McWilliam also discovered a sanctuary closer to home: the Seaforth Nature Reserve by the Liverpool docks at the mouth of the Mersey. He had played in the area as a schoolboy, when it was a no-man’s-land of dunes, train tracks, and vacant lots at the end of the bus line. An ambitious harborside redevelopment project had transformed it into seventy-four acres of freshwater and saltwater lagoons, reedbeds, and rabbit-grazed grassland.
Many mornings and afternoons before his shift began, McWilliam would drive through the industrial-waste dump that bordered the reserve and quickly find himself in a different world. Walking along the water’s edge, he took in the pleasant din of cackling gulls, whistling waders, and babbling ducks, amazed that such an Eden could be thriving at the edge of Liverpool. He cast his eye on oystercatchers, Canadian geese, ringed plovers, and more subspecies of gulls than he had ever known existed: black-headed, common, herring, lesser, great black-backed, Ross’s, and Bonaparte’s. Cormorants arrived by the hundreds, seeking shelter from storms on the Irish Sea. During the annual spring passage, from the final week of March to the first week of May, thousands of lesser gulls gathered in the lagoons en route to their breeding grounds in Finland. He came to know his fellow bird-watchers, and learned to recognize dozens of species and identify birdcalls.
It was around this time, shortly after McWilliam turned forty, that colleagues aware of his growing interest in ornithology asked McWilliam to look into some unusual cases relating to that field. Before long these investigations would come to redirect his police career—and lead to his encounter with the greatest falcon thief of all time.
SEVEN THE TRIAL
At three o’clock in the afternoon on October 5, 1983, Christopher “Kit” Hustler, a young environmentalist at Hwange National Park, received a radio call at Main Camp from the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority headquarters in Harare, the capital of the new nation of Zimbabwe. (The country’s name was derived from the term for “house of stones” in the language of the largest tribe, the Shona, referring to a complex of granite ruins dating to the eleventh century and situated in the hills near the southern town of Masvingo.) After a months-long probe of Adrian and Jeffrey Lendrum on suspicion of illegally taking the eggs of endangered species from national parks, officers were preparing to raid their house in Bulawayo. Investigators had secretly interviewed the Lendrums’ housekeeper, who had described “a pair of live birds eggs” being kept inside the family’s refrigerator. Headquarters in Harare believed that the suspects were “clever and devious enough to hide evidence from our people.” The superintendent wanted a bird expert to accompany them.
“Leave as fast as you can,” the superintendent instructed Hustler. “The raid won’t happen until you get there.”
It was dark by the time Hustler arrived in his ancient diesel-powered Land Rover in Hillside, the neighborhood of large homes and lush gardens on the city’s eastern edge. Austin Ndlovu, the provincial warden of Matabeleland, was waiting with two field assistants. All three wore the parks department uniform of khaki shorts and a khaki shirt adorned with green and yellow epaulets. Hustler hung back while Ndlovu (the surname means “elephant” in the Ndebele language) climbed to the veranda and knocked on the front door.
The door opened a crack.
“Are you Adrian Lendrum?” Ndlovu asked.
“I am,” a man replied.
Ndlovu held up a sheet of paper.
“We have a warrant to search your house.”
Lendrum, a handsome, fit man in his late forties, opened the door wider and stood in the threshold, reading the document under the porch light. He handed it back to Ndlovu.
“Better come in, then,” he said.
“We’re here to inspect your eggs,” Ndlovu explained.
