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.
The ferry ride the next morning was choppy; clouds hung almost to the water. Everitt, a moonfaced man of forty-six, wondered what kind of day lay ahead. In Victorian times, egg collecting in England was the quaint province of natural historians, but, as laws protecting endangered birds were passed, the activity became a criminal act. Collectors had gone underground; some communicated with one another using code numbers as aliases. In his ten years on the job, Everitt had never encountered a collector.
Halfway across the sound, Everitt was contacted by radio. It was the Northern Constabulary: the suspect was on the jetty. As Everitt disembarked, he saw a rangy man dressed in camouflage leaning against a bulging rucksack. He looked to be in his late forties, with sunken brown eyes. Everitt approached and asked his name. “As soon as he said it, I thought, We’ve found our person.”
The man was Matthew Gonshaw, the most notorious egg collector in Britain. An unemployed Londoner, Gonshaw had already served three prison terms on egg-collecting charges. When he was last apprehended, in 2004, investigators had seized nearly six hundred eggs, a hundred and four of them hidden inside a secret compartment in his bed frame.
There is no police station on Rum, so Everitt took Gonshaw to the Scottish Natural Heritage office, where Gonshaw consented to a search of his rucksack. It held several small syringes, which collectors use to forcibly blow out the contents of eggs; topographical maps of the area; a loop of rope; and a military survival guide. Everitt had also noticed shredded newspaper sticking out of some food containers. Inside them were twenty eggs, including eight of the Manx shearwater.
Gonshaw refused to answer questions; he knew the police would raid his apartment and asked that they get the key from the landlord instead of breaking down the door. Everitt called his Edinburgh office, which informed the Metropolitan Police, in London. Within hours, a joint special-forces team from the police and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the U.K.’s largest conservation organization, were preparing to search Gonshaw’s flat. Mark Thomas, a senior investigator for the R.S.P.B. who had become a minor celebrity on the environmental-crime circuit for his work on egg-collecting cases, told me recently that, when he got the call, “I put down the phone and literally ran to my car.”
Most of the bird eggs collected by Britain’s preëminent natural historians are housed at the Natural History Museum at Tring, forty-five minutes north of London. The Tring museum has the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a single person and is situated on the former estate of its founder, Lord Walter Rothschild, the banker and zoologist, who was famous for driving a zebra-drawn carriage. Rothschild died in 1937; more than two hundred animal species, including a worm, bear his name.
Today, the museum at Tring comprises six galleries, housing thousands of taxidermy specimens, among them crocodiles, domestic dogs, wild asses, and every known species of zebra, including the now extinct quagga, the last of which died in Amsterdam in 1883. It is also home to the largest bird-egg collection in the world, with around two million specimens, which has made it a leading institution for researchers. In the nineteen-sixties, the collection figured prominently in a study by the conservationist Derek Ratcliffe, who wanted to know why peregrine falcons were failing to produce offspring. By comparing recent eggs with older ones at the museum, Ratcliffe discovered that the shells had become perilously thin, likely owing to pesticides that the birds were eating. The attention led to a Europe-wide ban on DDT.
Oology—the study of eggs—is “one of the most exciting areas of ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at Tring, told me. But Russell, a small, serious man with an orange goatee, was not eager to show me the collection. It has been, he said, “completely locked down” since 1979, after Mervyn Shorthouse, a regular visitor posing as a wheelchair-bound invalid, stole ten thousand eggs in a three-year period. I’d been directed to a side entrance next to a dumpster, where a guard took my bag and identification and escorted me to Russell, who held my passport to my face and gave me a hard stare. “That will be kept on file for five years,” he said, and led me down an echoing corridor to a photocopier, where he scanned my documents.
The museum’s eggs are kept in an acrid basement filled with row after row of temperature-controlled steel cabinets, some arranged by collector. Russell grabbed a key off his belt loop and took me to one of the cabinets, which opened like a bank vault. Inside a glass-covered drawer, like rare jewels, were groups of small eggs, speckled blue, beige, and gray, each with a small round hole where its contents had been extracted. “These are Stuart Baker’s cuckoos,” Russell said. “Look how much variety there is.” I followed him to another cabinet; inside was a single white egg from a Samoan wood rail, collected in 1873. Russell paused to wipe his eyes. “That is the only egg there ever will be,” he said. “Because it’s extinct. But at least we have that one window.”
