rocky Mountains and Far West, less than 10 percent of the prepesticide breeding population remains … In all the US, excepting Alaska, perhaps a dozen, and certainly no more than two or three dozen, peregrine families mated, laid eggs and hatched and fledged their young this year … The birds are gone.”
Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book Silent Spring (originally titled Man Against the Earth) had already drawn international attention to the link between DDT and the destruction of bird populations across the United States. Calling insecticides “as crude a weapon as the caveman’s club,” Carson documented how the lethal chemicals worked their way up the food chain. In California, irrigation water laden with pesticides was recycled back into lakes, where it settled in the organs of fish. As herons, pelicans, gulls, and other birds frequented the lakes and ate there, their populations died off. In Wisconsin, the culprit was pesticides sprayed on trees to protect against Dutch elm disease; the pesticides poisoned the earthworms that ate the trees’ leaves, which passed the toxins on to robins. American bald eagles vanished across coastal Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, swan grebes declined in the western states and Canada, and pheasants, ducks, and blackbirds disappeared from the rice-growing regions of California and the South. “This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the colour and beauty and interest they lend to our world,” wrote Carson, “have come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected.” Carson’s groundbreaking work, along with research papers by Ratcliffe and other ornithologists on the near-extinction of the peregrine, led to a North American ban on the use of DDT in 1972, and dieldrin, another devastating insecticide, in 1974. The United Kingdom and the rest of Europe followed with legislation a decade later.
Since then, Great Britain’s peregrine population had climbed back to fourteen hundred pairs—about five hundred more pairs than there had been in the 1930s, before the DDT disaster struck. In recent years, a few hardy peregrines had also taken up residence in urban areas, including a pair roosting atop the clock tower of City Hall in the Welsh city of Cardiff, and a total of thirty pairs in London. But the birds were still considered at risk. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), a global wildlife protection agreement signed by 183 countries, had designated the peregrine an Appendix I bird, meaning that it was threatened with extinction and subject to the highest level of commercial restrictions. Following guidelines established by CITES, the British government had enacted the Control of Trade in Endangered Species Enforcement Regulations in 1997, making both the peregrine’s removal from the wild and trade in the bird punishable by lengthy prison terms. That legislation was enforced alongside the Customs and Excise Management Act from 1979, which made it a crime to “knowingly and fraudulently evad[e] regulations” on restricted goods, including narcotics, weapons, and protected wildlife.
Still, conservationists were not in complete agreement on the issue: some argued that the number of wild peregrines in the United Kingdom and elsewhere had stabilized, and that the laws should be modified. In 1999 the US government removed peregrines from its endangered species list. At a biannual CITES conference in October 2016, Canada would propose downgrading the peregrine’s status from Appendix I to Appendix II, a category for animals considered to be in less immediate danger. But most member countries rejected the proposal, citing “concern over inadequate precautionary measures” to prevent the raptor’s disappearance. “As an apex predator [the peregrine falcon] always will have a small po
pulation, and be vulnerable to persecution because it sits at the top of the food chain,” said Guy Shorrock, the senior investigative officer of the UK’s influential Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
* * *
Without even seeing the eggs seized at Birmingham Airport, McWilliam had little doubt that they were fertile and close to hatching. Late April to early May was the period in which peregrine chicks would be breaking out of their shells across the northern hemisphere. That the passenger was carrying the eggs strapped to his body suggested he needed to keep them warm until their incubation period was complete.
Plus there was the fact that he was heading for Dubai.
McWilliam’s work on bird-related cases with the Merseyside police had introduced him to a thriving international market for birds of prey. This legal trade linked wealthy Arab devotees of the ancient sport of falconry with licensed breeders in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries in Western Europe. The business was tightly regulated, using a system of government-issued metal or plastic rings fitted around the birds’ legs and certificates to guarantee that the birds had been born and bred in captivity. No bird of prey could be sold legally in the United Kingdom unless it had an “Article 10”—a document issued by the country’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, in accordance with regulations established by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna—testifying that it had not been snatched from the wild.
But McWilliam was also aware of a lucrative underground market for falcons. Investigative studies by conservation groups, along with information provided by commercial breeders, had disclosed that the richest Middle Eastern aficionados were spending huge sums, allegedly up to $400,000 for a single bird, to acquire raptors illegally from the wild. Believing that wild birds were faster, stronger, and healthier than those born and raised in captivity, these sheikhs employed “trappers” to snatch young birds from the most remote corners of the globe. The thieves used pigeons and other lures to take fledglings in mid-flight, or, on occasion, scaled cliffs and trees and seized chicks from nests.
Expensive paramilitary-style expeditions to the Kamchatka Peninsula in southeastern Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, the Indian subcontinent, Greenland, and other remote wilderness areas were said to be disturbing the delicate ecological balance of pristine regions by decimating bird populations, threatening the survival of some of the world’s most endangered species. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, raptor raiders had nearly wiped out saker falcons—a migratory species, larger and slower than the peregrine, that breeds from Central Europe eastward across Asia to Manchuria. It thrives especially in the desert environments of the Altai-Sayan region of Central Asia, a 386,000-square-mile area known for its remarkable biological diversity and home to a variety of threatened species, including the snow leopard and the Lake Baikal seal. The majestic gyrfalcon, the largest and most sought-after falcon of all, was in danger of eradication from huge swaths of the Russian wilderness, including the Chukotka Peninsula near the Bering Strait. Mark Jeter, a former assistant chief of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, describes the black market trade succinctly: “I always say, if there is a $50,000 bill flying around, someone is going to try to catch it.”
