The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  The pilot set down the helicopter gently at Kuujjuaq Airport, a single rutted tarmac runway. Then the pilot, Lendrum, and a third passenger, Paul Mullin, presented their passports to an official in a turquoise-painted corrugated-metal shed. They caught a waiting taxi to the Auberge Kuujjuaq Inn, a rustic two-story structure overlooking the river.

  The men had booked rooms for a week. If anyone asked, they would say they were documentary filmmakers for National Geographic who had come to northern Canada to gather nature footage for the society’s archives. But they were there for a different purpose: to steal the eggs of wild birds of prey. Four months earlier, in England, Lendrum had approached his business partner with a proposition. He was organizing his second trip to the Canadian subarctic, one of the prime habitats of the gyrfalcon. It’d been two years since he and Mullin had flown together from Johannesburg to London with the lanner falcon chicks concealed in Lendrum’s carry-on bag. Now he invited his friend to tag along again.

  “It’s going to be the adventure of a lifetime,” Lendrum promised. And all of their expenses would be covered.

  Lendrum would later insist that the mission was just a sightseeing trip—“a dream on my bucket list”—financed by the sale of a house he owned in England. But Lendrum, who was sharing his girlfriend’s home in Towcester, didn’t own a house, Mullin maintains. Months earlier, Mullin says, Lendrum had met with Howard Waller in Dubai, and asked him to put up expenses for what he presented as the ultimate wild take. “The gyrfalcons are like bluebottle flies up there. They’re all over the place,” Lendrum assured Waller, according to Mullin—though his mission in 2000 had been something of a bust.

  In Dubai Lendrum received $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills. Lendrum hid the cash on his body to avoid currency-reporting requirements, and then headed to Dubai International Airport for the flight home. Waller insists that Mullin’s story is a fabrication. “Because we grew up together it’s always assumed that it’s me” who financed Lendrum’s schemes, Waller said with a sigh when I pressed him on his role in Lendrum’s egg-thieving adventures. He claimed that after each one of Lendrum’s arrests he had tried to discourage his longtime friend from raiding nests and smuggling eggs. “I told him, ‘Stop what you’re doing, every time you do this it falls back on me,’ ” he said. “I told him this a long time ago.” Lendrum, like Waller, denies Mullin’s assertion that Waller commissioned him to obtain gyrfalcons in Canada. But when confronted with Waller’s claims, Lendrum would call his old friend “a complete liar,” insist that “he never rebuked me,” and accuse him of acquiring rare wild birds, including gyrs, from all over the world. “He’s trying to cover his own ass,” says Lendrum, who claims he stole black sparrow hawk eggs from nests for Waller in South Africa in the 1980s. “When Howard finds himself backed into a corner, he shouts and he gets abusive.” Waller denies that he ever asked Lendrum to steal wild raptors for him in South Africa or anywhere else.

  * * *

  Canada outlawed the wild harvesting of gyrfalcons in 1976—not that this stopped men like Lendrum. David Anderson, the director of the Gyrfalcon Conservation Project, says that pure white gyrs attract so much black market money that if he or his researchers spied one in the field, they kept the sighting a secret. The birds’ hues run from black to brown to gray, but it’s always the whites that disappear from their nests. “They are the biggest, baddest, meanest, prettiest falcons,” he says. “It’s not surprising at all that this mystique exists.”

  The black market trade isn’t the only threat to the gyr’s survival. Scientists are finding increasing doses of mercury, DDE, aldrin, chlorinated hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, and other toxic substances in birds and eggs as far north as Greenland and northern Norway, putting birds that eat other birds at a particular risk. And the warming of the Arctic’s summers is causing migratory peregrines to expand their territory—seizing the nests of gyrfalcons and competing with them for scarce food and territory. Kurt Burnham, a raptor expert at the High Arctic Institute in Orion, Illinois, predicted in a 2016 article in the Atlantic that the intensifying battle between gyrs and peregrines would likely cause “one of them to go extinct in the area” by 2030.

