On May 3, 2010 Jeffrey Lendrum was getting ready to board a flight to Dubai.

The non-descript middle-aged man went into the shower at the Emirates’ business class lounge at Birmingham International Airport like the thousands of other businessmen who travel through each day.

But unlike most, Lendrum's business was part of a far murkier world that linked up the rolling hills of the Rhondda Valley to billionaire sheiks in the Middle East.

Before Rhodesian Lendrum could board the flight he was found with rare peregrine falcon eggs worth £70,000 bound in socks and strapped to his body to keep them warm.

The ex-SAS member has been caught across the world trying to smuggle rare eggs with the press dubbing him the 'Pablo Escobar of eggs' - a nickname he apparently doesn't like.

The top egg thief has scaled vast cliff faces from Quebec to Patagonia and the Rhondda Valley to grab eggs to sell them off, it is believed, to rich people across the Middle East.

Lendrum visited the Valleys to catch several eggs

The 57-year-old has been arrested on four continents, is wanted by the Brazilian authorities and is known to dangle from helicopters to steal the eggs.

American journalist Joshua Hammer has followed Lendrum's story for many years and even retraced his steps in the Valleys.

Hammer said when Lendrum was around seven or eight he was already climbing trees and going after birds nests.

He said his criminal pursuits seemed to be his main source of income, escalating until he was procuring live eggs for sheiks in the United Arab Emirates.

Lendrum was first arrested in 1984 and has been on trial for a total of four times, the most recent in January.

Hammer said: "I went up to the Valleys twice with officers from the National Wildlife Crime Unit.

"The guy I was with had got the GPS points Lendrum used so we could go to the exact spots.

"He brought along his climbing equipment and he rappelled down a cliff, sometimes 20, 50, 100 feet.

"The ones in the Rhondda are pretty hard to reach. I think he did it early in the morning, where there aren't many people around."

Jeffrey Lendrum when he was jailed in 2010
Peregrine Falcon chicks which hatched from eggs seized from Jeffrey Lendrum following a previous arrest

Hammer, who has met Lendrum, said he did refer to himself as 'Pablo Escobar' but in a "annoyed" way at how the UK media has portrayed him.

Writing in OutsideOnline, Hammer wrote of when he arrived in the Rhondda: "Below us lay the stark and treeless Rhondda Valley, carved by glaciers during the Ice Age and bordered to the north by the red-sandstone peaks ofBrecon Beacons National Park, dotted with the burial cairns of Bronze Age tribes.

"When we reached the top of the escarpment and got out of the car, I was nearly blown off my feet by a gust of wind."

He added that the outcroppings are "perfect" spots for peregrines to lay their eggs.

Detectives later found that Lendrum had wandered the cliffs for days, and would have had to have set a fixed rope at the top of the escarpment and rappel down, putting the eggs into an insulated bag.

Despite the high cost of the bird eggs, Hammer said Lendrum didn't appear to benefit much financially.

Interpol estimate the illegal trade in wildlife is estimated to be worth up to $20bn a year.

Joshua Hammer

Hammer said: "The mystery is where the money goes. Even though the money paid for the eggs can be astronomical in these cases, there's no evidence that he got rich from this - unless he's got some money stashed."

Hammer said Lendrum often claims he is protecting the birds instead of smuggling them.

He said: "[Lendrum] is a hard guy to read. People do like him, he's a charming person."

Hammer's book on Lendrum, titled 'The Falcon Thief' is due to be published in 2020.

Lendrum was caught in 2010  and caged for 30 months, later reduced to 18 months, after he tried to export 14 rare peregrine falcon eggs – which have the highest level of international protection – to Dubai.

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Lendrum, was caught after an airport cleaner spotted him repeatedly dashing in and out of the shower in the Emirates’ business class lounge at Birmingham International Airport and alerted counter-terrorism police.

Eleven of the eggs were successfully hatched and the highly-protected chicks released back into the wild.

Lendrum, who regularly travelled around the world on business, admitted one count of trying to export the eggs and another of stealing them from a nest on the side of a mountain in Rhondda.

At the time he had previous convictions in Zimbabwe and Canada for stealing rare eggs.


At the time Judge Christopher Hodson quoted one of his peers saying "environmental crime, if established, strikes not only at a locality and its population, but in some measure to the planet and its future. Nobody should be allowed to doubt its seriousness or to forget that one side of the environmental story is always untold".

The court heard officers also found thousands of pounds of cash on Lendrum when they arrested him.

Lendrum has previous convictions in Zimbabwe and Canada for stealing rare eggs and was also caught at an airport in Sao Paolo in 2016 but disappeared when he was released on bail to appeal against his sentence.

In January 2017, Lendrum went on the run after Brazillian authorities said they had lost him.

In January this year The Times reported Lendrum was convicted and jailed for three years for crimes related to the theft of eggs from the nests of rare birds of prey.