Because captive breeding had a successful hatching rate of just 33 percent, unscrupulous breeders often found it far more cost-effective to illegally snatch nearly hatched eggs or chicks from the wilderness and then pass them off as having been hatched legally in their breeding centers. The Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 required that nine species of birds of prey bred in captivity, known as Schedule 4 birds—honey buzzards, golden eagles, white-tailed eagles, peregrines, ospreys, merlins, Montagu’s harriers, marsh harriers, and goshawks—be fitted with permanent identification rings on their legs when they were two weeks old or younger. Captive-bred birds of prey also had to have a registration certificate approved by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as an Article 10. But breeders found it easy to launder wild birds into the system, usually by mixing in very young, pre-banded chicks with those produced by captive parents. Sources told Shorrock that 30 percent of peregrines declared captive-bred were actually robbed from nests. It was easy money, and less risky than trying to sell wild birds or wild eggs directly into the black market.
In October 1992, prosecutors employed crude genetic profiling to prove that Joseph Seiga, an unemployed birdkeeper in Liverpool, had passed off four baby goshawk siblings stolen from the wild as the offspring of a captive-bred female. The babies shared multiple genetic markers but had none in common with the purported mother. Seiga was convicted and fined. Three years later DNA evidence helped send Derek Canning, a peregrine breeder in Northumbria who kept maps of aeries across Scotland and Wales, to prison for eighteen months for laundering dozens of wild-trapped falcons.
Some of McWilliam’s former colleagues belittled that kind of work, but McWilliam loved the challenge of the investigations—and, like so many of the men he was tracking, he enjoyed the thrill of the chase. He also believed that each sketchy breeder that he put out of business served as a warning to others—and as an incremental victory for the cause of environmental protection. In 2009, he zeroed in on John Keith Simcox, a breeder in eastern England, who claimed that the ring on his twenty-three-year-old female goshawk, which he had obtained in the 1980s from a breeder in Hungary, had fallen off the bird’s leg. An animal health inspector refitted the goshawk with the ring, but an informant told McWilliam that the inspector had unwittingly ringed a wild impostor; the elderly bird had died and Simcox had pulled a switch.
McWilliam swooped in with a search warrant and took a blood sample from the goshawk. Then, using a family tree attached to the bird’s Article 10 certificate, he tracked down the Hungarian goshawk’s offspring, obtained additional blood samples, and sent them all to a DNA lab. The results were indisputable: the newly ringed female could not be the birds’ mother. Simcox pleaded guilty to possession of a wild bird—McWilliam suspected he had stolen it from an aerie in north Wales—and to making a false declaration to obtain a registration. He received a three-month prison sentence. Simcox had allegedly engaged in such fraud for years, but this conviction “finished him off,” said McWilliam, forbidding him from ever again breeding Schedule 4 birds, including goshawks.
* * *
The rare-bird underground was far more extensive than a handful of launderers in England sneaking into aeries in Scotland and Wales. Criminals roamed from Southeast Asia to the former Yugoslavia to the Amazon jungle, plundering birds of prey, flouting export and import regulations, smuggling chicks and mature birds abroad in often horrific conditions, and feeding a voracious market for exotic fauna. In Bangkok in 2000, Raymond Leslie Humphrey, the owner of a British birds of prey center called Clouds Falconry, squeezed twenty-three live raptors—including Thai crested serpent eagles and Blyth’s hawk eagles, both previously unknown in Europe—into plastic tubes. Humphrey hid the tubes inside two large suitcases, and then checked the baggage into the unpressurized and unheated hold of an airplane to London.
Customs officers at Heathrow got a tip, pulled Humphrey aside, and seized his luggage. Inside the bags they made a terrible discovery: six of the twenty-three birds were dead (another died shortly afterward), and the other seventeen had sustained massive pressure injuries, asphyxia, and hypothermia. A search of Humphrey’s residence turned up dozens more endangered birds, as well as a golden-cheeked gibbon, one of the rarest apes in the world. Humphrey was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for illegally importing protected species—an act of “extreme and sickening cruelty,” in the words of the appeals court judge who upheld Humphrey’s conviction in 2003. The judge reduced the sentence by one year, but it was still the longest jail term ever given out in the United Kingdom for a wildlife crime.
