Lorber ducked behind a rocky hill that rose over the forest. From her perch she watched the boy, a slightly built adolescent, expertly scale a leadwood tree and disappear amid the foliage. After fifteen minutes of probing the branches, he began his descent. As soon as his feet touched the ground, Lorber clambered down from the rocks.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Pat Lorber. Who are you?”
“I’m Jeffrey,” he replied.
“What are you doing, Jeff?”
“Going to go fishing up at the dam,” he said.
“You’re not nest or egg collecting, are you?” she asked. Many local boys liked to clamber into trees and raid birds’ nests after school, but this was the first time Lorber had ever encountered anyone threatening her work at the Hillside Dams, a government sanctuary where egg foraging was strictly forbidden.
“No,” he said, “I just like to see what’s in the nests.”
“Now, here is the thing, Jeff,” Lorber said. “I’m doing a survey where I’m trying to establish how many birds breed in this particular area. You’re not going to be taking eggs, are you?”
“No, I don’t collect eggs.”
“Because a small and determined egg collector is going to muck up my figures.”
“I’m not doing anything,” the boy insisted. Then he scampered off.
That evening, the phone rang at Lorber’s home.
“Jeffrey said you accused him of egg collecting while he was down at the Hillside Dams,” said Peggy Lendrum, Jeffrey Lendrum’s mother. Lorber knew her in passing as a teacher at the local high school, but they had never spoken and she was surprised the woman had managed to obtain her phone number. Peggy sounded defensive and aggressive. “I want you to know that Jeffrey is a very truthful boy,” she said, “and if he says he’s not egg collecting, he’s not egg collecting.”
“Okay, Peggy,” Lorber said. “All right, then. ’Bye.” She was certain that Jeffrey Lendrum had been lying, but she didn’t want to make too much of it. The Lendrums were a respectable family. Hopefully the boy had learned his lesson.
* * *
It was Jeffrey Lendrum’s father, Adrian, he would always say, who had sparked his interest in egg collecting. “My father was passionate about wildlife,” the younger Lendrum would recall decades later, “not just birds, but beetles, butterflies, moths. He collected everything.” When Jeffrey was eight years old, Adrian enlisted him to raid the nest of a groundscraper thrush, a small, black-and-white-speckled songbird that lays its tiny blue eggs in clutches of two to four, high in trees in cup-shaped nests often woven from spiders’ webs. After Jeffrey had taken the eggs, Adrian taught him how to insert a pipette and “blow” the contents—expelling the live embryo so that it wouldn’t rot inside the eggshell—and mount the empty shell in Adrian’s modest egg collection, which contained about twenty specimens.
With his father’s encouragement, Jeffrey Lendrum became a prolific nest raider, clambering perilously from tree limb to tree limb dozens of feet off the ground, combing through the foliage and grabbing colorful treasures. Lendrum had an instinctive sense of how to “read” a tree—calculating his route by the pattern of the branching, the brittleness of the wood, the width of the trunk and branches, even the quality of the bark. He prided himself on his intimate knowledge of the forest. “I’ve climbed to more nests than you probably had hot breakfasts,” he would later say. And because most collecting was against the law, it required stealth and, sometimes, an ability to lie with a straight face. That day he was spotted by Lorber, Lendrum had been searching for the distinctive blue eggs of the redheaded weaver, a perching bird that builds nests out of leaf stalks, twigs, and tendrils in baobabs and other trees throughout Southern Africa.
Rhodesia had some of the strictest conservation legislation on the continent. The eggs of most small birds and common raptors could be taken from private land, but only if one had the landowner’s written permission. The government banned collecting eggs in national parks, except with a hard-to-obtain permit for scientific research. It was illegal everywhere to take the eggs of several dozen “Specially Protected Species,” including secretary birds, black pelicans, cranes, flamingos, and most raptors. African black eagles, martial eagles, bateleur eagles, brown snake eagles, black breasted snake eagles, Ovambo sparrow hawks, yellow-billed kites, black-shouldered kites, giant eagle owls, spotted eagle owls, tawny eagles, peregrine falcons, lanner falcons, and a dozen more birds of prey were very much sought-after by unscrupulous sportsmen, collectors, and traders; several of these species were unique to Southern Africa. The hunting, removal, and sale of these endangered animals was punishable by up to several years in prison. A handful of researchers and top falconers could get an exemption, but for everyone else, it was taboo.
