Newton and his fellow collectors eventually fell out of favor with other ornithologists and the British public. In the years after World War I a consensus was building that egg collecting had negligible scientific value and was threatening to drive some species to extinction. In 1922 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds condemned egg collecting as a “distinct menace” to birds, and the British Ornithological Union, to which Rothschild, Chance, and Jourdain belonged, denounced the practice. The three oologists angrily split from the group and formed the British Oological Association, renamed the Jourdain Society after Jourdain’s death in 1940. Its members gathered over dinners, often in evening dress, to show one another specimens and swap anecdotes about their adventures.
But the collectors were growing increasingly ostracized. “Are we English people so indifferent to the glorious heritage of birds that we will allow the selfish greed of individuals to denude our country of its rare birds?” wrote one enthusiast to The Field, a British ornithological journal, in 1935, reflecting the turning tide of public opinion. In 1952, the Guardian’s country diarist Harry Griffin scorned collectors as “the cloak-and-dagger men of the fells.” Two years later the Protection of Birds Act made oology illegal. Undercover investigators from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds bugged Jourdain members’ hotel rooms and raided their dinners. Chris Mead, senior officer at the British Trust for Ornithology, claimed that the Jourdain Society provided a network for illegal collectors and had become the “pariah of the bird-watching world.”
As a boy in Liverpool in the 1960s, Andy McWilliam had a few schoolmates whose fathers kept egg collections, and some of his friends made forays into the countryside to forage for themselves. But as an understanding of the dangers the hobby posed to nature spread, most collectors found other ways of passing the time. Still, some fanatics refused. After the Jourdain’s secretary, James Whitaker, was found guilty of offenses under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act—and had 148 illegally taken eggs seized (out of a collection numbering 2,895)—one Jourdain member likened the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which had gathered evidence for the arrest, to “little Hitlers.”
* * *
Into the new millennium, hundreds of egg collectors across the British Isles continued to gather specimens on the sly. And Andy McWilliam was becoming one of their principal nemeses. In 2000 he was invited to participate in Operation Easter, a nationwide crackdown launched three years earlier by Guy Shorrock of the RSPB, and the Scottish police, that named 130 egg collectors as top-priority targets. “It’s very rare in the UK to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock in the face of rampant nest robbing, and a man once described by the nature magazine Scottish Field as “Britain’s foremost wildlife detective,” told The New Yorker in 2012. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”
McWilliam began with a network of a dozen miscreants in Merseyside, many of whom ventured together on clandestine egg-hunting expeditions. The first target on his list was Carlton Julian D’Cruze, an unemployed cabinetmaker and longtime acquaintance of Dennis Green’s, who had allegedly raided nests across the United Kingdom for years but had never been caught. Shorrock suspected that D’Cruze was keeping a huge stash of eggs hidden in a safe house somewhere in Liverpool. McWilliam shadowed D’Cruze, a moon-faced man with a shaved head and thin mustache and goatee. One evening he spotted the pickup truck of another Operation Easter suspect in D’Cruze’s driveway. An inflatable dinghy lay in the truck bed. McWilliam was certain that they were preparing to drive to northern Scotland, one of D’Cruze’s favorite nest-raiding spots. McWilliam accosted the men as they emerged from the house, but he had no evidence of a crime. The men grinned tauntingly as they drove off—but McWilliam may have had the last laugh. “I heard that when they reached wherever they were going, they couldn’t blow up the dinghy because somebody had punctured it,” McWilliam says coyly. “You can read into that whatever you want.”
Soon after the driveway encounter, an informant told McWilliam that D’Cruze had moved—and had probably transferred his egg collection to his new residence. McWilliam obtained the address, secured a search warrant, and knocked on the front door. He waited, then knocked again. When a neighbor told McWilliam that D’Cruze was at home, the policeman kicked the door down and charged inside. McWilliam found D’Cruze on his knees in the second-floor bathroom, clad only in his underwear. He was frantically crushing eggs, tearing up data cards, and trying to flush the pieces down the toilet.