Another rare-bird trader, Harry Sissen, used plastic tubes to smuggle birds from black market dealers in Eastern Europe overland to France and then by ferry across the English Channel to Dover. At Sissen’s breeding center in North Yorkshire, Alan Roberts seized one hundred forty protected birds, including three Lear’s macaws from the Brazilian Amazon (only one hundred fifty of the all-blue parrots remain in the wild) and three blue-headed macaws from the Peruvian jungle. Sentenced to thirty months in prison for violating the regulations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, Sissen “was prepared to go to any lengths to obtain endangered species from which to breed,” the presiding judge declared. The black market value of a pair of Lear’s macaws, according to PsittaScene, a conservation journal published by the World Parrot Trust, was £50,000.
The worst of these smugglers reminded McWilliam of the “terrier men” he’d arrested in rural England, who used dogs to drive badgers from their burrows and tear them apart. Some people seemed to get pleasure out of subjecting animals to pain, he thought, or were so consumed by greed that they didn’t stop to consider the suffering they were inflicting on other creatures. McWilliam struggled to maintain his equanimity in the face of such brutality. “One of the things with being a police wildlife officer,” he would tell Timothy Wheeler for the 2015 documentary Poached, “is you’ve got to leave your emotions out of it, even if you are an animal lover [or] a bird lover … You’ve got to be quite clinical … and know if you get emotionally involved in these things, you never sleep at night.”
McWilliam knew that the greatest demand for illicit rare birds was coming from the Arab world. He had read intelligence about the Siberian raptor smuggling route to the Middle East, and his colleague Alan Roberts had helped Belgian authorities bust a zookeeper who ran a bird-laundering operation across the European Union: stealing peregrine eggs from their nests in southern Spain, forging Article 10s at Belgium’s Merlin Zoo in Sint-Jan-in-Eremo, and then allegedly selling the birds for nearly one million euros to rich Arab clients, as well as wealthy Chinese. “We began to pick up intelligence about wild birds going to Dubai, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia,” McWilliam would say a decade later, still careful about disseminating information from an active investigation. “Dubai was the one we got most about, because of the racing” that had been growing in popularity since its introduction to the Persian Gulf in the early 2000s. “We noticed people coming in who had no history of falcon breeding, or falconry, because of the new money.”
In the mid-2000s Guy Shorrock heard about two wildlife criminals who had recently been convicted in northern Canada for stealing gyrfalcon eggs, possibly for sale to clients in the Middle East. One of these men, Jeffrey Lendrum, was already in the Royal Society database for a conviction in Zimbabwe in 1984. The other, Paul Mullin, had no previous record. Shorrock wrote to the Canadian authorities, seeking more information, but citing privacy laws, the Canadians refused to share details with the charity. Then Shorrock attended a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species lecture in London that happened to be hosted by Canadian wildlife officials. As they narrated the story of the notorious 2002 gyrfalcon heist, Paul Mullin’s name flashed on the screen, along with a home address in Southampton. Is Mullin still stealing eggs from the wilderness? Shorrock wondered.
Shorrock never shared the information with McWilliam. Despite their frui
tful collaboration busting egg collectors in the early 2000s, jealousies and resentments had been building between the National Wildlife Crime Unit and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the two men in particular. “It’s all to do with the fact that a non-government agency [gets] frustrated … the police can’t share information [or] intelligence with them,” McWilliam would tell Timothy Wheeler in his interview for Poached. A series of email exchanges, made public via Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, would expose the wildlife unit’s growing resistance to working with, and even disdain for, the charity. “I do think on occasions they have something to offer,” McWilliam wrote to his colleagues in 2013, “but their expertise would have to be required and … the Police must keep control.” He seemed to waver. “Or then again we could just say ‘F*** them.’ ” It was an attitude the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds apparently reciprocated.
