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In 1968, Great Britain, after 150 years of controlling the armies and foreign policy of seven coastal sheikhdoms at the southeast end of the Arabian Peninsula, announced that it was granting them complete independence. Weeks later, at a desert oasis, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, met with the leader of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, and agreed to try to unite the sheikhdoms into a new federation. On December 2, 1971, Abu Dhabi and Dubai joined Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, and Fujairah in creating the United Arab Emirates. (The seventh sheikhdom, Ras Al Khaimah, joined a year later.) The UAE would be a constitutional monarchy, with laws enacted by a Federal Supreme Council made up of the seven dynastic rulers of the individual emirates. Whoever was the sheikh of Abu Dhabi would serve as president; the sheikh of Dubai would be prime minister.
Sheikh Zayed, a powerfully built figure with a lean and weather-beaten face and a sternly charismatic presence, became the United Arab Emirates’ first ruler. An ardent falconer, he considered the sport an essential part of the new nation’s cultural identity, and set out to introduce captive breeding to the Arabian Peninsula by luring Western experts to run the programs. In the mid-1970s, Sheikh Zayed invited a prominent English falconer named Roger Upton to join him on a hunt in the Arabian Desert. The pair rode camels in a wilderness area about an hour from Abu Dhabi, then a small town on an island in the Persian Gulf; with half a dozen falcons, they brought down bustards throughout the day. Upton and Sheikh Zayed became close friends, and Upton stayed on to breed falcons for him.
Then, in the late 1980s, in a turn of events that would prove fateful for Jeffrey Lendrum, Howard Waller, Lendrum’s boyhood companion (no relation to Renz Waller), who was then breeding falcons commercially in South Africa, heard through friends about potentially lucrative falcon-related opportunities in the United Arab Emirates. Waller had begun hunting with falcons and hawks as a boy in Bulawayo. “I remember being nine years old and walking down a dirt road when a sparrow hawk came up and caught a small bird right in front of me,” Waller would recall. “I thought, ‘Wow,’ and that’s where it started.” (Falcons, belonging to the falco genus, are long-winged birds that hunt in open areas and kill their prey with their curved, notched beaks; hawks, which belong to the accipiter genus, have shorter, rounded wings and hunt in woodlands, seizing their quarry with their talons.) Lendrum would say years later that his initial encounters with Waller, who had been a part of the same adolescent gang of wildlife enthusiasts, had not been auspicious. “We actually hated each other at first,” Lendrum would recall. “I thought he was a bit of a know-it-all, and I suppose I was a know-it-all, but eventually we became friends.”
Around 1988, Waller was invited to visit a new breeding program that a Canadian former colleague had started in Dubai. When Waller arrived, captive breeding programs were still trying to get off the ground, and wealthy Arabs remained dependent on wild falcons for hunting. Smugglers brought birds overland through Pakistan or Iran, and then ferried them across the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian Peninsula. Waller ventured into the Arabian Desert during the annual bird migration, and encountered trappers hiding among the dunes. But bird populations in Europe had thinned over the past decades, largely because of rampant poaching in the Balkans and other countries directly on the southern migration route; fewer raptors were flying over the desert. And the Emirates had become a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. The government announced its intention to crack down on wild taking, and many falconers agreed to play by the new rules.
In Dubai, Waller was later introduced to Sheikh Butti bin Juma Al Maktoum, an insurance and construction magnate then in his thirties, and a dedicated falconer and conservationist. An intense, energetic, and deeply knowledgeable figure with an aquiline nose, arched brows, and a trim mustache, Sheikh Butti was also the first cousin of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s crown prince. Impressed by the Al Maktoum family’s wealth, and by their devotion to falconry, Waller recognized a unique opportunity. “I said that I’d like to come out and start breeding for [Butti],” Waller says, “and he said yes.”
Soon Waller, who was married, with two young children, opened falcon pens at Sheikh Butti’s desert palace, on the edge of an eighty-seven-square mile camel farm that Butti’s cousin, Sheikh Mohammed, would later purchase and turn into a wildlife refuge called the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve. Waller was on his way to becoming one of the most successful breeders in the Emirates—and the world.
