The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Hustler’s suspicions gained credibility a few days after the trial, when British police raided a farmhouse near Birmingham and arrested a man who had illegally imported both chicks and the fertile eggs of four martial eagles, three crowned eagles, and two black eagles from Zimbabwe, valued together at £10,000. Evidence that the police would never make public pointed to Adrian Lendrum as the source. (His son was apparently not implicated.) “British police asserted that they had enough evidence to arrest Lendrum should he set foot in Britain,” reported the Chronicle.

  In the end, Zimbabwean authorities again believed they lacked the proof—bank deposits or sworn testimony from buyers—that the Lendrums were profiting from their egg thefts. They never charged Adrian Lendrum, but the rumors of the Lendrums’ involvement in a black market lingered. The March 1985 newsletter of the World Working Group on Birds of Prey and Owls, a pan-European network of enthusiasts and bird protectors, described the Lendrums as active bird-egg smugglers and explained that the trade “is organized internationally in a manner similar to international traffic in drugs.” With ingenious new methods of keeping eggs protected in transit, and new tactics to hatch well-advanced embryos, unscrupulous elements in the tight-knit community of rare-bird collectors had begun spreading the word that raptors-in-the-shell could be had for the right price. The article estimated that the trade grossed a modest $3 million a year, with the most expensive raptor egg, that of a gyrfalcon, fetching $80,000 on the black market. For connoisseurs of birds of prey in search of the most beautiful and exotic specimens in the world, there would be no greater mark of prestige than flying an African black eagle—or even better, a rare crowned eagle—thousands of miles from the birds’ native habitat.

  Looking back two decades later, Peter Mundy, an ornithology professor at Bulawayo’s National University of Science and Technology and a confidante of Val Gargett, would view the father and son as mutual enablers. Mundy had been friendly with Jeffrey and Adrian Lendrum for years—attending evening gatherings with the father at the Ornithological Society, chatting with both of them amiably at the airport, a tire shop, and other spots around the city. But the trial and conviction of the Lendrums exposed a dark side that he had never seen. The younger Lendrum was “a very personable and likable young man, and terribly energetic,” Mundy would write years later in Honeyguide, the quarterly magazine published by BirdLife Zimbabwe. “If only he had gone down the right path of scientific curiosity and endeavour, he could have contributed significantly … to ornithology at large. What went wrong? Perhaps the father’s behavior influenced the son.”

  Over the course of the trial, Kit Hustler says, Jeffrey Lendrum demonstrated a “sense of entitlement” that might, he thought, have derived in part from growing up white and privileged in colonial Rhodesia. “He believed that it was his right to go into the game reserves and help himself,” Hustler says. What Hustler didn’t know at the time was that Jeffrey claimed to have been encouraged in these activities by corrupt Parks and Wildlife officials. From the time he was a teenager, Lendrum would say decades later, he was paid handsomely to snatch the chicks of black eagles, African hawk eagles, lanner falcons, and other Specially Protected Species. “They couldn’t climb, so they came to me,” he would say. The officials, he would claim, would then smuggle them to destinations overseas. Jeffrey Lendrum had never mentioned any of this on the witness stand; he would later explain that he had thought nobody would believe him.

  * * *

  Jeffrey Lendrum lit out for South Africa a few months after the trial, fleeing a criminal record and intent on starting a new life. Still deep in the apartheid era, led by the hard-line Afrikaner Prime Minister P. W. Botha, nicknamed “the Big Crocodile,” the country was an easy place for a young white male who had flunked most of his O levels to find steady and well-paying work. He left behind bad feelings and at least one broken heart. Gargett never again spoke to the Lendrums, and never forgave them. Burdened with guilt for having trusted them, she left behind her beloved black eagle survey and moved to Australia, where her two children and grandchildren had settled.