Jeffrey Lendrum ignored all the prohibitions. He rode through the bush for miles each day on his bicycle, carrying a throw line with a heavy weight on one end to wrap around high branches and facilitate his ascent. He’d scan trees for bunches of sticks and developed a keen eye for following birds to their nests. And he came up with ingenious tricks for procuring eggs. Vernon Tarr, a neighbor in Bulawayo, remembers Lendrum’s determination to sneak an egg away from a crowned eagle—one of Southern Africa’s rarest raptors, a large and powerful bird with a russet-brown crest that has been known to seize small children in its huge talons. (In 1924, anthropologists in South Africa unearthed the skeleton of a toddler known as the “Taung Child,” a humanoid that lived two million years ago; scientists would determine that a crowned eagle had swept up the child and taken it to its nest, where the raptor ripped out its eyes.) Lendrum would find a suitable tree, carry up “tons of sticks, and build a rudimentary nest there,” Tarr says. “The next year the crowned eagles moved in.” Lendrum would wait until the female laid her eggs in the aerie he had built, and then would climb into her nest and snatch them.
Howard Waller, one of Lendrum’s closest boyhood friends, says that Lendrum was driven by an obsession that went far beyond that of a schoolboy hobbyist. Even then, stealing eggs was about more than just collecting; he had a real competitive streak. Waller remembers clambering into nests as an adolescent to take the live eggs of the common sparrow hawk. “I’d climb a tree and there would be a chicken egg in the nest with a sign on it saying, ‘Too late sucker,’ ” he recalls.
* * *
The Lendrum family’s route to Rhodesia had been a long one. Adrian Lendrum, a third-generation African with roots in Cork, Ireland, had been born in Kenya in the 1930s. (The word “Lendrum” is Celtic for “moor of the ridge.”) His mother died just after his birth, leaving Adrian’s father devastated, and with three young children to raise on his own. When Adrian was about three months old, he and his two older siblings left Kenya to live with their paternal grandparents in South Africa. Several years later, they were summoned back by their father, now remarried with stepchildren in Northern Rhodesia, a copper-rich and landlocked British protectorate in Southern Africa, just south of the Belgian Congo. Adrian attended school there, worked as a manager for the Rhokana Copper Mine, and met his wife, Peggy, also a third-generation African. Jeffrey, their oldest child, was born in October 1961 in Kitwe, the colony’s second-largest city. It wouldn’t be long, however, before Adrian Lendrum was moving on again.
In February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan acknowledged, standing before the South African Parliament, that a black “national consciousness” was rising across the continent. Over the next four years, one British colony after another—Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania), Kenya—declared independence, along with the Belgian Congo and France’s colonies in North, West, and Central Africa. Northern Rhodesia’s turn came in 1964. Following nearly a decade of protest marches, strikes, and other civil disobedience, Britain’s Colonial Office allowed an election early that year, with universal suffrage. A party led by a popular teacher and freedom fighter named Kenneth Kaunda won by a landslide, and what was once Northern Rh
odesia became the independent black-ruled nation of Zambia.
Kaunda, who became Zambia’s first president, soon declared his country a one-party state, and launched a massive scheme to nationalize land and private enterprises, which was when Adrian Lendrum started thinking about leaving the country. “He saw the way things were going in Zambia,” says his younger son Richard, who was born in 1966. “He wanted something else.” According to younger sister Paula, who was born in 1969, the immediate catalyst for the move was a robbery in Kitwe during which Peggy Lendrum was held at knifepoint.
In 1969, Adrian and his wife, Peggy, drove south from Kitwe with their children, across the massive Lake Kariba dam on the Zambezi River, to Southern Rhodesia, now known simply as Rhodesia, one of Africa’s last holdouts of white-minority rule. Many of Rhodesia’s 270,000 whites owned farms that had been in the family for two or three generations, and were terrified by what they saw happening around them. In 1965, the Rhodesian cabinet had unilaterally broken free of Great Britain and, in defiance of the international community, declared Rhodesia a sovereign state.