Lendrum led the officers down an entrance hall. The family was in the middle of dinner. Peggy Lendrum and her two younger children observed the intrusion from the dining room in confusion, while Jeffrey got up to join his father. Decades later, Jeffrey Lendrum would claim that he and his father had been unaware that they had done anything wrong and that the raid had caught them by surprise. “We had no warning,” he would say. “We were in disbelief, we were shocked, looking for words, wondering ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Expecting to be taken to the refrigerator in the kitchen, Ndlovu was surprised when Adrian Lendrum instead escorted him and his team into a bedroom. While the younger Lendrum looked on, Adrian pointed to a green wooden cabinet, five feet high, four feet across, and two feet deep. Ndlovu pulled open the drawers, one by one, revealing wooden display trays divided into compartments and covered by glass. Eggs, arranged like jewels on beds of cotton, filled each slot. There were opalescent green weaver eggs the size of marbles; the larger, custard-and-chocolate-blotched eggs of the nightjar; the purple-speckled eggs of the common bulbul, Zimbabwe’s most widespread songbird; a clutch of crimson-breasted shrike eggs, with brown speckles on a cream background; and hundreds and hundreds of others. Several deeper drawers contained the eggs of the most endangered birds in Zimbabwe: African black eagles, peregrine falcons, tawny eagles, and white-backed vultures. Astonished by the find, Ndlovu counted three hundred clutches in all, or nearly a thousand eggs. Hustler walked into the room as the inspection was going on and identified himself as a Parks and Wildlife ornithologist. Adrian Lendrum looked at Hustler with relief.
“Thank God you’re here,” Lendrum said. “There seems to be a terrible mistake.” Hustler sensed that they were attempting to “butter me up,” he would say decades later, as though they expected him to be flattered that they didn’t trust his colleagues. Lendrum explained that he and his son were trained ornithologists with good reputations. The eggs on display, he insisted, were “just a schoolboy collection.”
It hardly looked that way to Hustler. The collection was the most extensive private one that he had ever seen. It confirmed the rumors he’d been hearing from people like park ranger Steve Edwards that the Lendrums were secretly amassing a large stash of eggs. Written on every egg in black Indian ink with a fine draftsman’s pen was a “set mark”—a series of tiny numbers and letters, barely readable without a magnifying glass, that assigned codes to individual eggs and clutches (“c. 236”) and sometimes identified the year they’d been taken. These codes could in turn be correlated with data cards to obtain more details.
“Have you got the standard?” Hustler asked Lendrum, using the hobbyist’s lingo for the information index that always accompanied a collection.
Lendrum fetched boxes full of index cards. “All the information is in here,” he said. “We’re happy to provide that.”
“In order to clear this up, I’m going to have to take the collection,” Hustler told Lendrum. “And I’m going to have to take your data cards.”
Hustler continued exploring the home. In the kitchen refrigerator—sitting inside a lidless Tupperware container on a shelf beside milk, cheese, and leftovers—were the objects that had catalyzed the raid on the Lendrums’ house: two mottled brown and red eggs, slightly smaller than a chicken’s. These eggs, unlike those in the bedroom, had neither set marks nor the telltale puncture mark made to push out the embryo before mounting the prize in a display case. Adrian Lendrum claimed these were eggs of a gymnogene, or African harrier hawk, an omnivorous gray raptor with double-jointed legs. They, too, were heading for his egg collection. “We just got them today, so we put them in the fridge to cool them down, while we ate dinner,” he said. But Hustler was skeptical. They looked to him like peregrine falcon eggs, which were greatly sought-after by sportsmen around the world. Placing them in the refrigerator would keep them in a state of suspended animation (freshly laid fertile eggs can survive for more than a week in frigid conditions) until the Lendrums could sell them live on the underground market, a crime punishable under Rhodesia’s 1975 Parks and Wildlife Act by a steep fine and sometimes a stretch in prison.
The Lendrums watched calmly as Hustler and the Parks and Wildlife officers carried t
he trays and the refrigerated eggs to their truck. Then the officers placed Jeffrey Lendrum under arrest and drove him to the Hillside Police Station, where he was booked on charges of possessing wildlife trophies without a license, and released on bail. Adrian would soon be charged as well.
* * *
The news of the Lendrums’ arrests spread quickly through Bulawayo’s bird-watching community. Pat Lorber had begun working five mornings a week as an administrator in the ornithology department at the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe while her daughter and son attended school. She was sitting behind her desk in the “Bird Room” the next morning when Hustler walked in carrying a tray filled with eggs.
“What do you think this is?” he asked.
“An egg collection?” Lorber said.
