The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  When Lee Featherstone arrived ten minutes later, he extracted from his backpack a blue digital monitor called an Egg Buddy, a device about the size of a butter tray used by breeders to detect the heartbeat of a chick inside its shell. The breeder untied the socks and carefully removed the eggs. Featherstone noted the size, marbling, and presence of protoporphyrin, a brownish red pigment found in the shells of many raptor eggs. The color could be useful, evolutionary scientists theorize, to protect against solar radiation and for camouflage on rock ledges.

  Without a doubt, Featherstone said, these were the eggs of peregrine falcons.

  Featherstone gently placed one egg inside the Egg Buddy and closed the lid. On the green rectangular LED screen he and McWilliam watched a black line rise and fall rapidly and rhythmically, registering six hundred beats per minute, the normal heart rate for a peregrine chick. “That’s alive,” Featherstone said. He placed another egg in the tray. “That’s alive.” Huddled inside its shell, a tiny creature was preparing to punch with its beak through the internal membrane that protected its body, take its first breaths from an air pocket that lay just beyond, and then peck its way through the shell and into the world. One after another, the eggs registered strong heartbeats. Only one of the fourteen showed a flat line.

  To Featherstone, the fact that Lendrum had absconded with fourteen eggs, and that thirteen were still alive, proved that the thief was a professional. Even just locating so many peregrine eggs in the wilderness—at four eggs to a clutch, a minimum of four aeries—must have required patience, acute powers of observation, physical courage, and athletic skill. It took more expertise to ensure that the fragile creatures survived being ripped out of their nests, bounced around in a car for hours, and then strapped to a human body for a four-thousand-mile journey to the Middle East. If the thief snatched the eggs too early—within the first three weeks of the peregrine’s thirty-four-day incubation period, when the ambient temperature must remain between 99.1 and 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit at all times—they would die. If he snatched them too late, he risked having them hatch in his pocket or his backpack while he was going through customs or waiting in the airport security line. The falcon thief’s calculations had to be perfect.

  The decoy quail eggs and the painted hen’s egg were further signs of the criminal’s attention to detail. It was a clever tactic, probably meant to persuade a customs agent that he was carrying ordinary farm eggs home to eat.

  “He knew what he was doing,” Featherstone told McWilliam. “You have to wonder how many times he’s gotten away with it.”

  Featherstone placed the eggs back in the socks, secured them with the plastic ties, took off his woolen sweater, and carefully wrapped the socks up inside it. Then he tied the sweater and the socks around his chest, so that the eggs would absorb his body warmth. “They’re fertile, they’re alive, but they’re getting chilled,” Featherstone told the police. The raptor breeder drove to his home ten minutes from the airport, where he kept the eggs warm, manually rotating them every hour for the next several days and nights.

  The thirteen eggs would hatch between five and eight days later, and ornithologists from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the country’s biggest environmental charity, would introduce the newborn chicks to active nest sites on cliff ledges in northern Scotland. Eleven of the thirteen would fledge in the wild.

  In Birmingham, McWilliam checked into an airport hotel and prepared for the next morning, when he would meet the egg thief.

  THREE THE INTERVIEW

  Shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, May 4, Andy McWilliam parked his Peugeot at the rear of the police headquarters in Solihull, a town in the West Midlands region southeast of Birmingham. A police sergeant buzzed him through a security gate at the back of the three-story concrete slab, and escorted him and two plainclothes detectives from the local Counter Terrorism Unit to the “custody suites” on the ground floor.

  McWilliam and his fellow investigators entered a small, windowless interview room, furnished with a metal table and six chairs bolted to the floor as a precaution against outbursts from unruly detainees. A cassette recorder on the table would record four tapes—for the court, the police, and the solicitor, plus one backup—using a microphone mounted on the wall.

  Accompanied by a solicitor provided by the court, Jeffrey Lendrum walked into the chamber. He had been brought in handcuffs from Birmingham International Airport to the custody suites the previous evening. The woman who’d been with him in the Emirates Lounge, his domestic partner and a South African citizen, had claimed to know nothing about the eggs on Lendrum’s body. After strip-searching her and finding no incriminating evidence, the police had permitted her to board her afternoon flight to Dubai. “She was in a terrible state,” Lendrum would say years later. “I regret that.”

