insight into the mind of an addict. An interesting journey into a narrow alley of the world. Worth the trip. ( )

Month of November 2022 - The Thief Books

The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird by Joshua Hammer (2020) 317 pages.

Setting: England, Africa, Chile, Brazil, Dubai

If you are interested in reading a ‘true-crime investigative report’, then you will probably love reading this and give it a much higher rating. Unfortunately, I found it a very, very dry read. For me, there was too much written on the different political wars in Africa, 1970's Rhodesian wars, which I know absolutely nothing about, and not sure why it's even mentioned. Too much botanical name dropping of the many different kinds of birds and plants over and over. Too many ‘super-long’, unpronounceable names of so many elite figures, at the time, in Africa and the Middle East. This book was just exhausting to get through.

The author gathered his research from sit-down interviews, videotaped interrogations, newspaper reports, and trial transcripts. I wouldn’t exactly say this was full of adventure, nor treacherous, as the title suggests, because it was so impersonal and so much on everything else except “the falcon thief”, himself.

Joshua Hammer is a journalist, writing for The Times, GQ and other publications, who happened on a tiny article, while on vacation in London, about Jeffrey Lendrum, who was a bird’s nest egg snatcher as an adolescent, and now a 55-year-old bird’s nest egg snatcher outlaw. He was caught in Birmingham International Airport (England) for smuggling falcon eggs for wealthy Middle Eastern royal clients who paid up to $400,000 per bird or eggs from nests, if from the wild, which were considered faster and stronger than ones bred and raised in captivity. The Arabs were, and still are, practicing the art of falconry, except now they race them. This created a huge black market for wild falcon eggs for hatching.

Falcons were nearly wiped out of Europe and North America in the ‘50’s and 60’s when we were into heavily spraying DDT pesticide that infected their prey- wood pigeons and pheasants. Now, their nests are mostly found on cliff ledges and rock quarries in England, Wales and Scotland.

Obsessive egg collectors, which is what this book is mostly about, suffer the same obsessive-compulsive disorders as hoarders, many of them lonely and depressed as well. Jeffrey Lendrum may have also been addicted to the adrenaline rush of the dangers in snatching those elusive falcon eggs. One egg collector was discovered with over 4,000 rare eggs locked up in his attic. He had 12 golden eagle eggs, when there were only 250 golden eagles in the whole of United Kingdom at the time of this discovery.

With security the way it is today in airports, I’m sure it’s much harder today for falcon thieves to smuggle eggs in and out of countries. I wonder how they are handling that today?

Documentary, following the lives of several egg collectors

Poached: When Passion Becomes Obsession (2015)

YouTube video of Jeffery Lendrum, the falcon thief (mentioned on page 124), catching a cobra in the wild

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kPKbKOFFJgQ ( )

A true-crime adventure about a rogue, Jeffrey Lundrum, who trades in rare birds and their eggs-and the wildlife detective, Detective Andy McWilliam, determined to stop him. ( )

> Ribbons of white surgical tape were wrapped around his abdomen. Tucked snugly beneath the tape were one green, one black, and one blue woolen sock. Plastic zip ties divided each sock into five segments, and inside each segment was an oval-shaped object.

> Lendrum would find a suitable tree, carry up “tons of sticks, and build a rudimentary nest there,” Tarr says. “The next year the crowned eagles moved in.” Lendrum would wait until the female laid her eggs in the aerie he had built, and then would climb into her nest and snatch them.

> he had a real competitive streak. Waller remembers clambering into nests as an adolescent to take the live eggs of the common sparrow hawk. “I’d climb a tree and there would be a chicken egg in the nest with a sign on it saying, ‘Too late sucker,’” he recalls.

> In 1911, three members of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctica expedition trekked seventy miles through blizzards and minus-eighty-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures to collect eggs from an emperor penguin colony. The explorers were out to prove a theory advanced by the nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, that the development of an embryo from fertilization to gestation or hatching replicates the evolutionary stages of the same species ( )

A thrilling book about bird conservation is almost as rare as the pallid peregrine, but Hammer has definitely hatched one. You don't have to be an avian enthusiast to enjoy this adventure--definitely worth seeking out. ( )