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.”
The two men every serious egg collector knows are Mark Thomas and Guy Shorrock. They are senior investigators for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which keeps a database on wildlife-crime offenders and has assisted law enforcement in the prosecution of dozens of egg collectors. Founded in 1889 by women denied membership in the British Ornithologists’ Union, the R.S.P.B. was granted a royal charter in 1904, around the same time that, in the U.S., Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed his support for the Audubon Society. Today, the R.S.P.B. is one of the most influential protectionist groups in the world, with more than a million members; in Scotland, it is the eighth-biggest landowner.
The organization’s headquarters are in Sandy, an hour north of London, on a sprawling forty-acre nature reserve. Six hundred employees work there, in buildings named for birds. The investigations office—a small open space with six desks, in the Bittern building—overlooks a manicured garden and a pond. “Once, an e-mail went out to the entire staff that there was a honey buzzard outside, and within minutes four hundred people were there,” Thomas told me, shaking his head.
Thomas, who is forty-one, wears a buzz cut and round wire-rimmed glasses and has the earnest disposition of a schoolboy politician, which belies his determination; colleagues liken him to “a terrier with rats.” When I arrived last August, he was standing at his desk in a T-shirt and parachute pants, and gazing at an ordnance map on the wall. The previous week, he had accompanied police in Suffolk on the raid of a suspected egg collector who was also a police officer. They found six hundred and fifty eggs in his home, and two sets of handwritten data cards with scientific notations. One set dated the eggs to the nineteen-forties and early fifties, when taking eggs was still legal. The second set—found inside an empty water tank in the attic—contained the same notations but with the real dates of collection. “It was the perfect crime,” Thomas told me. “Except he’s kept all the evidence.” Thomas had been working twelve-hour days, feeding the information into an Excel spreadsheet in preparation for an upcoming pretrial interview. “The guy is snookered, basically,” he said.
In the corner, Shorrock, who is lanky and handsome at fifty-one, with light-blue eyes and sprouts of silver hair, was preparing two large overnight backpacks. He was going “somewhere up north”—he wouldn’t say where—to investigate a possible crime: an estate owner allegedly had set traps for birds of prey in order to protect his young pheasants for the hunting season. Shorrock would be camping out for at least two nights.
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.” In 2006, when Colin Watson, an infamous collector, fell to his death from a tree while attempting to reach a sparrow-hawk nest, a Jourdain Society member called the R.S.P.B. as a courtesy. (The headline in the London Daily Mirror read “NEST IN PEACE.”) Another time, during a raid on a collector’s house, Shorrock found a piece of paper with his own name and address on it; he subsequently moved.
Thomas hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I went with him to the Snipe cafeteria; he ordered an egg on a roll. Unlike Shorrock, Thomas had been a bird fanatic since his childhood, in Sheffield, where he was a member of the R.S.P.B.’s youth brigade. After getting a conservation degree, he took a research position with the R.S.P.B. at the age of twenty-five. “I knew I couldn’t face a job that wasn’t directly involved with a tangible benefit to birds,” he said. In 1999, with no investigative experience, he beat out a pool of applicants for a position as an investigator.
His tenure began as Operation Easter was getting under way. Two weeks into the job, he went to the county of Devon, where he joined a police raid of the home of a suspected egg collector. When they arrived at the house, the man immediately handed over a large display cabinet containing about five hundred stolen eggs. “I thought, This is strange,” Thomas remembered. As they were leaving, an officer smelled marijuana; it prompted the unit to go back to the door. “We asked if there was anything else he wanted to tell us,” Thomas recalled. “He pulled out a box and he said, ‘I don’t know why I got this, but it’s an automatic weapon.’ ” The police seized about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of cannabis. That night, as Thomas made the long ride back to Sandy, the story was already on BBC Radio. “I thought, If this is what it’s like, it’s going to be amazing,” Thomas told me.
