The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird

Today’s post is on The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird by Joshua Hammer. It is 317 pages long and is published by Simon & Schuster. The cover is a picture of a peregrine falcon. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime and wildlife protection. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- A true-crime adventure about a rogue who trades in rare birds and their eggs—and the wildlife detective determined to stop him.

On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales.

So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.

The Falcon Thief whisks readers from the volcanoes of Patagonia to Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, all in pursuit of a man who is reckless, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own.

Review- This is an interesting story about one man’s greed and his abuse of nature. Jeffery Lendrum was interested in birds and more rare animals from a young age. But started out as an innocent interest grew into a criminal life of stealing eggs from rare and endangered birds to sell to the highest bidder. But there was a lawman who cared about the harm and the birds that Lendrum so callously hurt, Andy McWilliam, and he chased Lendrum to the ends of the earth. I enjoyed this story mostly but when reading about Lendrum stealing the eggs that made me sick because some of these birds will mourn themselves to death for the loss of their clutch. But other than that it was a fascinating story about a thief who never thought he would get caught or that the lives of the birds he stole really mattered. If you are interested in true crime or rare birds then you should give this one a try.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.