McWilliam seemed confident that the existential struggles were over. The unit had achieved headline-making successes in recent years. An international investigation had resulted in the convictions and jailing of members of the Rathkeale Rovers, an Irish organized crime gang that had carried out a series of brazen rhino-horn robberies in museums across England, selling the artifacts to China. Some of the thieves got eight years. McWilliam had also become ever more skilled at scrutinizing the Internet for evidence of wildlife crime; two weeks earlier, photos that he’d spotted on Facebook had led to a raid and an arrest in Merseyside for that peculiar British scourge, badger baiting. He and his colleagues had expanded their investigation into the illegal falcon trade, too. McWilliam hinted that he’d gotten intelligence on some of the biggest financiers in Dubai and other Emirates; once again, though, he wasn’t allowed to name names. Efforts to persuade Arab governments to act on the intelligence collected by the National Wildlife Crime Unit had so far led nowhere. “It’s out of our control,” McWilliam said with resignation.
McWilliam’s appearance in Poached had made him something of a law-enforcement celebrity—much like the heroes of his favorite police drama from his childhood, Dixon of Dock Green. The documentary focused in part on the relationship between the wildlife officer and John Kinsley, a prolific Merseyside egg collector turned bird photographer. In 2002, McWilliam had blocked Kinsley’s application for a license to photograph birds’ nests, skeptical about his claim that he had reformed; four years later, police in South Wales arrested Kinsley for disturbing goshawks while climbing a tree to take pictures without a permit. “I got twelve months’ probation and was banned from every national park and reserve … because of Andy McWilliam,” Kinsley told the director bitterly early in the film.
After that setback, Kinsley had self-published a book, Scourge of the Birdman, a long attack on McWilliam that contained a doctored photograph of his nemesis with a Hitler mustache. The book, according to the jacket copy, “reveals the issues of corruption and dishonesty [of] some of those with positions of authority.” But in recent years, McWilliam and Kinsley had set aside their animosity, and the officer had evolved into something of a confidant for the egg thief. At the film’s conclusion, Kinsley, a haunted-looking figure who struggled for years with depression and unemployment, seeks to take advantage of an offer of amnesty and break from his criminal past. He summons McWilliam to his home and voluntarily turns over to him on camera his entire collection of thousands of eggs.
* * *
Several egg collections that McWilliam confiscated from Merseyside criminals in the 1990s and 2000s are held under lock and key in a storage room at the Liverpool World Museum, a bounty of archaeological and natural history wonders opened in 1860, at the height of the British Empire. I asked McWilliam if he could give me a tour, and, after a scramble on the phone to obtain permission, we rendezvoused with a curator in the museum’s cavernous central gallery.
The curator led McWilliam and me down a corridor, past administrators’ offices and storage rooms, to a door marked NO ENTRY. We followed him into a refrigerated chamber where the museum stores nearly ten thousand clutches. Almost all the specimens are kept in Tupperware-type plastic containers or glass-topped wooden trays on shelves in long rows of steel cabinets, which are compressed together and slide open with a turn of a handle, like a bank vault.
McWilliam opened drawers filled with trays of eggs belonging to Dennis Hughes, a daring peregrine egg collector who had been killed in a fall in a rock quarry in 1991. The collection had remained hidden for a decade after his death. In 2000, an informant told McWilliam that Hughes’s mother had kept her son’s bedroom locked since the day he died. “I went round and gently persuaded his mum, ‘Let’s have a look,’ ” McWilliam recalled. Inside a false bottom in Hughes’s bed, McWilliam found hundreds of eggs. A magistrate ordered their forfeiture, and McWilliam turned them over to the museum.
Here, too, were the collections of Anthony Higham and Carlton D’Cruze, the two Merseyside miscreants who’d been among the first significant collars of McWilliam’s wildlife-crime-fighting career. But the most impressive cache had belonged to Dennis Green, the destitute bird portraitist and onetime member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds who’d amassed four thousand eggs, one of the largest collections ever seized in Great Britain.
We cast our eyes over Green’s artfully arranged clutches of oystercatchers, stone curlews, peregrine falcons, and other endangered species: gem-like orbs resting on beds of cotton, fragile spheres of white, cream, and violet spotted and speckled with dark pigment. For a year I had been speaking to McWilliam about the compulsiveness and self-destructiveness of the collectors, had interviewed Lendrum about his relentless pursuit of live raptor eggs, at the risk of his freedom and sometimes his life, and viewed the famous oological collection at the British Natural History Museum in Tring, packed with the trophies gathered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century obsessives. There, in Hertfordshire, I’d seen the peregrine eggs that Derek Ratcliffe had used to document the lethal effects of DDT, one example of egg collecting serving, however inadvertently, the cause of science. I had also inspected perhaps the collection’s greatest treasures: six freckled, pale yellow, pyriform or pear-shaped eggs of the great auk, a flightless seabird that had lived across the upper latitudes and been driven into extinction by excessive hunting in the mid-nineteenth century. These eggs included an eighteenth-century specimen once owned by the famed Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani, which Walter Rothschild, the museum’s founder, had purchased for a substantial sum in 1901.
