During the breeding season that runs from March to May, when lengthening days and warmer temperatures trigger the hormonal changes that initiate the reproductive cycle, egg cells grow, and pass down to the mouth of the female’s oviduct, awaiting fertilization. “I put my hands on her back, she lifts her back up, I bend her tail to the side, and I slip the semen into her cloaca,” the bird’s reproductive orifice, Waller explained to me. Waller and I were speaking in Inverness, Scotland, where Sheikh Butti had moved the bulk of his breeding operations in 2013; raptors breed more easily in a cold and windy climate. Waller now spends most of the year on the windswept, rocky moor with his second wife and their two children. “If the female is sucking [the semen] in well, chances are very good that it will fertilize the egg.” The egg then condenses into a protective but permeable layer of calcium surrounding a yolk, which will develop into a chick in about a month. Most breeders have one or two reliable semen producers; Waller always had more than a dozen—and dozens of breeding females.
As Waller had discovered, artificial insemination was the only way to create hybrids because, as with almost all birds, interspecies mating among peregrines, sakers, and gyrfalcons is extremely rare in the wild. (One 1963 study estimated that only one in fifty thousand wild birds is a hybrid.) Insemination was also the only effective method to bring together the sperm and ova of desirable birds of the same species that didn’t get along. “You can’t just put a male and female together and say they’re going to breed,” Waller explained. “Falcons are like humans, they fall in love.” Incubating the eggs proved to be another challenge. Natural hatching is impossible for falcons in the desert, because the females refuse to sit on their eggs in an inhospitable and unfamiliar environment. But incubating artificially requires constant monitoring: tracking weight reduction due to water loss, maintaining the exact ambient temperature to keep the developing embryo warm … Waller estimated his hatch rate from incubators in the early days was far below 50 percent, although that improved over the years.
Waller and Sheikh Butti boasted that their prolific production of captive-bred falcons was benefiting global conservation by eliminating the need for wild taking. “I am a falconer, but my desire is to protect the wild populations of falcons,” Butti declared in a 2011 interview. He gave away falcons to family members and close friends, and maintained a loyal clientele of affluent Emirati enthusiasts. “The local falconers are very happy with the hunting quality of the birds I produce,” he said.
Sheikh Butti’s reputation as a wildlife conservationist preceded him. In the 1990s he’d opened the Sheikh Butti bin Juma Al Maktoum Wildlife Centre, a thirty-seven-acre walled zoo in the center of Dubai where he bred endangered animals. The project was the consummation of a fascination with animal husbandry that had begun when he was five years old and his father brought home baby hares, hedgehogs, and gazelles to live in the family compound in Jumeirah, a wealthy seaside neighborhood in Dubai. “There was one mountain gazelle I remember in particular that had been hand-reared and would follow us around the garden,” Butti recalled.
In his zoo, he resuscitated species that had nearly vanished from the Arabian Peninsula—the Arabian oryx, the sand gazelle, the Rüppell’s fox—as well as threatened African species, such as the black hippotragus, Cape giraffe, gerenuk (a long- necked antelope found in Somalia and other arid zones of the Horn of Africa), Speke’s gazelle, bontebok (a medium-sized, brown antelope indigenous to Southern Africa), and Grant’s gazelle. Butti’s desert palace had a large aviary with doves, Somali guinea fowl, gray-crowned cranes, 250 flamingos, and (Butti’s special pride) northern bald ibises—magnificently ungainly specimens listed by conservation groups as “critically endangered,” with ruffled black feathers, a bare red face, and a long, curved red bill. Sheikh Butti even reared a female cheetah that he mated with a male from a wildlife center in the Emirate of Sharjah. The pair produced six cubs, the first cheetahs born in the Arabian Peninsula in decades.
But his main passion was falcons.
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In the late 1990s, just as AfricaXtreme was getting off the ground, Waller invited Jeffrey Lendrum to come visit him at Sheikh Butti’s desert palace. The friends had remained close in Lendrum’s early years in South Africa, but had fallen out of touch during the mid-1990s. Lendrum was busy with his spare-parts trafficking schemes and Waller was dealing with some personal trouble. “Howard and his wife were going through a divorce, and I had kept out of the way,” Lendrum would say. Now Waller missed his old shamwari.