The trafficking of live wild falcon eggs was an ingenious variation on this scheme. Back in October 1986, a Welsh falcon breeder named Ceri Griffith had arrived at Manchester Airport, on a flight from Morocco, carrying twenty-seven lanner falcon eggs stitched into secret pockets in his shirt. In a bit of bad timing for Griffith, one egg hatched at the moment that he was passing through customs—and officials, hearing tweeting, ordered him to strip and seized the live contraband. Griffith avoided jail time but paid a £1,350 fine, close to the maximum penalty a wild-bird egg smuggler could receive at that time.
The egg trafficking went in both directions: In April 1990 customs officials at Dover, on the southeast coast of England, pulled over a Mercedes-Benz bound for mainland Europe and, acting on a tip, took the car apart and found a sophisticated incubation system hidden inside the dashboard, heated by the vehicle’s engine and filled with a dozen live peregrine falcon eggs taken from cliffs in Wales and Scotland. The two Germans in the vehicle pleaded guilty to smuggling offenses and were sentenced to thirty months in prison.
Since the incident in 1990, however, nobody had been arrested in the United Kingdom for smuggling wild raptor eggs; most law enforcement officials regarded the two busts in Manchester and Dover as isolated incidents. Now the detention of this new suspect at Birmingham Airport en route to Dubai suggested not only that egg trafficking was still a problem, but also that the operation was more ambitious than anybody had believed. Smugglers could be running eggs between Europe and the Arab world in a far-reaching conspiracy to defy international wildlife laws and damage the environment, financed by some of the richest and most powerful men on earth.
It disgusted McWilliam to think about it. Human beings had an obligation, he believed, to protect the environment and to coexist with other species with as little fuss as possible. “All living things were not made for man,” the biologist and co-originator of evolutionary theory Alfred Russel Wallace had written in 1869, expressing a philosophy that McWilliam embraced. “Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone.” What better reminder that humans were not the sole proprietors of the planet than the birds in your backyard? And as Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring, it served man’s interests to avoid rupturing the bonds between species—after all, the beauty, variety, and vitality of the planet depended on it. “To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area … has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right,” she wrote. Lendrum’s crime was a rebuke to the laws that Great Britain had carefully put into place over the decades to safeguard the future. Robbing nests for sport, or for greed, struck McWilliam as an egregious violation of the fragile, symbiotic relationship beween man and the wild.
“Don’t let the man go,” McWilliam told the officer. He suggested that the Counter Terrorism Unit arrest the suspect on a preliminary charge of possessing endangered species, which constituted a violation of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, a 1981 law passed by Parliament that expanded the protections afforded wild birds and animals and increased penalties for those who harmed them.
“I’m dropping everything and coming down to meet you,” McWilliam said, adding, “Whatever you do, keep the eggs warm.”
Five minutes later, McWilliam grabbed a toothbrush and a knapsack full of notebooks, said goodbye to his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, and climbed into his leased Peugeot hatchback for the one-hundred-mile trip to Birmingham.
* * *
As McWilliam drove south from Liverpool on the M6 with the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the passenger window, he felt a rising sense of anticipation. Since the Welsh lanner-egg smuggler Griffith had walked free after paying a modest fine in 1986, Great Britain’s courts had hardened their attitudes toward wildlife crime. Environmental damage and profit motive had become key considerations in determining sentencing: a professional criminal making off with protected species to supply an underground market was a far bigger threat, law enforcement officials believed, than someone stealing birds for a small personal collection. If the eggs were indeed what McWilliam presumed they were, this offense would constitute one of the most serious crimes ever investigated by the National Wildlife Crime Unit in its four years of existence. Until now, McWilliam’s cases mostly involved cruelty to animals or the illegal sale by taxidermists of the preserved parts of protected species—crimes considered the equivalent of misdemeanors and usually punishable by a fine. Live falcon smuggling carried a maximum pu
nishment of seven years in prison.
McWilliam had reason to think that the case might be a game-changer. McWilliam had been aware of the role allegedly played by Middle Eastern royal families in the illicit trade of wild raptors, but had never come across hard evidence. Maybe the suspect could lead him to some sheikhs. The oddity of the crime was also likely to attract the interest of the media, giving the National Wildlife Crime Unit, a bare-bones outfit engaged in a permanent struggle with politicians and the police force to obtain enough funding to operate, a chance to prove that its money was being well spent. A headline-making conviction of a notorious wildlife criminal could protect the unit from closure—or even, if McWilliam was very, very lucky, get his budget significantly raised for the next year.
He called the unit’s intelligence chief, a Scottish former drug investigator named Colin Pirie, to alert him to the arrest and to request that he begin digging into the suspect’s background. Then he reached out to Lee Featherstone, a local raptor expert and a breeder of goshawks—large, red-eyed, white-browed raptors that frequent the forests of Europe and North America. Featherstone and McWilliam had crossed paths during a wild-bird laundering investigation the previous year. McWilliam asked Featherstone, who was on the way home from a birds-of-prey fair in the Midlands, to join him at the airport to verify what species the eggs belonged to, and whether they were viable.
Ninety minutes later, McWilliam parked his car at Birmingham International Airport and made his way to an operational office belonging to the Counter Terrorism Unit. Two of the arresting officers briefed him on Lendrum’s detention, and then escorted him down a bland hallway to a cramped room used by the United Kingdom Border Agency, with three desks and an array of 1990s-era computers. The officers showed him the fourteen eggs that now rested, wrapped in their woolen socks, atop a computer monitor. Fluorescent lights and heated air blowing through the bulky machine’s fan vents were keeping them warm. Beside them on the officers’ desk lay the mysterious egg carton retrieved from the diaper bin inside the Emirates Lounge shower facility. The red-dyed egg that had piqued the janitor’s interest—as it turned out, an ordinary chicken egg—was still sitting inside the carton. Next to the carton was the box full of tiny, black-speckled quail eggs that the police had found in Lendrum’s luggage.
The Falcon Thief Page 2