The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Lendrum took Mullin to the Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage outside Bulawayo, established in the early 1970s to rehabilitate creatures that had been abandoned or injured in the wild. Lendrum had often delivered wounded wildlife there and had become familiar with some of the animals’ personalities. “Throw some meat in there and show my mate what he does,” he instructed the caretaker of a male lion. The beast picked up the bloody slab and dunked it in a trough filled with water, daintily cleaning it with his paws as Lendrum and Mullin watched in amusement. Moving to a nearby cage holding a leopard, Lendrum urged his partner to “go up to the fence.” As Mullin approached, the giant cat hurled himself against the barrier with a snarl, terrifying Mullin and sending Lendrum into paroxysms of laughter. When Lendrum beckoned to a vulture that he had rescued from the bush, the vulture, to Mullin’s surprise, flew straight to him. “I’ve always rescued animals,” Lendrum would say years later. “When I see a cow lying dead on the road in Africa, I will drag the cow off the road to save the vultures from being hit by trucks.”

  He showed equal compassion for other unloved species. During the Southern African winter, when temperatures can plummet to near-freezing and snakes slither across Zimbabwe’s asphalt roads to absorb the warmth, Lendrum and Mullin would venture out in Lendrum’s truck after dark. Headlights illuminating the way ahead, Lendrum might spot a puff adder—an aggressive snake whose cytotoxic bite can kill an adult human in twenty-four hours—screech to a stop, leap out of the truck, pin its head with a stick, and then pick it up by the neck and drop it safely into a cooler box. After accumulating a few snakes, Lendrum would release them all into a field. A YouTube video that Lendrum uploaded around this time shows him toying with an eight-foot-long Egyptian cobra: he dangles the snake by the tail, forces open its jaws, and displays its fangs before tossing it gently aside.

  On another occasion, Lendrum rescued from the road a rhombic egg eater, a favorite of his: a slender nonpoisonous snake that climbs trees to raid birds’ nests and feeds exclusively on eggs. Lendrum phoned Mullin in England.

  “Do you want it?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Mullin said. Lendrum smuggled it in his pocket on a plane to Heathrow. Mullin gave it to his daughter, who named it Twinkle.

  * * *

  Despite all the energy that Mullin and Lendrum put into their project, AfricaXtreme struggled to turn a profit. The Southampton shop, situated on a main street, attracted a steady stream of curious passersby, but many came to browse, not to buy. The partners spent lavishly on print and radio advertising to get the word out. Throughout 2001 and into 2002, short spots would run ten times a day during rush hours on two local radio stations. Accompanied by elephant trumpets, monkey screeches, birdcalls, and beating drums, a sonorous-voiced announcer invited locals to come check out the exotic carvings and to “turn your garden into a tropical paradise with unique, handcrafted metal birds made from recycled metal from Southern Africa.” But the blitz of publicity failed to whip up sales.

  Still, the partners forged ahead. They opened a second shop in Towcester, an affluent town of twenty thousand in the East Midlands, where Mullin had several friends. They started a mail-order business. Mullin took advantage of his travels for the telecommunications firm to make solo buying excursions in Uganda, Zambia, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lendrum divided his time between the crafts business and Wallace Distributors. He continued to complain about money, but he had a new distraction: he had begun a relationship with a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent, who was married but separated from her English husband. She’d met Lendrum at a dance party in Towcester, and shared his enthusiasm for auto racing. Lendrum sold his house in South Africa, and moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Towcester—and then into the house where his girlfriend lived with her two young daughters. He also hired her to run his shop. During his trips to Zimbabwe he could talk about little else.

  “I’m so in love,” he would tell Mullin while lying in his bed in the chalet they shared at the Southern Comfort Lodge during their handicraft-buying trips in the bush. Mullin would roll his eyes.

  “For fuck’s sake, shut up,” he would say.