  The birds’ difficult lives in the wild provided Lendrum with an argument for why removing eggs from their nests didn’t present an ethical problem. He described to Mullin the satisfaction he’d feel knowing that he had “rescued” birds from increasingly uninhabitable environments and delivered them to a pampered life in the care of devoted Arab falconers—a life of generous feedings, plenty of room to fly, and state-of-the-art medical care.

  Lendrum recruited a friend from his childhood to serve as his pilot in the far north. The son of a Special Forces operative in the Rhodesian Bush War, the pilot had flown helicopters for logging and power companies in Alaska and Canada, laying down pylons in the wilderness, and now conducted rescues for a sheriff’s department in Northern California. “[I am a] utility bush pilot with over 16,000 hours spent freezing in Alaska to cooking in the [Papua New Guinea] jungle and everywhere in between,” he wrote on his LinkedIn profile, “Africa, Australia, Venezuela, Hawaii and all over the Pacific—settling in California for the privilege to fly a Huey.” Working for the sheriff’s department, he had flown injured hikers and their rescuers on the end of a one-hundred-foot fixed line, a feat that required extraordinary concentration and precision maneuvering. These were the same skills the pilot would require on his clandestine new mission.

  Lendrum chartered the Bell JetRanger 406, a robust, versatile machine on which the pilot had done much of his training, from Cherokee Helicopter Services in Pennsylvania. He arranged for the chopper to be delivered to Montréal-Dorval International Airport. In Montreal, Mullin, Lendrum, and the pilot loaded the helicopter with equipment that they had picked up mostly on a shopping spree in London, financed, according to Mullin, by the cash advance. They had titanium-threaded Arctic jackets, snow pants, and liners, ropes, generators, three GPS devices, harnesses, survival kits (containing knives, snares, a compass, a saw, waterproof matches, candles, fishing lines and hooks), mobile incubators, lights, boots, and dozens of jerricans filled with jet fuel. They also had a professional-quality Canon XL 10 video camera with multiple lenses, which they would use to support their National Geographic cover story; Mullin planned to shoot footage of gyrfalcons and peddle the video to nature-documentary companies when he got back home. The spycraft aficionado was still driving his Toyota Prada with BOND license plates, and he invented a code name for their mission: Operation Chilly. They hadn’t told their wives, partners, friends, business associates, or anyone else about their plans.

  The men were in a boisterous mood as they prepared to set off in the early morning of June 10 on the long journey north to Kuujjuaq, a nine-hundred mile, twelve-hour flight, with scheduled refueling stops in Quebec City and a series of old French trading posts, mining towns, and lumber settlements: Saguenay, Baie-Comeau, Labrador City, Schefferville … Gyrfalcon egg-hatching season runs from mid-May to mid-June. They were heading to the subarctic right on time.

  Mullin broke out the video camera and filmed the pilot and Lendrum placing the last gear inside the JetRanger’s cargo hold.

  In the video, the pilot, a strapping blond-haired man wearing a pair of Ray-Bans, looks directly at the camera and grins.

  “Look at us,” he says. “We’re fucking criminals.”

  Lendrum gives the thumbs-up.

  * * *

  The morning of June 11 dawned cold and clear in Kuujjuaq. The pilot guided the fully loaded helicopter west out of the Inuit village, leaving all traces of a human presence behind. They flew for half an hour over pale green and russet hills dotted with patches of ice and snow, and rivers choked with ice floes. Mullin, in the backseat, followed the route on a NATO topographical map that he had procured in London, and pointed excitedly to a pod of white beluga whales frolicking in an icy river. At last they arrived at a palisade that plunged at a near-ninety-degree angle to a b
ody of water labeled Basalt Lake. The helicopter soared over sheets of ice, small breaks providing glimpses of the crystalline blue water underneath.

  Lendrum, in the front, peered out the window, searching the sky. After several passes over the lake, the pilot set the chopper down on firm ground high above the water and the three men climbed out of the craft. The tundra abounded with lichens, tussock sedge, Arctic poppies, dwarf heath shrubs, scrub birch, and willows. It was the most unspoiled corner of the world that Mullin had ever seen. Then, suddenly came a screech through the silence. A pair of peregrines soared overhead, emitting high-pitched warning cries. An aerie was nearby.