  McWilliam studied the man. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, Lendrum was trim and good-looking, with large, deep-set eyes, vestiges of gray hair around an otherwise bald head, and an open and friendly face. He seemed in good shape, yet he didn’t fit the image of a swaggering stuntman or adventurer. McWilliam could as easily picture him in a business suit as rappelling down a cliff.

  The lead Counter Terrorism officer read Lendrum his rights and informed him that his statements were being recorded. As they had agreed earlier, McWilliam would let his colleague begin the interrogation; McWilliam, the wildlife expert, would take over when the moment seemed right.

  “Okay, you were arrested yesterday,” the agent began. “Why were you carrying the eggs strapped to your body?”

  Lendrum repeated the story that he had told the airport police: he suffered from a chronic lower backache and his physiotherapist had instructed him to wear raw eggs strapped around his abdomen. It was an unusual remedy, he acknowledged, but nothing else had helped, so he’d decided to give it a try.

  McWilliam, scribbling silently in a notepad, let Lendrum ramble on for several minutes. Then he jumped in.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a cock-and-bull story. You and I both know exactly what kind of eggs you were carrying.”

  “They’re duck eggs,” Lendrum said. The solicitor sat beside Lendrum silently, jotting occasional notes, whispering into Lendrum’s ear, but making no attempts to interrupt the questioning.

  “They’re peregrine falcon eggs,” said McWilliam.

  “Duck eggs,” Lendrum insisted.

  “They’re peregrine falcon eggs,” McWilliam repeated. Identifying himself as an investigative support officer with the National Wildlife Crime Unit, McWilliam described the marbleized browns and reds, the dark pigments produced by natural selection over the millennia to protect eggs from direct sunlight on the cliff ledges where peregrines nest.

  Lendrum leaned back in his chair and went silent. McWilliam sensed what the suspect was probably thinking: the investigator across the table knew far more about birds of prey than he had expected.

  “All right,” Lendrum conceded. “They’re peregrine falcon eggs. I’ve got an egg collection at home, and I was taking them back there.”

  “So they were for a collection, then?”

  “Yes,” Lendrum replied. Under McWilliam’s gentle prodding, Lendrum talked of a boyhood spent climbing trees and rock faces near his Rhodesian home, of his longtime fascination with peregrines, eagles, and hawks. He described the weavers, rollers, and other passerines, or perching birds, that frequented the African bush. He had lived on and off for a decade in Towcester, a town in Northamptonshire in the Midlands, where his former wife and two stepdaughters still resided, but he always returned to Southern Africa, partly because of his love of the birds and other wildlife of the region.

  “Hang on a minute,” McWilliam said. “So you’ve lived in the United Kingdom, on and off, for many years?”

  “That’s right,” Lendrum replied.

  “But you can’t live in this country and not know the legislation. It’s inconceivable that you wouldn’t know about t
he protections afforded these birds.”

  “I—I know that there are some laws,” Lendrum said, appearing to sense a trap, “but I’m not familiar with the specifics.” Besides, he went on, “I’m not quite sure what harm there is in what I did. The eggs that I collected were all dead.”

  “We had them all tested yesterday,” McWilliam said. “They’re alive.”

  “No,” Lendrum replied.

  “You know exactly what you were doing,” the investigator said, exasperated by the smug denials. Lendrum had to have realized by now that McWilliam understood exactly what he’d done. “You strapped them to your body to get them through security because you didn’t want them to be found, and you wanted to keep them warm.”

  “No, no,” Lendrum protested.

  “Let’s cut the rubbish,” McWilliam said. “You were taking these falcon eggs out live because they are destined for the falcon trade in Dubai.”

  “Dubai was just a stopover,” Lendrum insisted. He preferred to travel from London to Johannesburg on Emirates using frequent-flyer miles, he explained, which made it far cheaper than a direct flight to South Africa.

