On the afternoon of May 31, 2011, Charlie Everitt, an investigator for the National Wildlife Crime Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, received an urgent call from a colleague in the Northern Constabulary, the regional police department whose jurisdiction includes the islands off the country’s western coast. The officer told Everitt that a nature-reserve warden on the Isle of Rum, twenty miles offshore, had reported seeing a man “dancing about” in a gull colony. Everitt looked at the clock. It was 4 p.m., too late to catch the last ferry, so he drove halfway to Mallaig, a tiny port town four hours away, where he could take the first boat out in the morning.
The Isle of Rum, a forty-one-square-mile rock, is inhabited by about forty people, many of them employed by the Scottish Natural Heritage, an environmental organization charged with protecting wildlife. Rum has red deer and an assortment of rare birds, including merlins and white-tailed sea eagles, and it is a principal breeding ground for the Manx shearwater, a seabird with a distinctly eerie call. For this reason, as Everitt knew, the place was also a target for egg collectors, a secretive network of men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds. (...)
At the turn of the twentieth century, as the conservation movement began raising awareness of endangered species, the collecting of wild-bird eggs came under scrutiny. In 1922 in London, Earl Buxton, addressing the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, warned of the “distinct menace” posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithologists’ Union, of which Lord Rothschild was a member. Indignant, Rothschild split off and, with the Reverend Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, a cantankerous Oxford-educated ornithologist who bore a scar across his forehead from falling off a cliff in search of an eagle’s nest, formed the British Oological Association. The group, which renamed itself the Jourdain Society after Jourdain died, in 1940, proclaimed that it was the only organization in the country dedicated to egg collecting.
It has not fared well. In 1954, the Protection of Birds Act outlawed the taking of most wild-bird eggs in the U.K. In 1981, some ninety species were declared Schedule 1; possession of their eggs, unless they were taken before 1954, is a crime. Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings. By the nineteen-nineties, more than half of Jourdain Society members had egg-collecting convictions, according to the R.S.P.B. One member recently agreed to a radio interview only after insuring that his voice would be disguised.
“An awful lot of the ornithological knowledge we hold dear is based on the work of both professional and amateur naturalists over the course of the last two hundred years, and that involved significant amounts of collecting,” Russell said, as we passed an aisle with Jourdain’s eggs. “But today’s collectors are not what I would call ornithologists. These are obsessives who have chosen eggs as a particularly attractive thing. The suspect part of the attraction is that you’re not allowed to do it.” (...)
Despite Britain’s fervor for wildlife preservation, it has no central government agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In terms of fighting wildlife crime, its closest equivalent, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, created in 2006, has only eight full-time employees. Both the public and law enforcement rely on the R.S.P.B. investigative team to help prevent bird crimes.
Egg-collecting cases make up about twenty-five per cent of the team’s work, but egg collecting is the only wildlife crime that warrants an ongoing nationwide police initiative, called Operation Easter. The program, which Shorrock helped launch in 1997, has enabled the R.S.P.B. to combine decades’ worth of intelligence on egg collectors into a national police database. “It’s very rare in the U.K. to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock, told me. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”
It had been a busy season for the investigators. Aside from the bust in Suffolk, the R.S.P.B. was guarding a red-backed-shrike nest in the South of England twenty-four hours a day. Two pairs of shrikes appeared in 2010, the first time the species had been seen nesting in the U.K. since the mid-nineteen-eighties; many blamed its disappearance on egg collectors. When word of their reappearance got out, dozens of people volunteered to protect the nests. “With all the crimes I’ve dealt with, egg collecting is always the one that upsets the public the most,” Shorrock, a former Manchester cop, told me.
On the table next to him was an embossed photo album titled “Egg Collectors and Their Associates.” Under one photograph of a group of men around a picnic table, someone had written, “Who are these guys?” Most egg collectors don’t seem interested in selling or even trading eggs, only in possessing them. “They’re not normal criminals,” Shorrock said. Thomas estimated that there were about fifty active collectors left. “We know who they are,” he added.