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Waller’s move to Dubai came at a time when falconry on the Arabian Peninsula was running up against the consequences of environmental recklessness. For centuries falconers had hunted, without limit, the Arabian Desert’s population of houbara bustards (Chlamydotis undulata), ungainly turkey-sized birds known for flamboyantly flaring their white chest feathers, running around in circles at high speed, and emitting booming calls to impress a potential mate. When under attack, they vomit a slimy secretion that can paralyze a bird of prey. British travel writer Wilfred Thesiger had seen bustards everywhere during a hunting trip he took with Sheikh Zayed, already the ruler of Abu Dhabi, in the desert dunes of the Empty Quarter during the winter of 1949. In his book Arabian Sands, Thesiger captured the excitement of that hunt and of the battle to the death between pursuer and quarry that had transfixed Bedouin for millennia. “Suddenly an Arab on the left of the line signaled to us that he had found fresh tracks,” he wrote:
A falconer unhooded his bird and raised it in the air, then it was off flying a few feet above the ground; the bustard was climbing now but the peregrine was fast overhauling it … then someone shouted, “it’s down!” and we were racing across the sands … We came upon the peregrine in a hollow, plucking at the lifeless bustard—Zayid pointed to some oily splashes on the ground and said, “Do you see that muck? The hubara squirts it at its attacker. If it gets into the shahin’s eyes it blinds it temporarily. Anyway if it gets on to its feathers it makes a filthy mess of them, and you cannot use the bird again that day.”
A decade or so later, Sheikh Butti, his father, and other members of the royal family of Dubai would take four-wheel-drive vehicles down sand tracks in the Arabian Desert and use falcons and salukis (hunting dogs also known as African greyhounds) to hunt for hares, bustards, kairowans (mid-sized birds), wolves, and rheem gazelles (miniature antelopes that stand only two and a half feet tall). “What I remember most is the fact that other than our vehicles there were no other car tracks in the desert. It was pristine,” Sheikh Butti said in a 2011 interview with Wildlife Middle East. In this world of harsh sunlight and heavy silences, he recalled collecting truffles in the desert in February following drenching autumnal rains, and getting lost at night “and being navigated by an old Bedouin who took us safely out using only his knowledge of the vegetation and the wind direction pattern of the dunes.”
But the landscape of Dubai was already changing. Sheikh Butti’s uncle, Sheikh Rashid bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, a semiliterate visionary who spoke only Arabic and displayed the ascetic habits of his Bedouin ancestors, ordered Dubai’s creek dredged in 1961, making the city the most accessible port in the Middle East. He brought electricity, running water, and telephones, built the first luxury hotels and dry docks, and turned Dubai into an international shipping center. The Al Maktoum family continued to build over the next four decades, expanding the airport and transforming Dubai into a giant shopping arcade and tourist magnet. They financed ambitious construction projects such as Dubai Internet City, a sleek campus of low-slung glass-and-concrete buildings and palm-fringed lawns with 1.5 million square feet of commercial office space designated for high-tech companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, and the Burj Al Arab, a 590-foot-high, sail-shaped hotel on an artificial island in the Persian Gulf. The building boom ripped up the desert and depleted the bustards’ habitat. Thousands of workers “would go out onto the huge gravel plains, collect rocks,
clean them, and load them onto trucks,” remembered Howard Waller, who had watched the desert be torn up to supply building materials for the expanding municipality. “Amongst the rocks were the beetles, lizards, and other prey which the bustards had fed on.” Four-wheel-drive vehicles had already replaced camels, allowing hunters to travel longer distances, and now the Arabs used shotguns as well as falcons to hunt down bustards in their increasingly constricted territory. Before long, hunters would wipe out the bustard on the Arabian Peninsula.
The billionaire sheikhs of the Emirates, Qatar, and other Arab countries, faced with the disappearance of their favorite prey, began to look for hunting opportunities overseas. The Al Nahyans, the Al Maktoums, and other wealthy Arabs leased vast tracts of desert in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, and other countries that still had healthy houbara bustard populations. Every fall they packed hundreds of falcons onto private jets and then spent a week or more hunting from mobile tent camps in the bush, preparing feasts each night with the prey that their falcons had killed. These lavish seven- or even ten-day expeditions, usually involving a caravan of four-by-fours and dozens of falconers, veterinarians, drivers, cooks, and other support staff, fueled a sense of competition as well as camaraderie among the sheikhs. It helped feed the demand for ever bigger, faster, and more powerful falcons.