I had dived deep into the esoteric world of the oologist, and begun to understand the eggs’ remarkable power: the beauty of their many shapes, textures, colors, and patterns, each the product of natural selection, the better to perpetuate the species … The complex metabolic system wrapped in a delicate casing, from the protein-rich albumen that cushions and nourishes the developing embryo to the microscopic pores on the surface of the shell that draw in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide … The egg, a symbol of new life and fertility, a self-contained miracle of genesis and development, requiring only heat and air to thrive, was “incorporated as a sacred sign in the cosmogony of every people on the earth,” wrote Helena Blavatsky, a nineteenth-century Russian occultist and philosopher, “and was revered on account of its form and inner mystery.” McWilliam sometimes ridiculed the collectors for their bizarre attachment to “a piece of calcium,” but I was coming to see that he, too, grasped their mysterious allure. “I think that if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg,” declared the clergyman and political activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862.
Next to the rows of cabinets, McWilliam recognized an antique wooden display case with forty thin drawers that he had seized from Green’s bedroom on a spring day in 1999, almost exactly twenty years earlier. “It’s like meeting an old friend,” McWilliam said. He opened the drawers to reveal the speckled buff-colored eggs of black-legged kittiwakes; the marble-like, lily-white eggs of Dartford warblers; and the black-and-purple-splattered eggs of red-backed shrikes, whose disappearance from Britain in the 1970s had turned public opinion decisively against the oologists. Each clutch had a story behind it—of human obsession and nature’s fragility, of man’s perpetual insistence on imposing his will upon the wildness of our world, and of the tiny handful of investigators, most unrecognized, working to safeguard the environment’s bounty and wonder.
The curator closed the cabinets and sealed the vault, and McWilliam led me back to the museum’s main gallery and out into the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I set out to enter the world of the fugitive Jeffrey Lendrum in the spring of 2017, I had no idea whether I would be successful. Fortunately, dozens of people around the globe whose paths had crossed the egg thief’s opened doors for me and brought his story to life. Over four interviews in Liverpool, b
ird-watching expeditions, and many phone conversations, Andy McWilliam vividly recounted his journey through the wildlife-crime underworld, his pursuit of Lendrum, and the complex relationship that developed between him and his quarry.
Overcoming his initial hesitation, Paul Mullin hosted me three times in southern England, and spoke to me for a total of ten hours on the phone. He described in detail everything from the nuts and bolts of the African handicrafts business to the felonious journeys that he and Lendrum took to the subarctic in 2001 and 2002.
Plenty of others provided guidance, inspiration, and stories as I followed Lendrum’s trail across four continents. In the United Kingdom, Pat Lorber drew a portrait of the ornithological community in Rhodesia and post-independence Zimbabwe, and her encounters during that period with young Lendrum and his father. Ian Guildford of the NWCU guided me on two trips through the Rhondda Valley—once with Andy McWilliam, and the second time with Mike Thomas, the peregrine watcher who first suspected that an egg thief was plundering local nests. Jemima Parry-Jones, founder of the International Centre for Birds of Prey, taught me the essentials of falcon breeding and other raptor-related arcana, with assistance from Holly Cale. Guy Shorrock of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds answered every question I had about ornithological crime. I’m also grateful to Nick Fox; Howard Waller; Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at the Natural History Museum at Tring; Martin Sims, Alan Roberts, and Nevin Hunter, all of the National Wildlife Crime Unit; Steve Harris; Bob Elliot of the RSPB; Darren Turner at the Warwick Crown Court; the staff of the British Library; Charles Graham; Michelle Conway, Phil and John Struczynski; and Jake Hulyer, a talented young British journalist who traded observations with me at Lendrum’s trial in London.
I had half a dozen lengthy conversations over Skype with Kit Hustler, the former ornithologist at Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, now living in New Zealand, who had near-perfect recall of Adrian and Jeffrey Lendrum’s trial in 1984 and the events leading up to it. In Zimbabwe, John and Jan Brebner spent a memorable day with me in Matobo National Park, pointing out eagles and nests, and sharing with me their love of African landscapes and birds of prey. Peter Mundy, Julia Dupree, Carolyn Dennison, and Vernon Tarr helped bring the African part of Lendrum’s story to life. Fredi and Rita Ruf of the Hornung Park Lodge in Bulawayo and the staff at the York Lodge in Harare were wonderful hosts during my stay in Zimbabwe.
In Brazil, Rodrigo Tomei shared documents and videos with me and related the tale of Lendrum’s arrest and his months in Guarulhos. Rafael Asenjo and Nicolas Soto Volkart of Chile’s Agriculture and Livestock Service provided key information about the trap they’d laid for Lendrum, while Nicolas’s son, Alvaro Soto, served as my guide in the wilds of Chilean Patagonia—imparting his knowledge about the resident birdlife and giving my Spanish a three-day workout. Nicolas Fernández at the Hotel Plaza recounted Lendrum’s sojourn there and gave me a personal tour of Punta Arenas. Dorothea Cist, a resident of Santiago, was instrumental in making the Chile trip happen. In Dubai, the estimable Pranay Gupte provided introductions to key contacts. Linda El Sayed Ahmed and Suad Ibrahim Darwish of the Hamdan bin Mohammed Heritage Center arranged visits to falcon breeders and trainers working for the Al Maktoum family; in Abu Dhabi, Bryn Close and his daughter Natalie allowed me to shadow them for three days at the President Cup, and Angelique Engels, an official at the Abu Dhabi Falconer’s Club, answered all my questions about the sport.