The bust had come about because the suspect’s brother was overheard in a pub in Scotland, talking about bird eggs. Someone followed him out, took down his license-plate number, and called the R.S.P.B. Before Operation Easter, R.S.P.B. investigators had resorted to putting microphones in trees, hoping to hear collectors as they climbed toward nests. Now license-plate numbers could be fed into a police database. The man was an associate of other known collectors; a judge granted a search warrant.
At the time, the R.S.P.B. was receiving about one report of nest theft per day, some from wives bitter about their husbands’ all-consuming hobby. All tips were kept on file. Collectors were mostly English, and most of the U.K.’s rare-bird nests were in Scotland. Surveillance cameras on the two main roads between the countries were programmed to log the license plates of cars that passed by. Thomas noted two patterns: cars belonging to suspected collectors appeared with greater frequency between March and June, the breeding season; and many of them were registered to members of the Jourdain Society.
The Jourdain Society’s eggs, which it referred to as “the national collection,” were housed in a museum in Oxford. Thomas talked a secretary there into forwarding him the quarterly Bulletin of the Jourdain Society, which announced upcoming dinners, held in Gloucester at the Fleece Inn. Thomas started staking them out, “just to get an idea of who was who.”
In the spring of 2001, the R.S.P.B. received a call from a bird-watcher on South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. It is a Gaelic-speaking area with severe weather, rough terrain, and a number of endangered birds, including golden eagles. About four hundred and fifty pairs of them are left in the U.K.
The birder had reported seeing a man scrambling along the side of a rock face in a hailstorm. Eagles often build their nests, or aeries, among rocks like the ones the man was scaling. An island-wide manhunt commenced. It culminated two days later, at the Howmore Hostel campground, where the suspect was found near his tent. His name would become synonymous with the defiance of the modern egg collector: Matthew Gonshaw, from London.
Thomas and Shorrock were puzzled: not only had they never heard of Gonshaw but they weren’t aware of any egg collectors from London. Gonshaw had no eggs on him, but he was held in custody. The next day, Shorrock met up with police and headed to Gonshaw’s apartment, located in a row of drab three-story units in the East End. The police forced the door. Inside, they found maps, climbing equipment, and bird books. There was a book by a Jourdain Society member, “Cryptanalysis of Ornithological Literature,” which explained how to decipher nest locations by piecing together details from mainstream bird literature, and a photograph of a legendary early-twentieth-century egg collector, John Walpole-Bond. “In memory of Jock—The Man,” Gonshaw had written on it. Shorrock told the East London Advertiser, “There is somebody else involved here.” He was sure Gonshaw was connected to other known collectors.
But Gonshaw, who was then thirty-eight, turned out to be an anomaly. He was single, unemployed, and living on public assistance. He had eluded road surveillance because he didn’t drive or own a car. Unlike the prototypical collector of means, Gonshaw, as his journals revealed, was a man who struggled to afford a pastime that consumed him. He carefully plotted his routes, bought advance-saver bus and train tickets, and calculated the cost of everything he would need, from butter to packets of instant custard made by a company called Bird’s.
He had slept in tents and hiked through the hinterlands of Scotland and England. Once, while trying to find shelter in the rugged Scottish Cairngorms, he unexpectedly encountered a wader directly under his feet. “My heart almost jumped to my mouth,” he wrote in his journal. “A purple sandpiper it was.” He also kept a close watch on London’s birds, noting at one point an increase in peregrine falcons in central London to “at least five pairs . . . as I predicted many moons ago.”
Shorrock found no eggs in Gonshaw’s apartment, but Gonshaw’s journals described the breeding schedules of dozens of protected birds and suggested that he had taken full clutches, or nestfuls, of eggs from choughs, red-throated divers, dotterels, and marsh harriers—all Schedule 1 birds. Nest locations were listed, with dates. Shorrock matched these with the R.S.P.B.’s own information about the locations of nests where eggs had gone missing.
Gonshaw was assigned a court-appointed attorney and pleaded not guilty. Despite not having physical evidence of eggs in his possession, he faced two trials, in England and Scotland, and was convicted on eight counts: one of disturbing a golden eagle (later overturned); two of possessing collecting equipment; four of taking Schedule 1 eggs; and one of attempting to pervert the course of justice by giving a fake name to investigators when he was apprehended. “In all my years, I’ve never lost a case,” Shorrock told me.