“It belongs to the Lendrums,” Hustler told her. Behind him trooped half a dozen uniformed Parks and Wildlife officers bearing twenty more trays of eggs. Lorber watched the procession with amazement. She had been been well aware that Jeffrey Lendrum had accumulated eggs in his youth, but had assumed he’d grown out of it. She and Hustler began to identify, one by one, the eight hundred shells mounted in the trays. Adrian Lendrum had made it easy for them. The collector had meticulously documented every one of his egg raids, noting the species, date, peculiar characteristics (“one single red blotch at sharp end”), and, if the egg had been taken inside Matobo National Park, the number of the nest, according to a map of the park that Val Gargett had distributed to her field teams. They found seven clutches of black eagle eggs, one crowned eagle egg, one brown snake eagle egg, three clutches of martial eagle eggs, as well as clutches of the eggs from fish eagles, peregrines, lanner falcons, black storks, white-backed vultures, buzzards, and tawny eagles. In all, the Lendrums had thirty-four clutches of Specially Protected Species—many, it appeared, seized from Matobo. It was an impressive collection, though the Natural History Museum’s own—eight thousand clutches acquired over six decades from dozens of donors—dwarfed it.
Lorber compared the information with the nest record cards that the Lendrums had filled out for Gargett’s surveys—all kept on file at the museum. Here Lendrum had meticulously described the chicks’ supposed development: “chicks growing well,” “flapping wings on edge of nest,” “nest empty, left.”
Every word was a lie.
Hustler called Gargett and broke the news. Gargett, always discreet, had at first kept her suspicions about the Lendrums largely to herself. But as her concerns had grown in recent months, she had confided in a few members of the Rhodesian Ornithological Society, now called BirdLife Zimbabwe. Several had reacted with skepticism. “Val is being over-the-top,” one elderly falconer had complained to Hustler. Now, as she sifted through dozens of protected species in the Lendrums’ collection, dismay and fury combined with a sense of vindication.
Gargett held up the egg of a Mackinder’s eagle owl, one of the rarest birds in the world. She clearly remembered showing a Mackinder’s nest with a clutch of two eggs to Adrian Lendrum in early August 1978. Both eggs had vanished without explanation, a lingering mystery that would now appear to be solved. According to his note card, Lendrum had taken the owl eggs from that nest on August 13, 1978.
* * *
The trial of Adrian and Jeffrey Lendrum opened in August 1984, nearly one year after their arrests, at the Magistrates Court, a four-story colonnaded and whitewashed edifice built in the 1930s on Fort Street in downtown Bulawayo. In the year since their arrest, the Lendrums had gone about their business as usual—Adrian working at Dunlop, his son in the cannery. The fifty-odd members of BirdLife Zimbabwe shunned them, but few others in Bulawayo knew about the case. To anyone who did inquire, Jeffrey would blame the trouble on a personal feud between his father and Gargett. Now that the trial was beginning, however, the Chronicle, Bulawayo’s most popular daily newspaper, brought the story to a wider audience. A colleague at Girls’ College, where Peggy Lendrum taught, recalled that fellow teachers were bemused but sympathetic. Most blamed the family’s troubles on a “misunderstanding.” It was a fantastical notion, they argued, that Peggy’s husband could be stealing eggs from a research project that he served with such devotion and loyalty.
The state had charged the Lendrums with the illegal collection of seventy-nine clutches of eggs from a national park, the illegal possession of thirty-four clutches of eggs of Specially Protected Species, and submission of fraudulent records. “Adrian had thought he would bullshit his way out of it, and that it would all go away,” Pat Lorber remembers. A few weeks into the trial, during a week-long recess, he would even prematurely celebrate his acquittal with a tea-and-cake party for his colleagues at Dunlop.
Clad in the business attire that he wore to his office job, Adrian Lendrum sat beside his casually dressed twenty-two-year-old son in the first row of the gallery. Benches were filled with dozens of members of BirdLife Zimbabwe. Sunlight streamed through the north-facing windows and fans suspended from the high ceiling stirred the air. A framed photo of Robert Mugabe hung on a scuffed white wall.