Lendrum was impressed by the opulence of the palace, the attention lavished on the falcons, and his friend’s success.Waller introduced Lendrum to Sheikh Butti—whom Lendrum would describe blandly as “a very nice guy”—and took him to see the Al Maktoums’ veterinary hospital. But he laid down one strict rule: Lendrum could not accompany him as he collected semen in the breeding pens. “The birds would get stressed if they saw a stranger,” Lendrum would recall. “Howard was the only one allowed in.” When Lendrum returned to South Africa, he gushed to Mullin that “you wouldn’t believe the job that Howard has.” The medical care for falcons in Dubai was better than that available to humans, he said, and the hack pens on Sheikh Butti’s property were “the size of three football fields.”
One day, Lendrum alleges, Waller took him aside and made a stunning proposal: he asked Lendrum to work for him as a trapper in the wilderness. With his skill as a climber and his experience moving goods across borders, Lendrum would be the ideal partner in a covert plan to strengthen his stable with feral birds. Waller wanted Lendrum to provide wild falcon eggs, rather than live birds, Lendrum says, because they could be carried across borders undetected.
Lendrum claims he told Waller that it wasn’t a promising idea. “It’s ninety-nine percent unlikely that it would work,” is the way that Lendrum says he put it. The length of time the eggs would be out of the nest—dozens of hours from door to door—“was just too long.” He would have to keep the eggs warm, probably by wearing them strapped to his body, which just wasn’t practical. And he questioned why Waller would need wild raptor eggs anyway, given the number of captive-bred chicks he was producing each season. “The time I went there, there were about one hundred babies,” he would say. “What the hell was he going to do with one hundred babies?” After this discussion, Lendrum says Waller dropped the subject.
Years later Waller would not deny that such a conversation took place, but he described it as idle chatter. “Lendrum and I may have discussed the idea, or Lendrum may have come to me with it, but nothing ever happened,” Waller would insist. Lendrum returned to South Africa, and they remained in periodic touch.
* * *
Lendrum and Waller would hardly have been the first Western birders to contemplate conducting sketchy business in the Middle East. In 1981, a few years after new regulations in the United States and Canada banned trapping and trading birds of prey, the US Fish and Wildlife Service recruited John Jeffrey McPartlin, a hunter, falconer, and convicted wild bird dealer from Great Falls, Montana, to assist them in a sting called Operation Falcon. It was the first attempt by law enforcement authorities to prove that a raptor underground linked Western smugglers with wealthy clients in the Middle East. After a three-year investigation, three hundred federal, state, and provincial agents swooped down on falconers and breeders in fourteen states and four Canadian provinces who had purchased wild gyrfalcons from McPartlin. Thirty people were arrested, dozens more interrogated, and one hundred birds seized. Fish and Wildlife Service agents claimed that the royal family of Saudi Arabia had acquired wild birds of prey illegally from some of these individuals, and might have used diplomatic privileges to sneak the birds past customs.
But although Operation Falcon officers described a “worldwide, multi-million dollar illegal black market in birds of prey,” the sting failed to pin down anything concrete. (The only organization conclusively determined to have been involved in the trapping and selling of wild falcons was the Fish
and Wildlife Service, which had permitted the seizure of fifty gyrfalcons from the wild to use in the sting operation.) The Saudi Arabian suspects hired a Washington, DC, lawyer who vigorously denied all the allegations. In the end, no Saudis were convicted of crimes, most buyers pleaded guilty only to misdemeanors, and Operation Falcon was widely attacked as a waste of government resources. One defense attorney claimed that McPartlin’s sting was a classic case of entrapment. Offering to sell breeders pure white gyrfalcons was “like having someone bring Marilyn Monroe by and asking if she can spend the night,” he said.