Worse for Gonshaw, an environmental bill that the R.S.P.B. had been pushing for twenty years had just passed. It included new sentencing guidelines, allowing custodial sentences of up to six months for taking Schedule 1 bird eggs. Gonshaw was among the first collectors who were sent to jail. When he heard the verdict, Gonshaw yelled, “I’ve never seen anything so sick in a court in my life!”
Gonshaw was not a member of the Jourdain Society, but his journal contained the names of society members and notes to himself on how he might gain entry. One of the members whom Gonshaw contacted was Jim Whitaker, who had long been on the executive board. Whitaker, who is seventy-eight years old, lives in Yorkshire, four hours north of London, in a house on a hill, from which he operates a publishing company called Peregrine Books. Peregrine has put out sixty-one titles. Some are about dogs, but most are about the U.K.’s rare birds and its early egg collectors, including a volume of profiles: “The Egg Collectors of Great Britain and Ireland.” When I reached him by phone, he seemed nervous. “Have you been speaking to the R.S.P.B.?” he asked me. He told me to call back the following day. When I did, his wife answered and promptly hung up on me. The next day, I reached Whitaker again, and he seemed more relaxed. “It’s hard on the women,” he explained. “There’s a limit to the support they’ll give you. They don’t have the same obsession the husbands have.”
Whitaker began egg collecting in Yorkshire as a child after the Second World War. “All the beaches were covered in barbed wire, so those my age went out bird nesting.” He made a career as a corporate business consultant, and collected as a hobby. For Whitaker, the appeal was both the beauty of the eggs and “the fieldcraft” involved in acquiring them. Some collectors are renowned for their climbing skills in reaching nests. Whitaker was revered as a “nest finder,” which requires careful research and patience. He once spent twelve hours tracking a short-eared owl to see where it would return to so that, when it left its nest again, he could take its eggs.
Whitaker does not believe that serious collectors are endangering birds. They track breeding schedules so that they can get to a nest early, when the contents of the eggs are still liquid and the shells thicker and less likely to fracture. They take the entire clutch of eggs. “That way, the bird will typically lay again,” Whitaker said. An adage repeated by collectors is that they are only stealing a bird’s time.
Shorrock disagrees. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard that,” he told me. “When a bird loses a clutch of eggs, some species will re-lay. This is designed to cope with natural failure, not the criminal hand of man. For many species, such as golden eagles and ospreys, once the eggs are taken, it is very rare for the birds to re-lay, and the breeding season for that pair is over.”
Whitaker was inducted into the Jourdain Society in 1974. The group operated as a social club. There were quarterly meetings that began with toasts to Jourdain and to the Queen, followed by presentations of eggs by its members. “People in the society then, they were businessmen, Army officers,” Whitaker said, his voice trembling. “There were three doctors. In those days, it wasn’t an arrestable offense.”
The society’s membership began to dwindle after July of 1994. Shorrock was part of a six-member investigations unit that went to the Red Lion Hotel in Salisbury, where a Jourdain dinner was taking place. The investigators booked rooms overlooking the hotel courtyard and positioned an attractive female colleague at the bar before the meeting. Several society members appeared. One of them approached the R.S.P.B. plant and began chatting with her. Before long, the man pulled a photo album from his bag and began showing her pictures of nests. “You must be with the R.S.P.B.,” she said to him. Shorrock, who was straining to listen from his room above, almost fell out of the window.
“This is the cream of British ornithology,” the man objected. Two hours later, the society’s dessert course ended abruptly when a squadron of police broke into the banquet room. “If my memory serves me right, there were sixteen policemen,” Whitaker told me, incredulously. “We acted like gentlemen.” As a result of evidence obtained from the raid, a nationwide series of stings was carried out three months later. On one day, police seized eleven thousand eggs from homes in seven counties. Six Jourdain Society members were convicted and fined.
“It’s a business,” Whitaker told me. “Years ago, an R.S.P.B. chap told a friend of mine that for every successful egg-collecting case they get thirty thousand new members,” each paying yearly dues. (The R.S.P.B. says it does not assess membership in that manner.)