By the new millennium, these trips would become shadowed by legitimate concerns from conservation groups that argued they were threatening the houbara bustard with global extinction. One Saudi prince’s party reportedly killed twelve hundred bustards during a weeklong falcon hunt in Pakistan—where the birds migrate during the late fall and winter breeding season—despite having a permit to kill just one hundred. (In 2015, Pakistan’s Supreme Court would rule that no further hunting licenses for bustards could be issued.) For the most part, however, “They don’t care in these places,” I was told by one trainer who hunts in Uzbekistan every October and in Algeria in November with Dubai’s crown prince, Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and his father, Sheikh Mohammed, who became Dubai’s ruler in 2006. The hunts also channel millions of dollars into unstable areas, something that would have calamitous consequences in November 2015, when a heavily armed, Iran-backed Shia militia would seize twenty-six members of a Qatari royal hunting party in Iraq’s southern desert. Only after sixteen months of negotiations and a ransom payment of $1 billion were the royals released.
The increasing sensitivity to environmental protection, along with fears of a scenario like the Iraq kidnapping, were among the reasons that Crown Prince Hamdan would introduce falcon racing to the Emirates.
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In the early 1980s, in his search for bigger, more powerful, and more beautiful birds, Sheikh Butti became one of the first Arabs to import a gyrfalcon to the Middle East. The world’s largest species of falcon—and “a killing machine without equal,” as the British falconer Emma Ford wrote in a 1999 book on the birds—gyrfalcons almost exclusively inhabit zones of ice floes and frozen tundra, stretching from Alaska and northern Canada through Greenland, Norway, and Lapland, to Siberia. Viking settlers in northern Scotland called them “geirfugel,” from the epithet geir, meaning “spear.” The scientific name is Falco rusticolus, or “country dweller.” Roosting in rock crevices sheltered from blizzards and gale-force winds, they can survive for weeks on icebergs in the open ocean and circle the skies for hours in search of prey—including lemmings, voles, seabirds, and ptarmigans (game birds of the grouse family). Powerful musculature and circulatory and respiratory systems as hyperefficient as those of the peregrine falcon allow the raptors to outlast their quarry in exhausting horizontal pursuits or dive-bomb them like a missile. T. Edward Nickens described the gyrfalcon in Audubon magazine as “a predatorial mash-up of Muhammad Ali and Floyd Mayweather, speedy and large enough to kill a fleeing Pin-tailed Duck in midair but agile enough to snatch a Lapland Longspur off a tundra tussock.”
Beginning in the medieval era, trappers embarked on expeditions to the Arctic to bring back gyrfalcons for European and Mongolian monarchs. These journeys, writes Ford, “required such courage and single-mindedness that they beggar belief.” Many trappers froze to death, while others disappeared forever into glacial crevasses or tumbled fatally off cliffs. For the nobility, gyrfalcons—and white gyrfalcons in particular—became unsurpassed symbols of wealth and prestige. In 1396, Turkish soldiers captured Jean de Nevers, the future Duke of Burgundy, during the Battle of Nicopolis in Greece; the Ottoman Sultan refused increasing offers of ransom, setting de Nevers free only after he agreed to hand over the ultimate prize: twelve white gyrs. Ivan the Terrible, the Russian czar, dispached his first envoy to England in 1550 with “a large and faire white Jewrfawcan” as a gift to Henry VIII’s daughter, the future Elizabeth I. And in the mid–nineteenth century, Husan-Dawlah Mirza, a claimant to the Persian throne, wrote about a white gyrfalcon that had been brought from Russia and presented to his father, the Shah. Kept on a damp bed of pebbles and sand near Tehran, “she feels the heat greatly,” Mirza observed, “so that she has to be well supplied with ice and snow.” He watched with awe each time the gyrfalcon was sent out to hunt and dived headlong to earth in pursuit of her prey. “All I know,” he declared, “is that neither I, nor has the oldest falconer of Persia, ever seen a falcon like it.”