When Shorrock arrived from D’Cruze’s mother’s house—a second search warrant hadn’t turned up anything—he shut off the water supply, took apart the toilet, and recovered the shredded note cards and egg fragments, which he laid out to dry. In the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ laboratory outside London, Shorrock and other experts reassembled 138 eggs of peregrines, sea eagles, and ospreys. “We laid them out like a macabre jigsaw puzzle,” he says.
They also had other evidence: McWilliam had seized 355 intact eggs that D’Cruze hadn’t had time to crush and flush. D’Cruze pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail, making him only the second egg collector ever to serve time for his crime. In 2000 Parliament had amended the Wildlife and Countryside Act with the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, making egg collection punishable by a six-month jail term. Up until then, egg collectors could receive only a fine of £5,000 per egg, or about $7,500 at the time of the amendment. The highest penalty ever assessed had been £90,000, approximately $120,000, levied against Jamie and Lee McLaren, two brothers known to investigators as the “Abbott and Costello” of egg collecting, who had videotaped each other stealing seabird eggs in northern England.
* * *
After the D’Cruze conviction in 2002, the World Wildlife Fund honored McWilliam as its UK Law Enforcer of the Year. By now, with his supervisor’s approval, McWilliam had scaled back his normal police duties and was taking on more and more wildlife-crime-related cases—investigations that nobody else in the department seemed to want and that often took him to far-flung corners of Merseyside. He cultivated informants in the underworld of badger baiters, who use dogs to corner and kill the burrowing omnivores for sport. He raided farms, served search warrants, seized graphic videos, and collected badger-blood splatter on clothing and in cars. The evidence he gathered helped to convict several notorious “terrier men,” as the badger baiters call themselves, of animal cruelty under the Protection of Badgers Act of 1992. Some of the investigations he found hard to forget. McWilliam and his partner Steve Harris once raided the home of a suspected badger baiter near Liverpool, and found backyard kennels filled with dogs that had suffered terrible injuries—one with no nose, another missing its lower jaw—from savagely fighting the sharp-toothed burrowers.
Further searching turned up stacks of brochures in the backseat of the suspect’s four-by-four, advertising free pest-extermination services. “I pass the brochures out in the countryside to people who have a fox problem,” the man told the officers after his arrest. Foxes in rural areas often carry off poultry, piglets, lambs, and household pets, and can spread rabies, prompting farmers to hire pest control services to shoot them.
“Why don’t you charge your clients a fee?” asked Harris.
“Because,” the man replied calmly, “I fucking love killing animals.”
Responding to complaints from animal welfare groups, McWilliam investigated the Southport Zoo, a decrepit Merseyside facility located beside the Pleasureland amusement park. He found wild cats—ocelots, servals, and snow leopards—pacing agitatedly in their enclosures next to a rickety wooden roller coaster, with carriages that clattered along the track every four minutes for ten hours a day during the summer. A solitary lioness spent most of her days confined in an indoor cell, while a pair of chimpanzee brothers lived separated and alone in barren, filthy cages. Disturbed by what he’d seen,
McWilliam looked for a way to shut down the facility. In the end, he busted the owners for thirteen violations of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species import regulations. The owners pled guilty, and authorities closed the zoo. To his discomfort, however, McWilliam “became a bit of a hero” to the animal rights protesters who’d demonstrated outside the zoo on weekends and bank holidays. “I wanted to distance myself from them,” he recalls. He was a police officer, not an activist.
He investigated two real estate developers who had secretly dug up the riverside burrows of the water vole, a semi-aquatic rodent regarded as one of England’s most endangered animals, to construct a drainage ditch for a housing complex. Relying on the account of a ninety-five-year-old witness who lived beside the reserve, McWilliam threatened the developers with arrest if they didn’t come clean. In the end, McWilliam had them prosecuted for the reckless disturbance of a protected species, and they paid a significant fine. He carried out a sting operation on a local taxidermist who advertised stuffed rare birds and mammals in the classifieds of a Merseyside paper. Posing as a customer, he called the man. “Don’t you need a CITES permit for that?” he asked, referring to the export and import documents issued by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. “Nobody ever checks,” the taxidermist replied. McWilliam made an appointment, brought along a search warrant, and arrested the man for import violations.