  Aggrieved conservationists in Bulawayo, still frustrated over their failure to convict the Lendrums on smuggling charges, were intent on dragging the younger Lendrum back to court. Eventually, Peter Mundy says, the South African police made a deal with Zimbabwean authorities to arrest Lendrum and swap him at the border for a couple of South African poachers in Zimbabwe’s jails. A colleague of Mundy’s even traveled to South Africa to search for the egg thief on behalf of the police, eventually tracking him to his boyhood friend Howard Waller’s farmhouse in the veldt outside Johannesburg. But Lendrum caught wind of the plan, and, Mundy wrote in Honeyguide, “he slipped away in the gloom” and disappeared. Decades later, Lendrum would claim that the supposed extradition plan was a fiction. “The guy has been reading too many Tom Clancy novels,” he would say.

  Whatever happened, Zimbabwe’s wildlife authorities soon lost interest in Lendrum. His ban from the parks expired after one year, and he began venturing back into the country. Soon he would have a new shopping list of Specially Protected Species and new clients—in the deserts of the Middle East.

  EIGHT THE COLLECTORS

  Andy McWilliam’s transformation into Great Britain’s most prominent wildlife cop was hatched during a stage of profound restlessness. He was forty-one years old, working the night shift and fielding radio calls. While he still enjoyed being out on the streets and keeping connections to the community, he was tired of drug busts, burglaries, and violence, and impatient to try something new. One day, a fellow officer familiar with McWilliam’s love of bird-watching passed to him the name of a thirty-year-old man in Merseyside who was secretly keeping a collection of bird eggs stolen from the wild. McWilliam obtained a search warrant from a West Midlands judge, entered the man’s house, climbed to his attic, and seized three wooden boxes lined with cotton wool and filled with two hundred eggs—many of them from endangered species. The man claimed that he had inherited the collection from his dead brother, and got his mother to vouch for him. McWilliam arrested him anyway. He busted a second egg collector, thanks to a tip from a fellow birder, a few weeks later.

  Shortly after the arrests, McWilliam reached out to Guy Shorrock, the senior investigations officer at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Founded by the animal-rights activist Emily Williamson in Manchester in 1889, the society had begun in protest against the exotic feather trade. The hunt for colorful plumage to meet a new desire for feathered hats among fashion-conscious women in the United States and Europe had devastated the world’s populations of ostriches, parrots, and great crested grebes. Since then, the RSPB had grown into the country’s largest conservation group. It had two million members, owned two hundred nature reserves across Great Britain, and operated from a manor house on a forty-acre estate in the town of Sandy, north of London, that had once belonged to the Peel family—kin of the founder of London’s Metropolitan Police. Shorrock was a member of a small team of full-time bird detectives at the private charity who kept a database on wildlife-crime offenders, and often joined forces with British police to solve bird-related crimes.

  Shorrock was a wiry man with piercing blue eyes and sprinklings of gray-white hair. A biochemistry graduate and former Manchester police officer, he had a passion for chasing down wild-bird launderers; “pigeon fanciers” who poisoned or shot falcons, to stop them from preying on their flying pets; gamekeepers on hunting estates, who also viewed falcons as a threat; and, above all, egg collectors. “Their pointless pursuit of egg shells, for their own personal gratification, made them universally unpopular,” Shorrock wrote in a blog post about a nationwide sweep he’d orchestrated to great public approval. “Each spring it seemed the phone was ringing every weekend with calls from around the country, particularly Scotland, about the sightings of possible suspects and their vehicles or the sad news that yet another nest had been raided.” McWilliam asked Shorrock to keep his eye out for c
ases involving egg collectors in Merseyside.

  As it happened, Shorrock had just opened a file on Dennis Green, a fifty-seven-year-old nature photographer, bird portraitist, and RSPB member, who lived quietly with his elderly mother in Liverpool. Green’s name had turned up in the diary of another collector, and Shorrock suspected that he was hiding a large cache of eggs in his house. In April 1999, McWilliam obtained a search warrant, and he and Shorrock raided Green’s small semi-detached home. A handsome man with bushy eyebrows and long strands of hair flowing from the back of his balding pate, Green first appeared shocked, then stood silently by as the investigators climbed up a narrow flight of stairs into a cramped loft jammed with the trophies of a lifetime of hoarding.