Whitaker’s home had been raided three times. On one occasion, two thousand eight hundred and ninety-five eggs were found; he was convicted of possession of a hundred and forty-eight. In 1997, he was the target of a hidden-camera television documentary, in which he was captured on tape talking about the locations of eagles’ nests. Afterward, convinced that he was being followed by the R.S.P.B. on a trip to Scotland, he mailed himself a box of chocolate eggs from a remote post office. Two days later, a postman appeared at his door with the package. When Whitaker signed for it, the man told him to open the box. “I said, ‘I thought you were a postman,’ ” Whitaker told me. “He said, ‘I’m an undercover policeman.’ ” Whitaker bit into one of the eggs to make his point. “I’m an honest man, generally,” he told me. “I’m a conservationist in a big way.”
In 2004, Whitaker got his revenge by publishing a new book, “The Golden Eagle, with Chapters on the Sea Eagle,” which would become of significant interest to the R.S.P.B. and collectors. Whitaker had gathered intelligence from his contacts about eagles’ aeries, and in an appendix he listed their six-digit G.P.S. locations. He printed three hundred copies of the book and sold them exclusively out of his home. Among his buyers was Gonshaw.
“He used to ring me up,” Whitaker said. “And he came up to see me.” They had at least one thing in common: as a teenager, in the nineteen-seventies, Gonshaw collected eggs with friends from bombed-out, overgrown lots. The East End’s Club Row was an animal market; Gonshaw sold his eggs at the Birdcage, an eccentric pub where live birds were kept in cages. After high school, Gonshaw worked odd jobs as a driver and a lifeguard.
When I asked Whitaker to tell me more, his tone grew sharp: “If you get associated with people like Gonshaw, you’re likely to bring the wrath of the law down on you even though you’ve done nothing.” After he calmed down, he said, “I felt sorry for him. He was so alone.”
Whitaker wouldn’t tell me why he didn’t help Gonshaw get into the Jourdain Society, but it’s likely that he was considered a security risk. Whitaker acknowledged that the society’s board had concluded that it had no choice but to take on new members in order to survive. The decision proved fateful. In 2002, the police and the R.S.P.B. raided the Liverpool home of a collector who had begun attending meetings, whom they had followed for five years. When they got inside the house, they found the suspect in the bathroom, flushing hundreds of eggs down the toilet. Shorrock ran downstairs, shut off the plumbing, and spent the next several weeks piecing shells back together as evidence.
The home also contained a trove of incriminating coded letters to and from collectors, which led to a series of busts. “Dear 15,” one of the letters began. It praised “JS top eggers”—Jourdain Society members—who had procured “ ‘affidavits’ from about 3 or 4 persons” attesting that their eggs were taken before it was illegal to do so. (Eggs are unusual among animal remains in that there is no way to determine their age.) Such precautions are “not just a good idea, but absolutely essential. Yours ever, 86.”
The R.S.P.B. worked out a key that matched names to the numbers. Among those with whom the collector had corresponded was Phil Beard, a self-employed carpenter who had been recently inducted into the Jourdain Society. “You had the well-to-do gentry here and the commoner here,” Beard told me, describing the group in its earlier days. “They hardly ever spoke to each other.” After he joined the group, Beard was pulled aside by a board member and warned that if he was caught he would be thrown out. Some members began procuring safe houses for their eggs.
Meanwhile, in 2004, Gonshaw was sent to jail again after being caught raiding a nest on the Isle of Tiree, in Scotland. The subsequent raid of his apartment turned up a correspondence with the onetime Jourdain Society member Mike Dawson, a.k.a. 86. Dawson, the author of the book on cryptanalysis that Gonshaw owned, warned Gonshaw against continuing his activity. “Moving to places in Scotland would be very dangerous as you would stick out wherever you went,” he wrote to Gonshaw, adding at the bottom, “Hope you destroy all my letters.”
A few days after speaking to Whitaker, I accompanied Thomas to the undisclosed location in Devon, along England’s southwest coast, where the R.S.P.B. was keeping its twenty-four-hour watch over the red-backed shrikes. Thomas hadn’t been down to see the birds yet, and when he picked me up in his family minivan he seemed pumped, like a kid going to a big football match. “The young birds from this nest will determine the future of the shrike in the U.K.,” he said. “The whole thing’s on a knife’s edge.”