Butti’s pure white gyrfalcon dazzled everyone in the sheikh’s circle. But almost all feared that the bird—which he had obtained from a breeder in Germany—would drop dead of exhaustion in the desert heat, or succumb to local pathogens. Not to mention that no one had the skills to train it. But under Sheikh Butti’s intuitive and attentive care, the gyrfalcon, named Hasheem (“Generosity”), became a skilled hunter—its talents easily visible during the sheikh’s early-morning training sessions in the desert and on his annual fall hunts overseas. Emma Ford’s Gyrfalcon, the classic text about the raptor, contains a photo of Sheikh Butti proudly holding a huge gyr on his manqalah, a muff-like cylinder of canvas or carpet, worn on the falconer’s wrist instead of a glove. Members of Sheikh Butti’s circle, as well as other enthusiasts on the Arabian Peninsula, began to import gyrfalcons, too.
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Howard Waller’s setup in Dubai exceeded anything he could have imagined back in South Africa. He established his base on the palace’s expansive grounds, a serene retreat one hour east of central Dubai that offered views of the urban skyline on clear mornings. He’d venture into the desert before dawn to observe the training of the birds, sharing observations with Sheikh Butti about falcon lineages, injuries, past performances, and horizontal and vertical speeds. His employer would become a confidant and a soul mate. “Almost like a long-married couple, they eagerly anticipate each other’s answers and communicate using a shorthand inscrutable to nearly everyone else,” wrote Peter Gwin in an October 2018 profile of the two falconers in National Geographic: “ ‘The gray whose father was the one we hunted with two years ago… . The gyr with the broken tail feather that we fixed.’ ” Waller could often be found on the palace grounds alone or with the sheikh, inspecting the aviaries that were home to several hundred falcons or visiting the kitchens where butchers prepared hundreds of quail and pigeons for daily feedings.
Encouraged by the sheikh, Waller introduced gyrfalcons to his breeding pens—purchased, he says, legally in the United States. From them he bred both pure gyrs and hybrids that, it was hoped, would combine the strongest qualities of different species. He crossed gyrfalcons with saker falcons (Falco cherrug), hardy flyers that are born and fledge in the arid zones of Mongolia and Central Asia, to create “turbo sakers”—big, fast-diving birds that thrive in a desert climate and are more aggressive than pure sakers. He also crossbred gyrfalcons and peregrines, which proved equally popular with Arab hunters. Over time Waller and Sheikh Butti would put together what the National Geographic described as “arguably … one of the most exquisite collections of falcons ever assembled.”
To get their birds to b
uild up wing strength, Waller and Sheikh Butti introduced “hack pens” to Dubai—enormous indoor bird gymnasiums—and equipped them with multimillion-dollar air-conditioning systems so that the birds wouldn’t be exposed to the 130-degree summer heat. To keep his gyrfalcons healthy during the molting season that typically lasts from March until the end of September, when the Arctic birds shed their forty-four wing and twelve tail feathers and grow new ones, and are especially sensitive to desert temperatures, Waller introduced air-conditioned “moulting chambers,” which led to higher survival rates and became a standard for raising gyrs in the Middle East.
When the birds got sick, they were taken to a falcon hospital in Dubai built by one of Sheikh Butti’s uncles. The facility had dozens of air-conditioned rooms, an intensive care unit and an opthalmology department, the latest model X-ray machines, heart monitors and endoscopy instruments, a full range of antibiotics and other drugs, and a team of international veterinarians who treated everything from aspergillosis (a lung infection caused by a fungus) to bumblefoot (a bacterial disease causing lesions of the spurs of the feet) to damaged feathers.
Back in Sheikh Butti’s desert palace, Waller was also conducting research into artifical insemination. From the time the chicks were just a few days old, he spent hours each day with his baby males in their breeding pens, talking to them, singing to them, playing with them, and eventually inducing them to regard him as a sexual partner. (Birds don’t instinctively identify with their own species upon hatching, and can be taught to bond sexually with a human—a process known as “imprinting”—rather than another bird.) Waller would wear a tight-fitting hat resembling a honeycomb that the copulating male—known as a “hat bird”—would leap on top of, ejaculating into a hole. Waller would then collect the semen in a capillary tube and drop the liquid into a female.
The Falcon Thief Page 13