  They sifted through stacks of football programs; moths mounted in display cases; autographs of British football players, television stars, and other celebrities; and taxidermied birds, including such rare species as hen harriers and short-eared owls. Then they began opening dozens of two-by-three-foot plywood boxes, each one screwed shut. Inside, McWilliam and Shorrock discovered hundreds of eggs. Hundreds more lay tucked inside plastic food containers, tins, and a forty-drawer display cabinet in Green’s second-floor bedroom, half obscured behind many more stuffed birds. All told, Green had ninety-nine taxidermied specimens in the two rooms. McWilliam and Shorrock counted more than four thousand eggs—one of the biggest collections ever seized in Great Britain at the time. There were eggs of golden eagles, peregrine falcons, ospreys, and other species listed as “Schedule 1” under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act—birds granted such a high level of protection that even “disturbing” them by approaching their nests is considered a crime. There were only 250 breeding pairs of golden eagles left in the United Kingdom, and McWilliam had found a dozen golden eagle eggs in Green’s home.

  Green insisted that it had all been “a misunderstanding.” The eggs, he assured Shorrock and McWilliam, had been gathered by others before 1954, the year that Great Britain’s Protection of Birds Act first made egg collecting a crime. He presented one thousand data record cards, all dating to the 1920s and 1930s, to support his claim. Analyses in a police lab, however, determined that the cards were forgeries, written by Green in ballpoint and felt-tipped pens, which hadn’t gone on the market until decades later. Scribblings on two osprey eggs in Green’s collection indicated that he had received them “as a gift” in 1991. Suspecting they had been snatched from the wild, Shorrock pored through hundreds of photographs of osprey nests in Scotland snapped that year by volunteer field monitors who kept tabs on eggs and recorded their characteristics in case they should be stolen. Two eggs bore the same unique red markings as the pair in Green’s collection.

  In Liverpool Magistrates Court later that year, Green accused Shorrock and McWilliam of behaving like “Nazi storm troopers” during the raid on his house. Shorrock presented to the magistrate a photo he had taken showing Green, McWilliam, and another police officer laughing over a joke in Green’s living room.

  “They don’t look like Nazis,” said the judge.

  “But that was my nervous laugh,” Green replied.

  Green was found guilty of a dozen offenses, including illegal egg possession and possession of stuffed protected birds without a license. Then, citing Green’s desperate finances—he survived on social welfare payments of £119 a week—the judge waived a fine, sentenced the photographer to a twelve-month conditional discharge—meaning he could avoid a guilty verdict unless he committed another offense within that time period—and confiscated both his egg collection and a handful of taxidermied birds. (Green claimed he had burned the rest of the birds in his garden; four years later he was discovered to have hidden the specimens in the home of a friend.) McWilliam had a T-shirt made up with the photo that Shorrock had taken and Green’s “nervous laugh” quote, and sent the shirt to Shorrock as a souvenir.

  * * *

  Egg collectors hadn’t always had such a dodgy reputation. In 1671, the writer John Evelyn, a contemporary of the famed Restoration-era diarist Samuel Pepys, visited Sir Thomas Browne, a distinguished physician, writer, and antiquary, at his home in Norwich, England. Evelyn remarked with wonder upon “a Cabinet of rarities, & that of the best collection, especially Medails, books, Plants, [and] natural things.” Among Browne’s “curiousities” was one of the world’s first documented egg collections, a display “of the eggs of all foul and birds he could procure, that country (especially the promontorys of Norfolck) being … frequented with—cranes, storkes, eagles etc. and a variety of water-foule.”

  During the Victorian era, oology, as the study of eggs was known, became a distinct branch of ornithology. Wealthy sponsors such as Walter Rothschild, an heir to the Rothschild banking fortune and founder of a natural history museum at Tring, near London, dispatched collectors to sweep up specimens from the Amazon jungle, the Hawaiian Islands, Central Africa, Borneo, and other remote corners of the globe. “Acquisition in the name of national pride, meant that eggs and birds (in the form of study skins and skeletons), were accumulated on an unimaginable scale,” wrote the British ornithologist Tim Birkhead in The Most Perfect Thing (the most perfect thing being, naturally, a bird’s egg).