As it turned out, the National Wildlife Crime Unit had the story of Mullin and Lendrum’s Canadian heist, conviction, and subsequent movements in its files as well—though nobody had checked through the piles of records at the unit’s Stirling headquarters. The documents dated back to the founding of the original National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit in 2002, the same year that Mullin and Lendrum were arrested in Quebec, and had been transferred to Scotland after the unit shut down in 2005, where they had been all but forgotten. A perusal of the records might have revealed not only that Mullin had changed his name and was back in England, but another tantalizing development: after years of globe-trotting, Lendrum had settled with his now-wife in a suburban town in the West Midlands, within striking distance of the peregrine falcons of Scotland and Wales.
FOURTEEN THE RHONDDA VALLEY
In the years that followed his guilty plea for stealing gyrfalcon eggs in Canada’s Nunavik territory, Jeffrey Lendrum tried to settle into a normal life. In the summer of 2002, just weeks after his arrest, he married his girlfriend in Sospel, a medieval mountain village in the Department of Alpes-Maritimes, north of the French Riviera. Paul Mullin, now living under a new name in the hope of burying his conviction for wildlife crime, served as the best man. After the ceremony in the village registrar’s office, 150 guests gathered outside to celebrate. Almost all were members of the bride’s Algerian-immigrant family, although a handful of Lendrum’s mates from southern Africa and England also made an appearance. Three days of Arabic-inflected singing, dancing, and fraternizing in and around the ancient alleys and plazas of Sospel followed. When the festivities ended, Lendrum returned to the house that his bride owned in Towcester, where together they continued to co-run AfricaXtreme. Lendrum made regular trips back to South Africa and Zimbabwe, both for business and to see friends and family. He was also serving as stepfather to his wife’s two preadolescent daughters from her previous marriage. His egg snatching days seemed behind him.
But the business took a turn for the worse in 2003. The sale of African handicrafts in England had reached a saturation point, and income fell off dramatically. With losses growing, Mullin closed the shop in Southampton and transferred his remaining stake in the venture to Lendrum; he had invested many tens of thousands of British pounds, and lost the entire amount. Lendrum renamed the Towcester shop African Art & Curios and struggled to keep it going, at one point borrowing money from his sister, Paula’s, husband so that he could refill his inventory in Zimbabwe. But he was forced to shut the business for good in 2008 and dispose of the unsold merchandise. That same year, Lendrum’s marriage broke up and his friendship with Mullin ended. The trouble began after Mullin’s South African girlfriend, who had followed her boyfriend to England, flew to Johannesburg with their infant daughter on holiday. During the visit she began a relationship with Lendrum, who by that point had drifted apart from his wife. Mullin’s now-ex-girlfriend decided to remain in South Africa with Lendrum and the child. The move sparked a bitter custody fight, and Lendrum took her side.
After the collapse of his marriage, the loss of his business, and the fallout with his closest friend, Lendrum returned to a nomadic existence, dividing his time between his ex-wife’s near-empty house in Towcester—which she’d stripped of furniture and was trying to sell—and a temporary place in Johannesburg. He was unmoored and looking for a new way to earn a living. And, as would happen whenever Lendrum found himself adrift, the evidence suggests that he resumed his exploits for his clients in the Middle East.
* * *
Mike Thomas first noticed disturbing things happening during the peregrine falcon breeding season of 2007. The leader of the South Wales Peregrine Monitoring Group, a volunteer organization with about a dozen members, Thomas spent weekends between March and May rappelling to aeries in the Garw (Ga-ROO) Valley and neighboring glens and gorges in the country’s former coal-mining heartland, a region with one of the densest concentrations of peregrine falcons in Great Britain, about fifty breeding pairs. On a gray morning in early May, Thomas, a thickset man then in his fifties with thin wire spectacles and a lantern jaw, hiked from his home in Blaengarw through a Japanese larch forest to an abandoned rock quarry. He followed a steep trail to the summit of a sandstone cliff, fixed a rope, and climbed down the rock face to a nesting site on a ledge that he’d been monitoring since March. Approaching the “scrape,” a shallow depression filled with gravel and flat pebbles to hold in heat and prevent the clutch from rolling off the ledge, Thomas made a dismaying discovery: the four eggs were gone.