Situated on the Rhodesian Highveld, a vast stretch of savanna and bush-covered hills between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, Bulawayo was a bustling colonial outpost, a factory town known for its furniture, clothing, and wooden construction parts, and the railhead for Southern Africa. About sixty thousand whites and several hundred thousand blacks lived in the city, their interactions limited by the white-supremacist politics of the era. The black population lived in crowded townships, while middle-class whites were all but guaranteed a big house, a garden, and servants. (Poorer whites, most of whom had come to Bulawayo to work for the railway, lived far more modestly.) White boys and girls learned British history and geography and played cricket, rugby, and field hockey on idyllic campuses carved out of the bush. For white adults, one’s social life revolved around an academy of music, a theater club, a ballet society, a choral society, the Rotary Club, and the Bulawayo Club, a billiards-and-drinking establishment founded in the 1890s exclusively for men. The annual highlight was a parade down Abercorn Street, Bulawayo’s main avenue, commemorating the Pioneer Column: a force of five hundred colonists and soldiers recruited by the mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes, that marched from South Africa through Matabeleland and Mashonaland in 1890 and established the first white settlements in what would become Southern Rhodesia. Just twenty miles down the road lay the Matobo National Park, carved in part from Rhodes’s former cattle ranch, a sprawling reserve filled with big game and birds of prey.
The Lendrums moved into a handsome house in the leafy Hillside neighborhood on the eastern side of town, with a large garden filled with flowering trees and a live-in husband-and-wife team that worked as the family’s gardener and domestic servant. After arriving in Bulawayo, Adrian landed a position as a human resources manager at Dunlop Tyres Africa, while Peggy taught at Girls’ College, a private high school. Jeffrey attended a private elementary school, where he was well behaved but bored and easily distracted in class, preferring to roam the bush in search of birds and other wildlife with a handful of like-minded friends. The family was close, Richard says, but it was the older son, Jeffrey, with whom Adrian formed the deepest bond.
In early 1973, Adrian showed up with eleven-year-old Jeffrey at the monthly meeting of the Rhodesian Ornithological Society. Bird-watching was a popular pursuit in the young country, reflecting the pride that many of its privileged white citizens took in its game parks and rich wildlife. About thirty members were present the evening the Lendrums walked into the cozy basement lecture room of Bulawayo’s Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, opened in 1964 and considered one of the best in Southern Africa. The Lendrums, younger than almost all of the rest, exuded an energy and enthusiasm that drew a crowd as Adrian Lendrum recounted how an Ayres’s hawk eagle, a fierce-looking bird mottled black and white, had roosted in his garden a year before. It was a thrilling sight, he said, and had sparked a fascination for birds of prey.
The father and son “were likable, smooth, gregarious, and chatty,” says Pat Lorber, who was there that evening. She’d chalked up her encounter with the younger Lendrum the previous year to typical boyhood mischief and hadn’t given him another thought. The Lendrums were asked to join a Saturday survey of waterbirds at the Aiselby Dam outside town, a reservoir rich with African pipits, sacred ibises, red-capped larks, African wattled lapwings, African purple swamp hens, ospreys, Temminck’s coursers, and dozens of other species. The birders also encouraged the pair to come back to the museum for evening ornithological documentaries. Soon the group invited them to participate in its longest-running and most prestigious project: the African Black Eagle Survey, launched by a warden at Matobo National Park in the early 1960s. It was an invitation that all would come to regret.
* * *
Matobo is one of the African continent’s geological oddities: a 165-square-mile field of granite domes, huge rolling rock slabs known as whalebacks, and blocks of broken granite piled one on top of the other as if some gargantuan toddler had used the boulders as playthings. The cooling and erosion of buried magma some two billion years ago formed the stony landscape. In between the striking rock formations, some of which rise to thirty-five hundred feet, lie swampy valleys, or vleis, fed by rainwater runoff and rich in acacias, mopanis, figs, euphorbias, and other vegetation. Thirty-two species of raptors—four hundred breeding pairs—nest in tall trees or on rock ledges, largely protected from baboons and other predators, subsisting on rock hyraxes and yellow-spotted hyraxes—small, furry mammals both known in Rhodesia as “dassies.”
The black eagle has been one of the park’s star attractions since tourists began visiting Matobo in the 1920s. Otherwise known as Verreaux’s eagle, after French ornithologist Jules Verreaux, who brought back specimens to the National Academy of Sciences in Paris in the early nineteenth century, this coal-black raptor has fierce yellow eyes, a massive wingspan, and a telltale white V on its back. “They can fly in a gale of [one hundred miles] per hour,” the South African raptor expert Rob Davies observed, “draw their wings in slightly and make progress into the eye of the wind, while other birds are being flung across the sky.” Watching them fly alongside lesser eagle species was, he said, “like watching jet fighters escort a bomber.” The raptors build massive stick nests on the ledges of cliff faces, often hundreds of feet above the ground, and frequently occupy them for decades. Some nests, augmented with twigs, grass, and other materials over the years, grow to twenty feet deep and ten feet wide. Survey participants had counted sixty pairs of black eagles in Matobo National Park—the highest concentration of the raptors in the world.