  “They’re beautiful,” Lendrum said. Mullin had his video camera out again. “Look at this male.”

  Even at a distance of several hundred feet, Lendrum could discern the difference in size between the two birds. Female peregrine falcons are about one-third larger than their mates, a phenomenon known as “reversed-size sexual dimorphism” and unique to owls, eagles, hawks, and falcons. Some evolutionary scientists theorize that because male raptors engage in territorial duels in midair, natural selection favors the smallest, lightest, and most agile of them. Others have posited that females need to be stronger because they are responsible for guarding the nest and protecting the eggs against predators, while males can remain focused on hunting prey.

  “That is a fucking noise,” the pilot said in the video, laughing. “See Lendrum fucking smiling now.”

  “It’s fucking nice,” Lendrum replied.

  Then he picked out a speck of white on the horizon and knew—instantly, from half a mile away—that it was the raptor he had come to the end of the earth for: the elusive gyrfalcon, the bird of kings. Above the lake, the trio watched, enthralled, as the bird approached its aerie. “Here it comes on the right,” the pilot could be heard exclaiming on the video. “She’s coming in, coming in, staying on the ridgeline,” he narrated like a sports announcer. “Here she comes, over the ridge now, traversing.” The gyrfalcon settled on a ledge. “Beautiful,” the pilot said, continuing to observe the gyrfalcon. “We’re on.”

  It was a white gyr—meaning that if its breeding partner was also white, the chances were excellent that the chicks would be that color as well. Still, you could never be sure: a scientific study in the Koryak Mountains of far eastern Siberia had turned up a nest in which a pair of white gyrfalcons had produced gray chicks. And if a white gyrfalcon mated with a gray, black, orange, or other morph, there was no telling what the pair would produce. Sometimes one clutch could contain birds of three or four different hues. But Lendrum was optimistic.

  The pilot and Lendrum fastened a one-hundred-foot static line to the helicopter skids, with the free end of the rope hanging down. Wearing leather boots, snow pants, gloves, and a green parka against the subarctic chill, Lendrum slipped a nylon safety harness around his legs and waist. He threaded the rope through a caribiner on his belt and secured it with a single figure-eight knot and a safety knot. The pilot lifted off slowly, making sure that the downwash from the rotors didn’t tangle the rope. The slack tightened and Lendrum began to rise in a seated position into the azure sky.

  Soon he was dangling seven hundred feet over the water. A video that Mullin shot of the moment would be seized by Great Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit nine years later and broadcast around the world: Lendrum swayed calmly in the breeze, framed against water and sky both dazzlingly blue. One hand grasped a padded green cooler bag, large enough to fit four cans of beer, while the other held the rope. Nothing but two well-tied knots stood between him and oblivion, yet he seemed utterly self-assured. (Mullin didn’t know how many times, if any, Lendrum had pulled off this stunt before, but he was so adept at climbing trees and scaling cliffs that “dangling from a helicopter would have been a piece of piss” for him, Mullin says.)

  The Bell JetRanger hovered close to the rock wall, almost stationary, rotors spinning. The pilot masterfully manipulated the cyclic stick, collective lever, and anti-torque pedals to keep the machine virtually still. One tiny slip would have sheared off the blades and sent both pilot and thief plummeting to their deaths.

  Lendrum turned toward the ledge. The female gyrfalcon circled overhead, distressed, as Lendrum inched closer to the aerie, an odoriferous heap splattered with whitewash, or bird feces, ptarmigan feathers, and other remains. “The nest was … the most filthy mess … covered with a thick layer of old wings and other debris, mostly of puffins and black guillemots, and simply hopping with little black flea-like creatures,” a one-eyed, one-armed naturalist named Ernest Vesey wrote in his 1938 memoir In Search of the Gyr-Falcon, about his own aerie raid in northwestern Iceland. More than a century before Vesey’s expedition, American ornithologist John James Audubon left a similar account of finding the nest of white gyrfalcons on the southern coast of Labrador, not far from Kuujjuaq. “The nest of these hawks was placed on the rocks, about fifty feet from their summit, and more than a hundred feet from their base,” he wrote. “It was composed of sticks, sea-weeds, and mosses, about two feet in diameter, and almost flat. About its edges were strewed the remains of their food, and beneath, on the margin of the stream, lay a quantity of wings of the Uria Troile, Mormon arcticus, and Tetrao Saliceti, together with large pellets comprised of fur, bones, and various substances.”