The evidence that the Lendrums had committed a crime against endangered species was overwhelming. Lorber, Gargett, Hustler, and other experts explained the double sets of record cards and the phony data. Acquaintances described watching Jeffrey Lendrum ascending to the tops of trees in pursuit of protected species, and then trying to hide the eggs by stashing them in his clothing or in a bag. An acquaintance of Adrian Lendrum testified that, after his arrest, Lendrum had begged him to provide a phony statement to police that he had given Lendrum a large collection of eggs; he had refused.
Unlike the prosecutor, who was privately perplexed by the experts’ equating egg theft wth elephant or rhino poaching, the magistrate—typically a judge who presides over a trial involving a less serious criminal offense than a murder, assault, or armed robbery—Giles Romilly, a respected holdover from the days of white-ruled Rhodesia and an avid outdoorsman, viewed the Lendrums’ alleged offenses as serious crimes. At one point Romilly organized a field trip to inspect a black eagle aerie that the Lendrums were accused of robbing. The Matobo Hills were filled with Ndebele dissidents who had declared war on Mugabe the prior year following a series of politically motivated massacres and had vowed to kill government officials. Surrounded by armed guards, the magistrate inspected the nest, determined that the chicks had never hatched and so had likely been stolen—then got out of the park as quickly as he could.
On the witness stand, Adrian and Jeffrey Lendrum denied everything in self-assured but nonconfrontational tones. Jeffrey Lendrum swore that the few eggs he had taken from the national parks were dead, and demonstrated how he ran tests to determine if they were rotten by shaking them vigorously and listening for a particular sound, or by rolling them to see if they moved in an “irregular” manner. But Lorber and Hustler testified that such techniques were useless; shaking an egg as Lendrum described would kill the embryo. The Lendrums also attributed the false data on the nest record cards to their lack of scientific training, and not from any intention to commit fraud.
On October 1, six weeks after the trial began, the magistrate announced that he had reached a verdict. In a hushed courtroom, Romilly found both men guilty of theft and illegal possession. Adrian Lendrum was also convicted of fraud. “By their actions the accused have prejudiced an extensive research programme conducted by authorities over many years,” Romilly said, according to the official transcript. “There was a trust placed in you by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, your colleagues in the Ornithological Society and the museum staff [and] you abused this position.”
The scale of the crime demanded the “maximum penalty,” the magistrate said. Romilly imposed a $2,500 fine on the father and an equal amount on the son, confiscated their pickup truck, incubators, and egg collection, and sentenced each to four months in prison at hard labor, suspended for five years. If they managed to stay out of trouble during that period, they would serve no time at all. Parks and Wildlife had alre
ady barred them from Zimbabwe’s national parks, a humiliation that, said Romilly, “will obviously bear very hard on you.”
Pat Lorber was in the courtroom when the magistrate read aloud the judgment. Upon hearing the sentence, Adrian Lendrum’s “face just fell,” she said.
* * *
A year earlier the father and son had been Val Gargett’s most accomplished protégés. Now they were pariahs. “People didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” Lorber says. Yet the verdict left conservationists dissatisfied. Kit Hustler was certain that the Lendrums were smuggling live eggs and chicks out of the country to buyers in Western Europe. The fresh peregrine eggs in the refrigerator had first raised his suspicions. Parks and Wildlife investigators had also found before the trial a five-egg incubator at the Lendrums’ home and a belt with pouches that seemed custom-made for keeping eggs warm as they were being transported on foot—perhaps through airports. The most powerful evidence came from a statement provided in confidence by the family’s maid, who had seen the younger Lendrum packing eggs into the pouch and taking them to the airport. “He would be gone for three days,” she told the police, according to Hustler, who was closely involved in the investigation. Just before the trial, however, the maid recanted, afraid that she would lose her job if she testified in public against the Lendrums and perhaps remain unemployable. Romilly was left with only circumstantial evidence of the Lendrums’ guilt—the incubator, the egg belt—neither of which was presented at their trial. It was not enough, he said, to convict them of trafficking and send them to prison.
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