The Falcon Thief will appeal to those who also were enthralled by The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson and The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, and to anyone who enjoys reading about birds, nature and travel. This breathlessly-paced adventure is extensively researched, informative and beautifully written. The author does a remarkable job of interweaving classical research with contemporary interviews to provide a compelling portrait of the history of falconry in Europe and the Middle East, the peculiarly obsessive nature of oology and its destructiveness, of wildlife crime and its punishment (mostly in the UK), and of falcon breeding and conservation.Ĭombining adventure and true crime, this gripping narrative is a fascinating and infuriating story that reads more like a novel than nonfiction. Prey must be killed only to be eaten, and we must give thanks to StarClan for its life. From the next Gathering, there will be an addition to the warrior code. They provide every mouthful as well as our ability to hunt and feed ourselves. We should give thanks to our warrior ancestors that we are able to eat at all. Lendrum’s tragedy was how his passion for nature was perverted into an obsession for oology which then was bastardized into an unwavering delusion that he was somehow “saving” endangered birds of prey by stealing their eggs and selling them to the highest bidder. StarClan gives our prey to us, and StarClan can take it away. As an adult, Lendrum continued to hone his skills, becoming a daring cliff climber and expert naturalist. Early on, his father shared his passion for collecting bird eggs with the impressionable boy. Then there’s Lendrum, a swashbuckling and arrogant white Irish national born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who developed a deep understanding of and passion for wildlife as a child growing up in Africa. Also known as oology, egg collecting is popular amongst some disaffected British men who blindly pursue it without any regard for the damage it causes. These factors are compounded by poaching and habitat destruction and, in Britain, by the juvenile obsession with egg collecting. Then there are those who trap young wild raptors during their first migration to sell to falconers and falcon racers in the Middle East. A massive population decline in raptors throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere was caused by the widespread and reckless use of the pesticide, DDT, which causes egg shells to thin to the point where an incubating bird crushes them. First, there’s the tragedy of why birds of prey are endangered in the first place.
There is an undercurrent of tragedy that runs through this meticulously researched expose.
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