  Inches from the aerie, Lendrum reached out and grabbed his prize: four large cream-colored eggs, with reddish brown freckles. Charles Bendire, the American oologist who escaped death at the hands of Apache Indians while snatching the eggs of a zone-tailed hawk, described gyrfalcon eggs vividly in an 1892 report from the field:

  The ground color, when distinctly visible … is creamy white. This is usually hidden by a pale cinnamon rufous suffusion … The eggs are closely spotted and blotched with small, irregular markings of dark reddish brown, brick red, ochraceous rufous, and tawny. Some specimens show scarcely any trace of markings, the egg being of near uniform color throughout … In shape they vary from ovate to rounded ovate. The shells of these eggs feel rough to the touch, are irregularly granulated, and without luster.

  Lendrum placed the eggs in the cooler bag, and gave a hand signal. The pilot pulled away from the cliff, lifted into the sky, and deposited Lendrum gently on the tundra, before touching down nearby.

  Later that day Mullin would slip into the harness and dangle from the helicopter just for the experience. He realized, terrified, that he had no control over his movements. “You’re dependent on air flow, downwash, you’re spinning left, and you’re spinning right,” he recalled. Hanging from the line made him appreciate Lendrum’s athleticism even more.

  Over the next few hours the pilot, Lendrum, and Mullin covered hundreds of square miles of gyrfalcon-rich territory, becoming steadily more proficient at spotting gyrs and their nests. The pilot circled high above the cliffs, zeroing in on a soaring bird and following it along the rock wall until its whitewash-splattered aerie came into view. Then he’d set down the helicopter in a meadow atop the cliff. If Lendrum thought the rock face was scalable, he fixed a rope, rappelled to the aerie, snatched the eggs, and climbed back up, with the cooler bag dangling from his belt. Sometimes the pilot managed to find flat ground at the base of the cliff where he could land his helicopter, and picked up Lendrum at the bottom, sparing him the arduous ascent back to the summit. Usually, however, the water reached to the very edge of the cliffs, making landing impossible. Three times that day, the rock face proved too steep to manage, and Lendrum approached the nest at the end of the fixed line suspended from the helicopter.

  After each heist they flew on for another four or five miles—the limits of each gyr’s territory—and renewed their search. Mullin observed the hunt from the backseat of the JetRanger, marveling at the birds’ elegance and at the dramatic landscapes. “A lake, a mountain and the sea beyond,” wrote Ronald Stevens in his 1956 book The Taming of Genghis, in which he traps a gyrfalcon chick in Iceland and teaches it to hunt. “The sky so blue in the transient
smiles of an Arctic summer, so leaden and lowering at most other times. Against this background Genghis had his home.”

  Remarkably the trio made no attempt to hide their activities, apparently assuming that authorities would never obtain the visual and audio record. “Are you down?” shouted the pilot from the top of a cliff in one video sequence. A male gyrfalcon circled above, calling out in agitation. “Are you in the right spot?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Lendrum replied. “I may not have enough rope.”

  “I’ll belay you down, keep going,” his partner said. “We’ll meet you at the bottom.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Lendrum said, as he clambered out of sight to snatch the eggs from the aerie.

  The men showed no particular sensitivity to other species they encountered on their felonious romp. Halfway through the day, the pilot spotted a herd of caribou and chased it by helicopter across the tundra. Mullin filmed the beasts as they stampeded in terror, some of them slipping on the slick ground or toppling over into pools of water. They pursued a herd of musk oxen next—great shaggy beasts that look like a cross between a buffalo and a yak. Then the pilot and Lendrum headed off for some more aerial reconnaissance, leaving Mullin to explore the cliffs on his own. Unarmed and wary of encountering polar bears, he cautiously clambered up the rocks to an aerie where four unattended, pure-white gyrfalcon chicks, days old, chirped helplessly at him and huddled in fear.