  * * *

  Lendrum would always publicly insist that he had given up illegal nest robbing after leaving Zimbabwe in 1985. But in late 1999, Mullin began noticing something odd: cartons of hard-boiled eggs, dyed yellow, green, and brown, were turning up in the Bulawayo chalet. When Mullin asked Lendrum what he’d been up to, Lendrum replied that he had been driving into Matobo and snatching live raptor eggs for clients whom he wouldn’t identify. He then filled the nests he robbed with hard-boiled replacements in the hope that the birds would reject the eggs as rotten and lay another clutch.

  Lendrum loosened up and confided to Mullin that he also had more ambitious plans: he wanted to steal the eggs of exotic birds of prey from around the world and deliver them to wealthy falconers in the Middle East. Several months later, Lendrum left the handicraft business in Mullin’s hands and traveled to northern Canada on what he called a “proof of concept” mission. His aim was to study the feasibility of bringing back the eggs of Arab falconers’ favorite raptor, the gyrfalcon.

  Financing the operation by himself, Lendrum flew for several days over cliffs and uninhabited tundra with a pilot in a chartered helicopter. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he told Mullin when he got back. “In a week it changed from a place where you could land your helicopter on the frozen lakes to greenness and bears and all the rest of it. If you had come with me, you would have had such good fun.” But, he reported with chagrin, he’d managed to spot just a single gyrfalcon and only one aerie. The guidebook that Lendrum had consulted claimed that gyrfalcons build south-facing nests; in fact, as he learned only toward the end of the trip, the aeries always face north, to avoid the prolonged exposure to sunlight that would melt the snow on cliff ledges and cause the eggs to rot from the moisture. He vowed to try again.

  Lendrum talked of traveling to South America to raid the nest of a harpy eagle, named by the eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus after the mythical harpy beast, the half-human, half-avian personification of storm-force winds in Greek mythology. The largest, strongest raptor in the rain forest and one of the world’s most threatened birds, the harpy has slate-black upper feathers, a white breast, and a pale gray, double-crested head, and can grow to three feet tall and weigh as much as twenty-five pounds. Also high on his wish list were the eggs of the Eurasian eagle owl, a fast and powerful raptor with pumpkin-orange eyes and feathery ear tufts, which nests in rock crevices throughout much of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. But this was all just talk.

  Then, one morning in early 2001, following another handicrafts-buying trip to Victoria Falls, Lendrum disappeared for several hours from the chalet at the Southern Comfort Lodge. When he returned he reached inside his backpack and set down three baby birds on his bed. The chicks had mottled black-and-white feathers, hooked beaks, and large yellow legs and black talons. They appeared to be one or two days old, and they were chirping and screeching at ear-piercing volume. They were lanner falcons, Lendrum told Mullin over the racket, a migratory raptor that is slightly smaller than the peregrine, with a propensity for hunting game by pursuing it horizontally, a technique known as the “chase and grab.”

  He told Mullin he planned to smuggle the babies to Dubai.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Mullin asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Lendrum assured him. He had a client—and a plan.

  The next morning at dawn, Lendrum fashioned a nest made of towels and placed it at the bottom of his rucksack, then laid the three chicks inside. He placed the rucksack on the floor behind the driver’s seat of his pickup truck, where it was cool and dark. The two men set forth on the thirteen-hour drive from Bulawayo to Johannesburg. Mullin wanted to see for himself if Lendrum could pull off the stunt and had invited himself along as far as London. On the road trip south Lendrum fed the birds every two hours with a
blend of minced calf liver and raw egg yolk, placing the food into their beaks with a pair of tweezers. At the airport, Lendrum removed the birds from the rucksack to avoid the baggage scan machine, where their bones would be visible. Instead he put them carefully in the pockets of his fleece, and walked them through the metal detector. Lendrum fed them again in the shower room of the Virgin Atlantic business-class lounge, transferred them back to the rucksack, and, with Mullin, boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to the UK. He stored the birds in the overhead compartment, and Lendrum and Mullin settled back in their business-class seats.

  Then, in the middle of the night, Mullin awoke to a piercing noise emanating from directly above him.

  Cheeep cheeep cheep. Cheeep cheeep cheeeeep.

  “Jeff,” he said, shaking Lendrum awake. “I can hear the children crying.”