But it was the egg collectors who dominated his caseload. Working closely with Guy Shorrock from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, he deciphered encrypted notes and matched handwritten records to the bird charity’s database of nest robberies, discrediting collectors’ claims that they had acquired their collection at a garage sale or inherited it from family members. “The collectors couldn’t bullshit him,” says Steve Harris, who worked with McWilliam on many bird crime cases. McWilliam pored through eBay and other websites looking for suspicious purchases. One Liverpudlian had ordered large quantities of Bubble Wrap, plastic containers, egg box foam, and specialty books off the Internet; McWilliam got a search warrant while the suspect was out of the country, and found an egg-blowing kit—tiny files, drills, and pipettes—in his desk drawer and a thousand eggs in a specimen cabinet. He arrested him as soon as he returned to England.
He developed a network of tipsters, often cultivating the collectors’ ex-girlfriends or collectors who had quarreled with their rivals. “Andy was a no-nonsense, old-fashioned bobby,” said Shorrock. “He understood police work, he understood people.” And he was discovering a web of hidden relationships. McWilliam turned up handwritten notes in D’Cruze’s house that contained coded references to one Anthony Higham, a thirty-nine-year-old printing firm manager who had apparently been raiding nests across Great Britain. A source directed McWilliam to the likely location of Higham’s collection: the home of an elderly woman who was a neighbor of Higham’s ex-girlfriend. McWilliam obtained another search warrant, and knocked on the woman’s door.
“Has Mr. Higham asked you to hide anything in your loft?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, nervously.
She has “Yes” on her face, McWilliam thought.
McWilliam entered the house and, in a now-familiar routine, climbed to the attic and found boxes containing one thousand eggs, along with diaries and photographs documenting Higham’s exploits. Higham had befriended the woman over several months and had asked her politely to store his cartons while being hazy on the details; she’d had no idea what was concealed inside them. After McWilliam arrested him, Higham, a broad-shouldered, clean-shaven man with trimmed blond hair and the slightly sagging physique of a former athlete, surrendered hundreds more eggs from another stash, including many from peregrines, ospreys, and golden eagles. As he handed them over, Higham looked at McWilliam wistfully. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.
* * *
McWilliam struggled to understand the obsession. “It’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” he would tell Timothy Wheeler for the 2015 documentary Poached, which followed the lives of several egg collectors targeted by Operation Easter. “They blow the contents of the egg out and they keep a small piece of calcium which they can’t put on display anywhere. They hide it away, and it’s a mystery to me what they get out of it.”
Some collectors had even narrowed their obsessions to a single species. D’Cruze focused compulsively on the chough, a crow-like bird found in Wales and Cornwall that lays cream-colored eggs with red markings, five to a clutch, on cliff ledges often hundreds of feet off the ground. Enticed by the nest sites’ inaccessibility, D’Cruze had stolen twenty-eight chough clutches in his career. He had even written a lengthy manuscript about the eggs for a caliologists’ series published by Oriel Stringer books, produced mostly by egg collectors for the benefit of other collectors and filled with clues about where to find nest sites. (Caliology is the study of bird’s nests.) One book in the series, The Osprey by W. Pearson, guides collectors to eighty nesting sites in Great Britain, providing grid references and markers such as dead pine trees, Victorian-era monuments, and lochs. Pearson notes in his introduction that “the pseudo-protectionists were up in arms” after the publication of the series’ first book, and “one society for the protection of birds tried to get a High Court injunction to get the book banned.” The attempt failed.
Another collector McWilliam arrested had made his life’s quest the tree pipit, a small songbird that lays its four to eight eggs in a ground nest, concealed in deep woodland or scrub. The man looked down on collectors who raided the nests of eagles and other raptors, he told McWilliam, because they were so large and conspicuous and, in his view, didn’t present much of a challenge.