  McWilliam tried a new tack.

  “So,” he asked, “where did these eggs come from, Jeff?”

  Lendrum said that he had taken them from four aeries in and around the Rhondda Valley, a rugged former coal mining region in the south of Wales. He had driven there on holiday in his car, he said, and had stumbled by chance across a dozen peregrine nests while hiking in the hills. His initial thought was that he might hatch them and breed them when he returned to Africa, but when he took them out of the vehicle at Birmingham Airport, he realized that they were dead. So he wrapped them in socks to protect the shells, with the intention of “blowing” the dead embryos when he got home and mounting the eggs in his collection. He insisted that he hadn’t realized he was breaking any laws.

  “You parked your car at the airport?” McWilliam asked.

  When Lendrum answered in the affirmative, McWilliam stopped the interview, ushered the two Counter Terrorism agents out of the building, and climbed back into his Peugeot.

  “Let’s go find that car,” he said.

  * * *

  At Birmingham Airport, Counter Terrorism investigators typed Lendrum’s name into a police database to obtain his registration information. The car in question was a 2008 gray Vauxhall Vectra Estate registered to his ex-wife’s address in Towcester, with license plate number Y262KPP.

  McWilliam and his two colleagues drove to long-term parking, a sprawling outdoor lot with a capacity of seven hundred vehicles. Dividing the lot, McWilliam and a second carload of agents drove up and down their allotted rows, seeking out the gray car. After twenty minutes, the other car radioed that they’d found the Vauxhall in spot C10. McWilliam had retrieved the key from Lendrum’s personal effects before leaving the station. Now he inserted it in the door. It didn’t turn.

  “Smash open the window,” McWilliam said.

  An agent punched through the front passenger window with a tire jack. McWilliam opened the door, brushed the glass off the seat, and peered inside. Old folded maps of Wales and the Midlands and used coffee cups littered the musty interior. McWilliam opened the glove compartment. Inside, he discovered a handheld satellite navigation device. Then he walked to the rear. An officer popped the rear door using a lever beneath the steering column.

  “Bloody hell,” McWilliam said.

  A large metal-and-yellow-plastic box bearing a label from British hatcher manufacturer Brinsea lay inside. McWilliam recognized it immediately as an egg incubator. An electric cable joined to a two-foot extension cord ran from the incubator through the space between the two backseats to the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. Beside the incubator was a three-foot-high blue canvas backpack filled with coiled climbing ropes, carabiners, and steel stakes. McWilliam photographed the evidence and returned to the interview room at police headquarters, where Lendrum was still waiting.

  McWilliam laid the incubator, the ropes, and the other gear on the table.

  “If you’re just an egg collector, then how do you explain this?” McWilliam asked. “Why the hell do you have an incubator in your car?”

  Lendrum shrugged. The incubator was intended for “hens in Zimbabwe.” The eggs, he repeated, were for his collection in South Africa. Again he insisted that the embryos inside were no longer alive. He had worn them on his body to self-treat a bad back. He denied that the dyed red egg left behind in the Emirates shower room was a decoy.

  McWilliam was used to dealing with liars, but this was a new level of willful deceit. Did Lendrum really expect him to believe such blatant prevarication? Was this some kind of casually sociopathic detachment from reality? Or had he gotten away with his crimes for so long that he’d come to believe he could talk his way out of anything?

  “Bollocks,” McWilliam said. “You know that peregrines are a protected species. You know you cannot legally export them without a permit.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lendrum said.

  “If you thought it was okay, then why did you conceal them? Why did you strap them to your body? All of your actions, the fact that you didn’t declare them at any time to security, the fact that you were hiding them on your body, the evidence in the boot [the car’s trunk], all of the evidence shows planning and preparation. Is there anything you want to say?”

  Lendrum shook his head, and McWilliam terminated the interview. He saw nothing more to be gained from it.