  Lendrum listened. Then he burst out laughing.

  “Go feed the fuckers,” Mullin said.

  Lendrum brought down the rucksack and a small plastic container filled with the yolk-and-liver mix, and carried all into the toilet. When he returned, the chicks had gone back to sleep. Soon Mullin fell asleep, too.

  Then, two hours later, Mullin was jolted awake again:

  Cheeeep. Cheeep Cheeeep.

  Lendrum again scooped up the birds and the mix and retreated to the lavatory.

  The chicks woke up four more times in the course of the flight to London, but the white noise of the jet engine masked their hunger-driven screeches from the other passengers and crew, and Lendrum and his live contraband made it safely off the plane.

  The two parted ways at Heathrow. “Make sure you look after the children,” Mullin called, as Lendrum rushed to catch his flight to Dubai. Mullin soon heard from Lendrum that he had safely delivered all the chicks to his mystery client. (Years later, Lendrum would insist that Mullin’s story was “a complete flight of fiction. Have you heard how noisy those birds are?” Mullin would stand by what he said.)

  This sort of escapade, Mullin would come to realize, was Lendrum’s oxygen. He wasn’t doing it for the money—Mullin saw no evidence that Lendrum was cashing in, at least not yet. “He lived a very basic lifestyle,” Mullin would remember, two decades later. “If he was making sixty thousand dollars out of each egg that hatched and became an adult, where was the big house, the big car? He did buy himself a new Toyota double-cab four-by-four, but he didn’t make a lot.” Perhaps, Mullin speculated, Lendrum was content to work for a relative pittance in return for the promise of adventure. He needed challenges, loved living on the edge—whether playing with deadly snakes, scaling the tallest cliffs and trees, or stealing the world’s most endangered species. “It’s always been about the thrill for Jeff,” his boyhood friend Howard Waller would say. “He likes to beat the system. That’s been his thing since he was a kid.”

  Now Lendrum’s appetite for risk and his willingness to skirt the rules had pulled him into a global enterprise.

  TEN DUBAI

  Centuries before Jeffrey Lendrum began raiding nests for wealthy Arab clients, trappers were shinnying up trees and scaling cliffs in avid pursuit of falcons. In 1247, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor, offered instructions to falconers on how to obtain chicks from the wild. “If the nest is in a tree, a man can climb up and, having put the young ones in a basket, carry them home,” he advised in On the Art of Hunting with Birds, his classic work on falconry. If the aerie was built into the fissure of a high rock face, however, “a man is secured to the end of a rope and descends or is lowered from the rim of the mountain or cliff to the level of the hollow, and, entering, lifts the bird from the nest.”

  Adelard of Bath, a twelfth-century English natural philosopher, recommended capturing chicks “seven days after hatching” in the morning when their stomachs were empty and it was cool. Frederick II thought it better to leave the chicks in the nest as long as possible, “because the longer they are fed by their parents the better and stronger will be their limbs and pinions,” he wrote, “and they are less likely to become screechers or gapers.”

  While Europeans raided nests, Arabs of the era (and for centuries afterward) trapped “passage” falcons: young birds that had left the nest for good. During the September-to-November migration of millions of birds from Eastern Europe and Central Asia to Africa, the trappers waited for the falcons (mostly peregrines, but also some sakers) in the Syrian Desert, the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys, and farther down the Arabian Peninsula. They would strap a pigeon to a shabichet hehmama, a lightweight wooden frame covered with a dozen nooses made from woven strands of camel hair, and then, as the falcon passed overhead, send the bird aloft. The raptor would zero in for the kill, ensnare a toe or two in a noose, and flutter down to earth.

  Other trappers employed a lugger falcon, a sluggish raptor known as a bizzuar in Arabic. Partially blinded from a thread passed through each eyelid, the bird would be sent into the air clutching a decoy bundle of feathers called a nigil. The passage bird would attack the bundle, intent on wresting it from the weaker falcon, and, its foot caught in a hidden noose, fall to the ground.