Anthony Higham admitted that he was “obsessed with the peregrine,” while Derek Lee, a Manchester man whom McWilliam arrested in 2004, started at age sixteen and was led to increasingly rare specimens. Beginning with blackbirds and song thrushes, “I traveled elsewhere to pick up a kestrel or sparrowhawk egg,” he told the Guardian in 2006. “Then the next challenge was the buzzard. Eventually I came across peregrines and red kites.” The most tantalizing prize for many collectors, according to Guy Shorrock, is the egg of the greenshank, a large sandpiper with long green legs and gray plumage that inhabits the remote wetlands of northern Scotland. Laid in clutches of four in a depression in the ground and usually concealed among lichen, dwarf shrubs, and pine needles, the greenshank egg is almost impossible to find and represents, Shorrock says, “the pinnacle of egg collecting.”
McWilliam noticed other common traits among the collectors. Several men styled themselves after their forerunners of a bygone age, back when oology was a respected pursuit. McWilliam found a handwritten thesaurus in D’Cruze’s bedroom filled with turn-of-the-century terms that he used to make his diaries sound more like those of his Jourdain Society heroes. Higham fitted his home office with Victorian furniture, and, using John Walpole-Bond’s diaries, retraced the famed collector’s routes through the remote glens of northern Scotland. Higham undertook thirty-six treks, discovering sixty nests in many of the same spots where Walpole-Bond had found his. Matthew Gonshaw, among the most notorious egg collectors in British history, kept a photograph in his bedroom of Walpole-Bond. “In memory of Jock—The Man,” Gonshaw had written on it, referring to Walpole-Bond by his nickname. In his long career, Gonshaw stole thousands of eggs, went to jail repeatedly, and was banned from Scotland for life.
All of the collectors relished the physical risks: the dangerous rappels down rock faces, the scrambles up trees, the crossings of turbulent waters. Climbing for peregrine eggs in a rock quarry in northern Wales in 1991, Higham had watched his partner, Dennis Hughes, slip and fall dozens of feet to his death. Instead of being traumatized by the accident, he wrote in his diary, “I was well and truly hooked.” Higham came close to dying, too, after capsizing his dinghy while rowing to an island in a frigid loch. D’Cruze nearly froze to death one winter, he told McWill
iam, while hunting for nests in northern Scotland and losing his way in the wilderness. Colin Watson, a maintenance man described in the media as “Britain’s most ruthless egg collector,” tumbled off a forty-foot larch tree in Yorkshire one May morning in 2006 while trying to raid a sparrow hawk nest. He suffered massive injuries and died at the scene. “Nest in Peace,” declared the headline in the London Daily Mirror.
For many collectors, the cat-and-mouse game with the authorities was equally thrilling. Derek Lee posed as a bird-watcher and gleefully duped unsuspecting park rangers into leading him to nests. D’Cruze wrote field notes and letters filled with coded references to accomplices—one was “86,” another “15”—and kept them in an envelope labeled “top secret.” Several collectors whom McWilliam arrested had developed clever subterfuges, burying their caches in the ground or stashing them in the hollows of trees, then returning in the off-season to retrieve them, after the rangers and RSPB nest watchers had left. One of McWilliam’s wildlife police colleagues arrested a master carpenter in Norfolk who had constructed secret compartments throughout his mobile home—hollow storage areas built inside seats and sofas, in which he had secreted thousands of eggs. Matthew Gonshaw hid the most prized eggs in his collection inside a hollowed-out bed frame.
The most exciting moment invariably came when the collector at last approached the object of desire. “The sight which met my eyes is one I shall treasure,” wrote Higham about his first climb to a nest of osprey eggs, in 1992. As the female osprey flew off, “shouting” in agitation, Higham moved in. “Three richly marked eggs bedded in a cup of damp moss were visible in the twilight,” he wrote. “I packed them into my gloves, then into my hat, carrying my haul in my teeth.” In 1997 D’Cruze attempted to rob the nest of a white-tailed sea eagle, a large raptor that had been wiped out in Great Britain by hunters in the early twentieth century. An RSPB program had recently reintroduced a dozen breeding pairs to Scotland. D’Cruze traveled with an accomplice to the remote Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, where a few pairs had taken up residence. “My body felt cold as there was quite a chill, so W and myself set a steady pace along the track towards the loch,” began the harrowing account in his diary:
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