Read This: The Falcon Thief

Just finished The Falcon Thief by Joshua Hammer, and if you need something to read, this is it.

Peregrine falcons are one of my favorite birds, so when I say that Jeffrey Lendrum spent 30 years stealing their eggs out of nests, understand that I went into this book already predisposed to hate the guy. He'd rappel down cliff faces, strap eggs to his body with heating pads, and then fly them to the Gulf states to sell to wealthy falconry collectors, and he got caught multiple times and did time and went right back to it every single time.

I keep going back and forth on how I feel about this book. Lendrum knew these birds — he understood their nesting habits, their breeding cycles, their habitats, the kind of field knowledge that conservationists spend entire careers building — and he used all of it to strip nests, some of which held the last known breeding pairs in their regions. That's infuriating. But then Hammer writes about the operations themselves, the logistics and the scouting and the smuggling routes, and I couldn't stop reading because I genuinely wanted to know how he pulled it off even while being mad that he did.

There's a whole black market for raptors that I had no idea existed, and Hammer gets into all of it — the enforcement side, the trade networks, the falconry subculture in the Gulf states that drives demand. I went in expecting a fun true crime read and came out both fascinated and genuinely angry that this world exists and that so few people are trying to stop it.

It's short, probably a weekend read or less, and I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. Pick it up.