Nearly a decade after Operation Falcon, an investigative series on the British ITV nework aired “The Bird Bandits,” a half-hour exposé of the Arab connection. The host, Roger Cook, promised to provide “evidence of an organized and vastly profitable trade in endangered birds of prey.” Guided by an investigator from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Cook’s producer staked out a peregrine nest in northern Scotland, and caught on camera an egg thief, Steven McDonald, rappelling down a rock face and making off with a clutch. Cook dressed up as an Arab sheikh, with fake beard and mustache, keffiyeh, and robes, and—using a hidden camera—filmed himself meeting with a European smuggler who promised to deliver to him peregrines stolen from Scottish nests. “Many Arabs still believe that wild birds have superior speed and killing power, and Scotland … is the source of the most highly prized,” Cook claimed in his narration. “The young birds are then passed into the system, and a variety of middlemen, in [Great Britain], France, Belgium, and Germany,” arrange for their passage to the Middle East. The average price paid by Arabs for a wild peregrine, Cook claimed, was £15,000, then equal to about $25,000.
The falconry community vehemently disputed the program’s contentions. The Hawk Board, an association of British falconers, charged that the producers had spent weeks in the Gulf “trying desperately” to locate a sheikh interested in buying a Scottish peregrine—and failed. The board insisted that the prices presented in the show were wildly exaggerated, that no market existed in the Middle East for British peregrines, either wild or captive-bred, and that eggs, chicks, and nestlings that had not yet developed into mature flyers had no value to the Arab falconer.
Perhaps it was true that sheikhs weren’t purchasing many falcons stolen from Scotland, but, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a huge black market trade sprang up in sakers and peregrines from the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Altai Mountains. In 2006, the World Wildlife Fund office in Vladivostok reported a “catastrophic drop” in the number of saker falcons in Russia, from sixty thousand to two thousand pairs in twenty years. The Middle East Falcon Research Group, an Abu Dhabi–based veterinary and ornithological institute, identified the perpetrators as Syrian and Lebanese students studying at Russian universities, including one Syrian gang that had captured fifty sakers before its leader was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. A network of Russian coconspirators, from railway personnel to airline baggage handlers, moved the birds through the Russian interior, placing them on flights to Moscow, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, and Irkutsk, before transferring them to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and other neighboring countries. From there, according to an article in the journal Contemporary Justice Review, they were smuggled into the Middle East. Traffickers wrapped the falcons in cloth and squeezed them into tubes, hiding them in sports bags, under fruit, and in diplomatic packages. “Eyes can be sewn shut, supposedly to reduce nervousness, and once swaddled they can be packed into rigid suitcases with holes drilled in them,” the article reported. Many of the birds suffocated en route. Others died from high temperatures, stress, and lack of food and water.
Other investigations seconded that captured falcons were headed to the Middle East. The British newspaper the Telegraph reported that in October 2004, police had intercepted a commercial aircraft carrying 127 sakers shortly before it left a military air base in Kyrgyzstan. The falcons, estimated to have a black market value of £2.6 million, then worth approximately $4.7 million, were heading for Syria. In the same Telegraph article, a zoologist in the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator described how falcons were trapped using pigeons fitted with plastic noose traps as bait. “There were several Arabs and their Mongolian trappers careering all over the steppe in a Land Cruiser,” the zoologist said. “Every time they spotted a falcon, they leapt out and released about twenty pigeons in different directions. It was crazy.” In October 2013, the Express Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper, reported that the wildlife authorities had raided a falcon-hunting camp near the Khyber Pass and confiscated pigeons intended as bait to catch sakers and peregrines. A forest officer told the newspaper that most of the sakers “are netted in Afghanistan, China and Russia,” and then transported to Peshawar for sale to visiting Arab sheikhs.
One licensed breeder in Europe who does frequent business with royal families in the Middle East confirmed to me that the trade is flourishing, although talking about it is taboo. “There’s huge, huge money in wild falcons,” the breeder told me, with the most sought-after bird, the “ultra-white” gyrfalcon, fetching $270,000 to $400,000 in the Arab world. During a recent trip to a sheikh’s palace, his meeting was interrupted by the arrival of trapper-smugglers carrying gyrfalcons from eastern Russia. “They’d been hooded, and they were in a horrible state. [The smugglers] had driven them three thousand miles,” he said. The breeder confirmed that the underground involves royals in such falconry-obsessed countries as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and, increasingly, Saudi Arabia, which remains one of the last countries in the region to permit wild falcon trapping within its borders.