Between them, Thomas and Shorrock had been inside many of the collectors’ homes, some of them several times. It was like one big family, almost. Daniel Lingham, whose home contained thirty-six hundred eggs, broke into tears when Thomas and the police arrived in 2004. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. “I can’t stop.”
The Isle of Rum, a forty-one-square-mile rock, is inhabited by about forty people, many of them employed by the Scottish Natural Heritage, an environmental organization charged with protecting wildlife. Rum has red deer and an assortment of rare birds, including merlins and white-tailed sea eagles, and it is a principal breeding ground for the Manx shearwater, a seabird with a distinctly eerie call. For this reason, as Everitt knew, the place was also a target for egg collectors, a secretive network of men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds. (...)At the turn of the twentieth century, as the conservation movement began raising awareness of endangered species, the collecting of wild-bird eggs came under scrutiny. In 1922 in London, Earl Buxton, addressing the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, warned of the “distinct menace” posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithologists’ Union, of which Lord Rothschild was a member. Indignant, Rothschild split off and, with the Reverend Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, a cantankerous Oxford-educated ornithologist who bore a scar across his forehead from falling off a cliff in search of an eagle’s nest, formed the British Oological Association. The group, which renamed itself the Jourdain Society after Jourdain died, in 1940, proclaimed that it was the only organization in the country dedicated to egg collecting.
It has not fared well. In 1954, the Protection of Birds Act outlawed the taking of most wild-bird eggs in the U.K. In 1981, some ninety species were declared Schedule 1; possession of their eggs, unless they were taken before 1954, is a crime. Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings. By the nineteen-nineties, more than half of Jourdain Society members had egg-collecting convictions, according to the R.S.P.B. One member recently agreed to a radio interview only after insuring that his voice would be disguised.
“An awful lot of the ornithological knowledge we hold dear is based on the work of both professional and amateur naturalists over the course of the last two hundred years, and that involved significant amounts of collecting,” Russell said, as we passed an aisle with Jourdain’s eggs. “But today’s collectors are not what I would call ornithologists. These are obsessives who have chosen eggs as a particularly attractive thing. The suspect part of the attraction is that you’re not allowed to do it.” (...)
Despite Britain’s fervor for wildlife preservation, it has no central government agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In terms of fighting wildlife crime, its closest equivalent, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, created in 2006, has only eight full-time employees. Both the public and law enforcement rely on the R.S.P.B. investigative team to help prevent bird crimes.
Egg-collecting cases make up about twenty-five per cent of the team’s work, but egg collecting is the only wildlife crime that warrants an ongoing nationwide police initiative, called Operation Easter. The program, which Shorrock helped launch in 1997, has enabled the R.S.P.B. to combine decades’ worth of intelligence on egg collectors into a national police database. “It’s very rare in the U.K. to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock, told me. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”
It had been a busy season for the investigators. Aside from the bust in Suffolk, the R.S.P.B. was guarding a red-backed-shrike nest in the South of England twenty-four hours a day. Two pairs of shrikes appeared in 2010, the first time the species had been seen nesting in the U.K. since the mid-nineteen-eighties; many blamed its disappearance on egg collectors. When word of their reappearance got out, dozens of people volunteered to protect the nests. “With all the crimes I’ve dealt with, egg collecting is always the one that upsets the public the most,” Shorrock, a former Manchester cop, told me.
On the table next to him was an embossed photo album titled “Egg Collectors and Their Associates.” Under one photograph of a group of men around a picnic table, someone had written, “Who are these guys?” Most egg collectors don’t seem interested in selling or even trading eggs, only in possessing them. “They’re not normal criminals,” Shorrock said. Thomas estimated that there were about fifty active collectors left. “We know who they are,” he added.
Between them, Thomas and Shorrock had been inside many of the collectors’ homes, some of them several times. It was like one big family, almost. Daniel Lingham, whose home contained thirty-six hundred eggs, broke into tears when Thomas and the police arrived in 2004. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. “I can’t stop.”
by Julia Rubinstein, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Richard Barnes