  * * *

  The Crown Prosecution Service ordinarily has twenty-four hours following an arrest to charge a suspect with a crime, although the custody period can be extended for twelve more hours at the discretion of the police officer responsible for the prisoner. If the prosecution declines to charge the suspect by that deadline, he must be released immediately. If it decides to file charges, then it is up to a judge to set bail or to keep him in jail until trial. In this case, the police superintendent at Solihull had extended Lendrum’s detention to thirty-six hours, and about eight hours remained on the “custody clock.” McWilliam knew that most prosecutors in the United Kingdom had no familiarity with wildlife legislation, and it was impossible to predict what they would say about a batch of stolen eggs. If Lendrum walked out the door, McWilliam was certain that he would flee the country. Beneath the nonchalant demeanor, he sensed a career criminal who’d been undertaking this kind of operation for years—and would for decades more, despite this tussle with the law.

  How had he financed his expedition to South Wales? Who had sent him there? How often had he made these trips? McWilliam wanted answers, and he knew he was running out of time.

  FOUR THE ART OF FALCONRY

  In 1839, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring diplomat and amateur archaeologist named Austen Henry Layard quit his job as a clerk in his uncle’s London law office and set out on what would become a decade-long journey across the Middle East. Arriving six years later at the Tigris River near Mosul in what is now Iraq, Layard excavated the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, an Assyrian capital built between 720 and 700 B.C. There—amid temples emblazoned with cuneiform writings celebrating King Sargon II, the conqueror of Babylon, and giant statues of lamassus (winged creatures with the head of a man and body of a lion or a bull)—Layard unearthed a bas-relief that showed, he wrote, “a falconer bearing a hawk on his wrist.” The bearded hunter holds thin straps made of leather, known as jesses, or sbuq in Arabic, between his thumb and index finger, with the ends tied around the raptor’s feet. Layard’s discovery, the earliest known representation of falconry, made a strong case that the sport had originated in the Arab world at least twenty-five hundred years before.

  In its early days, long before the arrival of Islam in the Middle East, falconry served as a means of survival. Bedouins in the Arabian Desert trapped peregrines during the raptors’ autumn migration from Europe or Central Asia to Africa. The nomads trained the birds to kill and return to the gauntlet worn on their human’s fist, a
nd to hunt hares or houbara bustards (large terrestrial birds) to supplement the Bedouins’ meager diet of milk and dates and rice. It was an efficient way of putting food on the table, and it established a unique relationship between man and bird. “For the Bedouin the [falcon’s] victory over its quarry was a feat of courage and strength in which they felt able to share,” wrote Mark Allen, a noted Arabist and the onetime director of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, in his 1980 book Falconry in Arabia. “In the [falcon’s] graceful restraint at rest and her grim hardness in the field, the Bedouin saw qualities which were for him among the criteria for honor in a tribal society.”

  Arab traders likely introduced falconry to the West before the fall of the Roman Empire: in Eucharisticos, a confessional meditation written by the Macedonian Christian poet Paulinus of Pella in A.D. 458, the author recalls his adolescent wish to possess “a swift dog and a splendid hawk.” But in medieval Europe, falconry was practiced differently than in the early Bedouin hunts: training and housing birds of prey was beyond the means of most manor-bound peasants, and forests were the protected domains of the nobility, so “hawking,” as the sport also was known, became a leisure pursuit of monarchs and nobles, who organized lavish hunting parties on their estates. The aristocracy even established a pecking order, laid out in the Book of Saint Albans in 1486, for who could hunt with what. Only the king was entitled to a gyrfalcon, the world’s most exotic raptor, brought by traders from frozen Nordic cliffs. A prince could use a “falcon gentle,” or female peregrine, while a knight would have to make do with the slower but often equally agile saker. To a lady went a merlin, a small and sturdy falcon with a blocklike head. Lesser birds were designated for those common folk who did have the resources to hunt; these included the sparrow hawk for a priest, and the lowly kestrel for the “knave or servant” of a lord. Kings built elaborate mews on palace grounds, and lavished privileges on master falconers.The Laws of the Court under Hywel the Good, a tenth-century Welsh prince, stipulated that the royal falconer “is to have his horse in attendance, and his clothing three times in the year, his woolen clothing from the king, and his linen clothing from the queen, and his land free.”