At the time that the Lendrums became involved, the survey leader was Valerie Gargett, a Quaker and former high school math teacher who had quit her job in 1969 to devote herself full-time to ornithology. Her many admirers had come to view her as a sort of Jane Goodall of the raptor world. A teetotaling vegetarian, whose years in the field had left her lean, suntanned, and supremely fit, Gargett spent many hours each week clambering up rock faces and perching on ledges to observe the life cycle of her beloved black eagles. Several of these wild raptors came to trust her and granted her extraordinary access. “Val could go put her hand gently under one particular eagle, feel how many eggs she had, then take the egg and weigh it,” Lorber remembers. Vernon Tarr, the Lendrums’ neighbor, once watched Gargett slip a thermometer between the eagle’s breast feathers and her brood patch—a bare patch of skin filled with blood vessels that provides insulation for her chicks—to measure the incubation temperature. “The eagle didn’t flinch,” he says.
Gargett had assembled several dozen volunteers to help her follow the courtship of eagle pairs, their nest building and egg laying, and the incubation, hatching, and fledging of their young. “Do not stay at or near the nest for longer than five minutes to obtain the information,” she instructed her assistants, who paired off and monitored two or three aeries per team during nesting season between Januar
y and April. “We are visitors to their world and respect their right to live undisturbed and uninfluenced by us.” She urged volunteers, most of whom were not young, to keep in top condition. “It paid to be physically fit and if possible a little underweight, [as] it was sometimes necessary to pass through narrow cracks in the rocks, and even down short rock tunnels,” Gargett wrote in her 1990 book The Black Eagle. “One member on the portly side became wedged in a crack and laughed at his own predicament, until he became so firmly fixed that nobody could move him. In those circumstances one simply had to wait for the victim to relax; struggling was useless.”
When Jeffrey and Adrian Lendrum joined the group, Valerie and her husband, Eric, were delighted to have a vigorous, agile father and son to monitor some of the least accessible nest sites. Eric Gargett, a member of the Bulawayo city council and an experienced technical climber, taught Jeffrey the basics of rappelling, or abseiling, as it was called in Rhodesia: how to fix a secure belay at the top of a cliff, thread the line through the caribiners on his harness, tie the complex knots upon which his life depended, and maintain the proper stance as he launched from the top of the cliff and moved down and across the face. The younger Lendrum, a natural athlete, became a fearless rappeller, descending six-hundred-foot rock faces to perch on a narrow ledge beside an aerie. Sometimes his shamwari (“friend” in Shona, the dominant tribal language of Rhodesia) Howard Waller, an avid falconer, would join him. “Jeff was cocky, macho, and athletic, like his father,” Lorber remembers. “Howard was the quiet, geeky one.”
After two years Val Gargett entrusted Adrian and his son with a spin-off survey of the augur buzzard, a black raptor with a rust-colored tail that builds nests on ledges at the base of vertical cracks in cliffs, or at the intersection of trees and cliffs. Gargett had an endless appetite for data and often created new surveys to be carried out by other members of the society. “The Lendrums are so active, and so useful, and so nice,” Gargett enthused to Lorber. “Adrian and Jeffrey will be perfect.” Thirteen-year-old Jeffrey Lendrum was now struggling at the Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo, an all-boys day school staffed by lay teachers. Discipline was lax, Paula remembers, and her brother’s difficulties focusing on classes and homework worsened. But his enthusiasm for the outdoors balanced out his lack of concentration in the classroom. Working on weekends and on holidays, the Lendrums located thirty aeries and surveyed the buzzards for hundreds of hours between 1975 and 1977. Hiking side by side for hours through the bush, climbing trees and cliffs, and sharing observations about the birds’ behavior strengthened the father-son relationship. They noted the raptors’ “kow-kow” courtship call and the “bombing-diving-and-stooping” and “spiraling-twisting-and-talon grasping” of the male’s mating dance, as Adrian Lendrum described it in one report. They observed the bird’s swoop from a perch and its plunge from a hover “that resembled a fast parachute drop” in pursuit of a rodent or an insect.
The Falcon Thief Page 5
