This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
I’ve never been interested in birds; I’ve occasionally appreciated hearing them sing or noted pretty colors or the gracefulness of a bird in flight, but that’s about the extent of it. So bird-watching has never appealed to me as a hobby, and it certainly had never occurred to me to get involved in a hobby such as falconry, collecting birds of prey and training and working with them to hunt. Reading about a man obsessed with collecting the eggs of falcons did, however, turn out to be compelling.
Jeffrey Lendrum was raised in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), his father, Adrian, of Irish descent but also born in Africa. Adrian and Jeffrey were fascinated by wildlife, with so many species of animals available to observe. But the two didn’t just observe; they collected, disturbing the balance of wildlife and especially causing problems with protected species that were being studied and monitored in the national parks. Lendrum generally got away with it growing up, and he was never able to kick the habit of raiding nests. He had an uncanny ability to figure out where birds would nest and, thanks to natural athleticism and years of practice, he was an incredibly skilled climber and rappeller and could make his way to nests that seemed impossible for a human to access.
Author Joshua Hammer explores Lendrum’s background as well as that of Andy McWilliams, one of the investigative officers who pursued Lendrum in his crimes. McWilliams spent several decades on a police force covering Liverpool and other towns around it, and his personal interest in bird-watching had led him to join Britain’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, a team that helps police around that country to investigate various offenses involving animals, whether it’s trading of endangered species or animal cruelty.
For the majority of readers who likely will know little about it, the book delves into the history of “the art of falconry,” a sport enjoyed by nobility and a “means of survival” for many people across the Middle East for centuries. As Hammer writes, the peregrine falcon was in particular highly respected because of its speed, boldness, precision and efficiency in being able to swoop at dizzying speeds from the sky down to the ground and capture and kill prey. It has “extraordinary physical abilities” thanks to a “hyperefficient respiratory and circulatory system, … streamlined wings, … powerful muscles, and optic nerves (that) relay images to its brain ten times faster than those of a human.” His descriptions of these magnificent animals make it easier to appreciate why Landrum and others are so obsessed with the birds.
To complete the picture of what Landrum was doing and why, The Falcon Thief then explores one last important set of players in this drama: wealthy sheiks in the United Arab Emirates, who prize these birds as powerful and beautiful creatures that speak to their cultural history of falcon hunting before the land was developed into high-rises and luxury resorts in the middle of the desert. While hunting with the birds is now difficult because prey were largely wiped out during this development, at the turn of the millennium, a billionaire prince created the sport of falcon racing. “Racing was (his) ambitious attempt to keep Emiratis connected to their heritage. The populist move also turned falconry into a multimillion-dollar global enterprise,” Hammer writes.
So there are beautiful birds; eggs to be procured in the wild that can be hatched into birds to be trained for racing or hunting; some very rich collectors supposedly willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, and men like Jeffrey Landrum, skilled and obsessed and eager to keep raiding nests. It all makes for a compelling story that Hammer puts together in a way that even readers who know nothing about birds can appreciate the drama, the danger, the daring and the skill of one thief who went to any lengths, such as dangling 100 feet from a helicopter, to snatch the eggs of a gorgeous wild animal.
It’s always satisfying to be entertained and educated at the same time, and Hammer did that skillfully in this book.
Rated: High, for 10 uses of strong language and occasional instances of milder profanity. There were a few spots where some people in the book had a tendency to use strong profanity. Most of the book feels completely clean.
* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Click here to purchase your copy of The Falcon Thief on Amazon.