  Oologists were often celebrated for their feats of bravery in the cause of scientific exploration. Charles Bendire, a German-born US Army officer, who collected eggs while based in a series of western forts after the Civil War, was snatching the egg of a zone-tailed hawk from a cottonwood tree in the Arizona desert in 1872 when Apache warriors on horseback attacked him. He placed the speckled orb between his teeth, shinnied down the tree, and made his escape. “As he rode headlong into camp, gasping and gagging, Bendire discovered that he couldn’t spit the egg out,” according to an admiring biographer. Soldiers pried open his mouth and removed the egg intact, in the process ripping out one of Bendire’s teeth.

  Other collectors lost more than denticulation: John C. Calhoon, from Taunton, Massachusetts, drew breathless newspaper coverage for his pursuit of ravens’ eggs in the cliffs near St. John’s, Newfoundland. “Daring Act of American Ornithologist at Birds Island,” an 1889 headline proclaimed. “He scales Perpendicular Cliff Three Hundred Feet High. Shuddering Fishermen Lean on Their Oars and Witness the Dangerous Ascent.” Two years later, Calhoon’s strength gave out during a climb up from a raven’s nest on those same cliffs, and he fell two hundred feet to his death. Gathering eggs during his Sierra Nevada honeymoon in 1901, Francis J. Britwell was blown from his perch atop a sixty-foot pine tree by a gust of wind, caught his neck in the loop of his safety rope, and strangled to death while his bride watched. Richardson P. Smithwick, the twenty-two-year-old scion of a family of North Carolina egg collectors, was smothered in a sand dune cave-in in southeastern Virginia in 1909 while raiding the nest of a belted kingfisher. The Oologist, a popular magazine for egg collectors in the United States, reported “the sad ending of an active, useful life. Mr. Smithwick was an active young worker in his chosen field of science.”

  A few oologists were, in fact, dedicated scientists: Edgar Chance, a Edwardian-era collector, devoted his life to observing the breeding habits of the common cuckoo and was the first ornithologist to document “brood parasitism”—laying eggs in the nest of another species and tricking the host bird into incubating them as her own. In 1911, three members of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctica expedition trekked seventy miles through blizzards and minus-eighty-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures to collect eggs from an emperor penguin colony. The explorers were out to prove a theory advanced by the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, that the development of an embryo from fertilization to gestation or hatching replicates the evolutionary stages of the same species. (Haeckel believed that grooves in the back of the human embryo’s neck resembled gills, proving that man had a fishlike ancestor.) The Antarctic trio suspected that the penguin embryo would demonstrate that the bird had descended from reptiles. The eggs, alas, proved nothing. Most collectors, however, seemed driven by little more t
han what one Victorian observer called “a passion for beauty and a lust for curiousities.”

  The British curiosity seekers were by far the most prodigious. John Arthington Walpole-Bond, an Edwardian-era collector from Sussex, claimed to have seen in situ, or in their orginal place, the eggs of every species in the British Isles, and amassed a collection well into the thousands. “I have vivid memories of him striding along on the very brink of the Sussex cliffs,” wrote one friend in his 1956 obituary, “and, in a high wind, stopping … to perch himself on the tip of a promontory in order to lean right over and clap his hands in an effort to put out a Peregrine”—that is, frighten the raptor away from the nest in order to seize her eggs. Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, an Oxford-educated minister, had a scar on his forehead from plunging off a cliff in pursuit of an eagle nest. He amassed 17,500 clutches, thought to be the largest collection of eggs in Western Europe. Tim Birkhead, in The Most Perfect Thing, speculates that many of these collectors felt an erotic attraction to their specimens. Cambridge University professor Alfred Newton, according to one contemporary, spent hours “ogling his eggs” and barred women from setting eyes on them. “Perhaps their wonderful curves trigger deep-rooted visual and tactile sensations among men,” wrote Birkhead. “That may also be one reason Fabergé’s eggs are so popular: an expensive nuptial gift that fuses sensuality of form with the ultimate symbol of fertility.”