  The passage falcons, eighteen months old or younger, were ideal birds for falconry, wrote diplomat and Arabist Mark Allen in Falconry in Arabia, being far superior to both chicks snatched from their nests and mature raptors that had been trapped after their first migration. The juvenile passage falcon, with fully developed musculature and feathers and an ability to hunt inculcated by its parents, combines, Allen declared, “the [malleability] of youth with its capacity for adventure and carelessness of danger.”

  * * *

  By the 1970s the trapping of wild falcons was dying out in much of the world. In 1973 the United States, which had lost about 90 percent of its peregrine population to DDT and other pesticides, passed the Endangered Species Act, making it illegal to acquire, deliver, hold, sell, or market falcons except for scientific purposes. That same year, eighty countries ratified the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). The treaty, which was eventually signed by 183 nations, designated twelve hundred species, including many birds of prey, as Appendix I—“threatened with extinction”—and prohibited trade of wild raptors except with hard-to-obtain licenses for research. In the decades since, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Russia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries in Europe, Asia, and South America have made illegal the trapping of almost all birds of prey.

  The new restrictions forced falconers to seek alternatives to taking birds from the wilderness. There had already been experiments with captive breeding, or mating falcons in a controlled environment. Renz Waller, a German falconer and artist best known for his portrait of a white gyrfalcon owned by General Field Marshall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s supreme commander of the Luftwaffe, had tried repeatedly, although with very limited success, to induce peregrines to breed in an aviary in the Nazis’ falcon center in Riddagshausen in north-central Germany. Nazi leaders admired falconry in part because of its ties to medieval Teutonic knights, and Hermann Göring and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, both avid falconers, supported an expansive program of training raptors and teaching Nazis to hunt with the birds.

  Waller’s experiment ended abruptly in 1944 when an Allied bombardment burned his facility to the ground. Three decades later, the Midwest-based Raptor Research Foundation, the Canadian Fish and Wildlife Service, and Cornell University’s Peregrine Fund relied on Waller’s notes in their attempts to breed peregrines in captivity for the purpose of repopulating the wild.

  As Renz Waller had discovered, captive breeding turned out to be anything but easy. Raptors proved far more temperamental and sensitive to being cooped up than domestic fowl. Deprived of the acrobatic courtship flights, marked by loops, tight turns, and swooping dives, that served as an essential mating ritual in the wild, the birds usually refused to copulate. If they did, females would not sit on their fertilized eggs. Hatching falcon eggs in incubators was problematic, too. Th
ey often overheated, or weren’t rotated at the proper intervals, preventing the embryo-nourishing albumen, or egg white, from spreading inside the shell. Moving an early embryo risked breaking the chalaza, the cord that anchors the yolk to the albumen, killing the chick-to-be; even tilting the egg at an incorrect angle could twist the cord and kill the embryo. Misjudging the humidity in the incubator could also prove fatal. High humidity would cause the egg to lose too much water between laying and hatching, leaving the chick too small and weak because of dehydration to break through the shell. Low humidity would result in a chick too large to maneuver inside the shell, and so it would be unable to peck its way out of its tiny enclosure.

  Ornithological researcher Heinz K. Meng at the State University of New York at New Paltz succeeded in breeding the first pair of peregrines in North American captivity in 1971. He lent the birds to Tom Cade, the founder of the Peregrine Fund, who helped the couple—and two other pairs—produce twenty falcon chicks in 1973. Across the world, breeders were learning how to select compatible pairs, construct congenial nests, induce the birds to mate, perfect artificial incubation, get parents or surrogates to rear the incubator-hatched chicks, and encourage birds to lay a second clutch of eggs to increase the number of young. As the handful of breeding programs became more successful, “the whole thing snowballed,” says Jemima Parry-Jones, who’d started breeding birds of prey in the early 1970s at her raptor center in rural Gloucestershire. Arab devotees of falconry, flush with oil wealth and prohibited by international law from obtaining wild birds, began buying captive-bred birds in the United States and Europe, creating a commercial market. By the early 1980s breeding programs had produced thousands of raptors of a dozen species, including two thousand peregrine falcons.