Thomas’s first thought was they had been snatched by one of the peregrine falcon’s mortal enemies: a pigeon fancier, or a devotee of the ten-thousand-year-old practice of breeding or racing domestic pigeons, the falcon’s most common prey. But this nest would have been impossible to access without rappelling equipment, and pigeon men, in Thomas’s experience, tended to go after aeries that were not difficult to reach. In addition, they often left beer cans strewn about nesting sites and crushed eggs rather than make off with them. Besides, Thomas and his fellow volunteers knew almost every pigeon fancier in the Garw. The peregrine monitors had let them know, he says, “If you steal the eggs, we’ll come after your pigeons.”
Days after the Blaengarw eggs went missing, two other clutches disappeared nearby. The next breeding season, a peregrine clutch vanished from a high ledge across the mountains in the Rhondda Fawr Valley. The ledge was reachable only by a rappel so dangerous that Thomas believed the thief had to be a professional. “Whoever is climbing this is nobody we know,” he told a fellow volunteer. The group recorded half a dozen disappearances the next year, 2009. And who knew how many more they hadn’t found? Working at their own expense, the volunteers were forced to leave many remote aeries unattended.
Thomas was obsessed by the mystery of the missing clutches. Who had stolen them? And why? The thief was clearly a skilled climber and an experienced peregrine spotter, yet he must also have had help from a local. “You can spend days trying to locate these sites,” he explained. He found it disturbing to speculate about how much damage the egg thief might have caused. “Some years twenty-six peregrine clutches were in the area,” he said. If the nest raider had been systematically attacking peregrine aeries since 2007, Thomas reasoned, he could have stolen well over one hundred eggs.
* * *
On the morning of April 28, 2010—a Wednesday—Jeffrey Lendrum placed his climbing equipment into the trunk of his Vauxhall Vectra sedan in Towcester and drove alone two hours to the southwest to rural Wales. He checked into the Heritage Park Hotel in Pontypridd, a town of ancient stone bridges where the River Rhondda flows into the River Taff, and set out shortly after dawn the next morning for the thinly populated upper reaches of the Rhondda Fawr Valley. Years later, he would admit that this was one of many trips to Wales he had made between 2002 and 2010—but this one, he would swear, was his first and only egg snatching mission.
Seven years later, I made arrangements to meet Andy McWilliam and Ian Guildford, the Wales-based investigator with the National Wildlife Crime Unit, to retrace Len
drum’s steps that day. On an unseasonably chilly May morning, Guildford—a bespectacled, rangy Londoner, who’d lived in Wales for four decades—picked me up at Cardiff’s central rail station. We drove north through verdant hills, past the old coal-mining town of Aberfan, to where McWilliam was waiting at a McDonald’s in the town of Merthyr Tydfil. The burly, gray-haired investigator had driven down from Liverpool that morning. He had the GPS points of the four aeries that Lendrum had looted in April 2010, which would enable us to follow his tracks. McWilliam wasn’t sure, though, that we’d be able to catch sight of any peregrines. His bird-spotting skills, he admitted, had grown rusty through lack of practice. “A couple of years ago,” he told me, “I’d walk through woodlands and say, ‘There’s a lesser yellow legs.’ Now I go out and I say, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
We began a switchback climb through denuded sandstone hills, blanketed in lichens and pale green grass and rising several thousand feet above the Rhondda Fawr. Gouged by slow-moving glaciers during the last Ice Age between eighteen thousand and ten thousand years ago, the Rhondda Fawr (the Great Rhondda) and a smaller valley just to the east, the Rhondda Fach (the Little Rhondda), had once been covered with dense woodlands. Then, in the mid–nineteenth century, geologists discovered a rich seam of coal running beneath the surface of the two valleys, anywhere from a few dozen feet to half a mile down. Soon tens of thousands of men had swapped subsistence farming for the steady cash wages of a life underground, and the forests were razed to make “pit props,” beams that support the roofs of coal mines. “The hills have been stripped of all their woodland beauty, and there they stand, rugged and bare, with immense rubbish heaps covering their surface,” wrote Arthur Morris in the 1908 book Glamorgan. “The river Rhondda is a dark, turgid, and contaminated gutter, into which is poured the refuse of the host of collieries which skirt the thirteen miles of its course.” Then, in the 1970s, the anthracite began to run out, and the collieries closed, the last in 2008. Today the two Rhondda Valleys have among the highest unemployment rates in the British Isles.
The Falcon Thief Page 18