In 2012, after years of illegal smuggling of saker falcons from Central Asia, the bird was declared “globally endangered” by the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature. Six years later the Convention on Migratory Species established a Saker Falcon Task Force, comprising forty specialists from twenty countries, to monitor the raptor and save it from extinction. By many accounts, the Emirates has successfully cracked down on bird smuggling. According to a 2017 report by the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies, the country had the highest number of bird-trafficking seizures in the world between 2009 and 2016. (The majority of the raptors were heading for Dubai.) But it is vastly more difficult to stop a skilled smuggler from sneaking eggs across a border than to prevent the smuggling of chicks or adolescent birds—and, once wild falcons or eggs have entered the Emirates, Convention on Endangered Species rules are still so loosely enforced that, as the European breeder put it, “laundering illegal birds into the system is easy.”
* * *
The genetic superiority of falcons procured from the wild has been an article of faith among many Arab hunters since captive-breeding programs took hold decades ago. Only the toughest, strongest, and fastest birds survive in nature, the argument goes, and these genes are passed down through the generations. Yet Jemima Parry-Jones, who breeds raptors in Gloucestershire, insists that “anyone who believes that a peregrine egg from a wild nest is more viable, stronger, and healthier than a good bird bred in a captive situation is mistaken. You might as well say, ‘Wild horses are better than specially bred race horses,’ which is rubbish.”
Nick Fox, the longtime breeder of falcons for the ruler of Dubai, says that Arab falconers want wild eggs primarily for a different reason: because they introduce new bloodlines into captive breeding programs. It is a widely held assumption that small populations of captive raptor species become vulnerable to “genetic decay” and need periodic reinvigoration from the wild. “Inbreeding has reduced survivability,” says Fox, who started a breeding program thirty-five years ago with six New Zealand falcons and, unable to import more due to trade restrictions, watched the quality of the descendants gradually deteriorate over the decades. Toby Bradshaw, the chairman of the biology department at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an avid falconer, argued in a 2009 academic paper published on his departmental website
that the “regular infusion of genes from wild populations [is] necessary” to keep captive-bred falcons from losing the “wild qualities”—speed, power, and hunting instinct—that expert falconers seek. “This is a strong argument for maintaining a modest wild take for propagation purposes even in countries where a falconry take is not allowed,” Bradshaw maintained.
Jeffrey Lendrum had his own opinions about Arabs’ affinity for wild birds. “The thing they would worry about is that so many birds are being interbred, they don’t know what they’ve got anymore,” he would explain. “A gyrfalcon could be one-quarter peregrine. A lot of these guys think, ‘It’s better to get something from the wild [so] we’ll know what we’ve got.’ ” That may well have been the thinking of Lendrum’s Emirates-based contacts when they sent him off for what would be the most ambitious wild take of his lifetime. He had a blank check, the full confidence of his sponsors, and a plan to capture the most prized falcon of them all.
ELEVEN OPERATION CHILLY
On the early evening of June 10, 2001, Jeffrey Lendrum sat in the front passenger seat of a Bell JetRanger 406 helicopter, gazing through the window at the vast wilderness of northeastern Quebec. The sun was still high in the subarctic sky, and the temperature hovered just above freezing. As the helicopter traveled north, marshy valleys filled with forests of black spruce and larch gave way to near-treeless tundra still dappled with snow. Black bears and wolves loped along the boggy terrain. The chopper descended toward Kuujjuaq, an Inuit community of 2,500 that had served as a fur-trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the mid–nineteenth century. A few hundred bungalows lay in neat rows beside a boulder-strewn beach facing the Koksoak River, the longest waterway in Quebec’s Nunavik territory, comprising the northern third of the province, an area larger than California. Ungava Bay, an icy basin at the mouth of the Koksoak just below Baffin Island and the Hudson Strait, lay about thirty-five miles to the north.
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