Hammer - The falcon thief: a true tale of adventure, treachery, and the hunt for the perfect bird

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Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by Joshua Hammer

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2020

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket image by Albatross / Alamy Stock Photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hammer, Joshua, 1957- author.

Title: The falcon thief : a true tale of adventure, treachery, and the hunt for the perfect bird / Joshua Hammer.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031607 (print) | LCCN 2019031608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501191886 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501191893 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wildlife crimes. | FalconsEggs. | Wild bird trade. | Rare birds.

Classification: LCC HV6410 .H36 2020 (print) | LCC HV6410 (ebook) | DDC 364.16/28598961468092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031607

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031608

ISBN 978-1-5011-9188-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-9189-3 (ebook)

This book is based on dozens of first-person interviews plus trial transcripts, videotaped interrogations, contemporary media accounts, and secondary source materials. FOIA requests filed with the British government for transcripts of police interviews were not successful, as these transcripts are generally disposed of after five years. In such cases, I reconstructed the exchanges based on extensive interviews with participants. Some other dialogue has also been reconstructed from memory and notes, to the best of my ability.

Shortly after New Years Day in 2017, I was on vacation with my family in England when I happened to pick up a copy of the Times of London. A short article buried inside the newspaper caught my eye. Thief Who Preys on Falcon Eggs Is Back on the Wing, declared the headline. The report by the Timess crime correspondent John Simpson described a notorious wild-bird trafficker who had jumped bail and disappeared in South America:

He has dangled from helicopters and abseiled down cliffs in search of falcon eggs for wealthy Arab clients Now, the international egg thief is on the wing again after the authorities in Brazil admitted that they had lost him. [Jeffrey] Lendrum, 55, slipped the net after being caught with four albino falcon eggs stolen from Patagonia and jailed for more than four years. He is said to pose a serious threat to falcons in Britain and beyond

The story of the egg thief grabbed my attention. The notion that there was a lucrative black market for wild birds eggs seemed faintly ridiculous to me, like some wacky quest out of Dr. Seusss Scrambled Eggs Super!, which Id read aloud many times over the course of a decade to my three boys. Id never considered that obtaining the worlds most valuable eggs would require dangerous, logistically complex missions to the most remote corners of the planet. What kind of character would make a living that way? Was Lendrum one oddball or part of a whole hidden industry? Always a little skeptical of tabloid hype, I also wondered how much of a threat to endangered raptors Lendrum really posed. I tore out the clipping and started making casual inquiries when I got home.

As I found myself falling deeper into the life of Jeffrey Lendrum, discovering his childhood fascination with falcons and his compulsive tree climbing and nest raiding, something not altogether unexpected happened: I began to notice birds. That spring I traveled to southern Wales with two officers from Great Britains National Wildlife Crime Unit to search for peregrines and their aeries in the cliffs of the Rhondda Valley. Later that summer, on a magazine assignment in the marshes of southern Iraq, I threaded through canals in a motorboat, acutely attuned to the avian life around me. Pied kingfishers, little black-and-white birds with needle-sharp beaks, darted out of the reeds as our craft sped past; a sacred ibis, with enormous black-tipped white wings and a scythe-like black bill, skimmed the surface of the marsh. I reread My Bird Problem, a 2005 New Yorker essay, in which Jonathan Franzen described how his early bird-watching forays had heightened his excitement about venturing into the wild and encountering natures breathtaking diversity. A glimpse of dense brush or a rocky shoreline gave me a crush-like feeling, a sense of the worlds being full of possibility, he wrote. There were new birds to look for everywhere.

It wasnt only the rare ones that caught my eye. In April 2018, I returned from one of my last field-research trips about the falcon thief to discover my five-year-old son in a state of high excitement. By a remarkable coincidence, a pair of common pigeons, Columba livia, had built a nest on the bathroom window ledge of our third-floor apartment. For a month, as I wrote about the breeding behavior of birds in the wild and excavated the story of Lendrums transformation from an adolescent nest raider to an international outlaw, I found regular inspiration looking at that ledge, easily visible across the courtyard from our kitchen window. Watching the pigeon incubate her eggs, observing the tiny, down-covered chicks as they huddled beneath their mother and grew in two weeks into awkward fledglings, made Lendrums crimes more vivid to meand more outrageous.

The bird-watching urge was proving irresistible. On Marthas Vineyard, in Massachusetts, the next summer I followed by kayak a pair of regal, ruffle-headed ospreys circling high above their man-made nest at the Long Point Wildlife Refuge; lost myself in a canoe for an hour among honking, socializing Canadian geese on Chilmark Pond; admired a red-tailed hawk soaring above the dunes at Great Rock Bight; and called my family outside to watch when an American robin briefly alit in our garden.

And then, as I was writing this book in the fall, came the most serendipitous moment. Early one morning I caught a flash of color just outside my office window in Berlin. A parakeetan