I’m grateful to Timothy Wheeler, the director of Poached, who shared the raw transcript of his long interview with Andy McWilliam; and to Paula Lendrum Maughan and Richard Lendrum, who filled in details about their brother’s early years. Jeffrey Lendrum met with me near Pretoria for three hours and continued conversing with me by phone for six months, making me understand his genuine passion for birds of prey and even turning over the GPS coordinates of the nests he plundered in the Rhondda Valley and Patagonia.
Kevin Cote was involved in this project from its early days, serving as an enthusiastic listener, problem solver, and sounding board over dozens of hours of bike riding along the Havelchaussee and through the Grunewald in Berlin. Philip and Terrie Stoltzfus hosted me at their home during my frequent visits to London, serving me fantastic dinners, putting me up in a guest room, and listening to my tales of egg collectors, bird smugglers, and falcon racers. Their daughter, Ellie Chamberlain Stolztfus, and her husband, Dan Chamberlain, often joined us and also lent an ear to my ramblings. Kathleen Burke, Janet Reitman, Lee Smith, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Diane Edelman, David Dobrin, and Melissa Eddy helped to assuage anxieties and self-doubt. Alex Perry provided keen advice and, with his family, hosted me at his lovely home in Hampshire. David Van Biema, a fellow bird enthusiast, kept me excited about the project; Terry McCarthy was a pal and soul mate during his too-brief sojourn in Berlin. Geoffrey Gagnon in New York and Claudio Edinger in São Paulo also offered friendship and support.
Jon Sawyer and Tom Hundley at the Pulitzer Center, Ian Buruma, formerly of the New York Review of Books, and Suzanne MacNeille of the New York Times underwrote my trip to Southern Africa in December 2017; Suzanne also assigned me pieces from Chile and Dubai, further helping me defray the costs of my global odyssey. The gang at Outside—Chris Keyes, Alex Heard, Reid Singer, Luke Whelan, and my longtime editor Elizabeth Hightower Allen—commissioned, edited, and published my article “The Egg Thief,” which became the basis for The Falcon Thief.
I’m deeply indebted to my editor, Priscilla Painton at Simon & Schuster, who believed in this project from its inception and pushed me onward. Megan Hogan edited the manuscript line by line, vastly ramping up the quality of the narrative, shepherded it along from start to finish, and took care of countless production-related details. Emily Simonson also contributed valuable comments and questions, as did production editors Samantha Hoback and Yvette Grant. Flip Brophy, my longtime agent, was an eager listener over breakfasts at Barney Greengrass and other eateries in New York City. Nell Pierce, Flip’s assistant, cheerfully and efficiently dealt with contract issues and other details.
Finally, great thanks to my mother, Nina Hammer, my father, Richard Hammer, my stepmother, Arlene Hammer, and my sister, Emily Hammer, for being there for me on the other side of the pond. In Berlin, my sons, Max, Nico, and Tom abided my frequent absences, and understood—even shared a bit—my growing fascination for birds. Above all, Cordula Kraemer believed in me, stood by me, kept me focused when I was seized by structural problems and anxieties, and gave endlessly to me. Without her love, generosity, and patience, this story would never have taken flight.
More from the Author
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
A Season in Bethlehem
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© CORDULA KRÄMER
Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Outside.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Joshua-Hammer
@simonbooks
ALSO BY JOSHUA HAMMER
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A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place
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NOTES
Pr
ologue
“Thief Who Preys on Falcon Eggs”: John Simpson, the Times, January 5, 2017.
“A glimpse of dense brush”: Jonathan Franzen, “My Bird Problem,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2005.
Chapter One: The Airport
“gave me a background”: John Struczynski, interview by author, April 14, 2018.
“Are you carrying”: Mark Owen, Midlands-Birmingham Police, interview by author, October 4, 2017; Andy McWilliam, interview by author, Liverpool, August 22, 2017.
“What kind of eggs”: Owen, interview, October 4; McWilliam, interview, August 22.
Chapter Two: The Investigator
“We’re not quite sure”: Andy McWilliam, interview by author, Liverpool, January 21, 2017.
“a spectacular crash”: Derek Ratcliffe, The Peregrine Falcon (London: A&C Black, 1993), 66.
“all peregrine eyries”: David R. Zemmerman, “Death Comes to the Peregrine Falcon,” the New York Times, August 9, 1970, p. 161.
“as crude a weapon”: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 297.
“This sudden silencing”: Carson, Silent Spring, 103.
“As an apex predator”: Guy Shorrock, interview by author, Sandy, England, August 26, 2017.
“I always say”: Mark Jeter, quoted in “The Egg Thief” by Joshua Hammer, Outside, January 7, 2019.
The Falcon Thief Page 25