It was a long day, involving three trains and an off-road car ride. Thomas wore hiking boots and had a backpack filled with rain gear, snacks, and sandwiches. He moved quickly through the stations when we transferred, boarding early.
According to conservationists, the fact that the shrikes had returned for a third year meant that they were recolonizing. But in the previous two years two pairs had come and there had been two broods; this time there was just the one nest. It had also been one of the rainiest seasons on record. A first nest had failed: the eggs never hatched, possibly owing to the weather. “The last thing these birds need are collectors,” Thomas told me. Nonetheless, two of them had already shown up, hiking along a path next to the nest, the location of which had never been made public. Thomas was hardly surprised. “It’s a Venus flytrap,” he said. “They have to go there.”
The nest site was situated half a mile into a nature reserve lined with tall Norway spruce trees. When we arrived, a staffer in shorts and a baseball cap was training a Swarovski telescope on the nest, about two hundred metres away. Another guard, on break, was sunning himself next to a green camper, which functioned as an office for coördinating volunteers, who had been given photographs of known collectors. They recognized the two collectors instantly and phoned the local police, who responded by paying them a warning visit.
We continued down a hiking trail and over a small ravine to a second guard station, closer to the nest. Colin Marker, an affable white-bearded retiree in his third year as a volunteer guard, was seated on a rock with a pair of binoculars and a steno pad. “1300 Visit by Mark Thomas and a journalist,” his entry documenting our arrival read. Next to him were two handmade wooden paddles. “It’s a clapper,” Marker said—a noisemaker to scare off animals. Collectors weren’t the only predators the birds faced; magpies could attack. Thomas used to run after kestrels, but he quit. “One day, I was chasing one and I said, ‘I’m just not doing it anymore—this is completely mental,’ ” he said.
The nest was in a vexing location, only thirty yards from the hiking trail. Nest sites are picked by the males, two of whom had arrived from somewhere in East Africa in June, a week before the female. Both presented her with food, and then sat upright on their respective branches, singing. The female chose her mate; the other male hadn’t been seen since.
My binoculars were trained on a barely visible clump of branches when the female appeared on the edge of the nest. She was tiny, with a barrel-chested posture. Her mate sat on a nearby branch, his fuzzy light-blue head twitching in all directions. Thomas guessed that the eggs had just hatched, and that the nest contained at least two chicks. The previous two years, the R.S.P.B. had been able to announce the nest’s success at the Rutland Bird Fair, one of the world’s largest annual birding events. “It’s absolutely mega,” Thomas said. “Even the collectors go.”
Marker winced. “If I got them in a room . . . there’s no punishment too harsh,” he said.
One of the R.S.P.B. contract guards living at the site took a more practical view: “If it weren’t for the collectors, I’d be out of a job.”
On the morning of June 2, 2011, the day after Gonshaw was arrested on the Isle of Rum, his apartment was raided by an eight-man squad in riot gear from the Metropolitan Police. When Thomas got to Gonshaw’s third-floor landing, the apartment door was splintered on the floor and the officer in charge, Stephen Rodgers, was on the phone with the building manager. “That’s it,” the manager said. “That’s the last time I fix that door.”
Thomas pulled out his video camera and began recording as the officer, in a bobby hat and coat, solemnly narrated an ascent on a ladder through a small hatch in Gonshaw’s ceiling. He found hundreds of eggs neatly arranged by species in three handmade wooden cabinets, the dimensions and pencil sketches of which were in Gonshaw’s journals. Gonshaw had systematically replaced his entire collection since his last arrest. He had six hundred and ninety-seven eggs. Among them were eggs of a rare osprey and of the beloved avocet, the long-legged wader that adorns the R.S.P.B.’s logo.
Thomas spent a month cataloguing the eggs. Eventually, he came upon the evidence that he knew would break the case open. It was a clutch of three golden-eagle eggs, already a rarity, as eagles typically lay only in twos. The shells were heavily damaged by large holes in the sides. Gonshaw must have reached the nest in mid-April, well into the bird’s nesting cycle; it appeared that he had removed live chicks. Thomas photographed the eggs and later distributed the images to the media. The Guardian likened Gonshaw’s crime to a third-trimester abortion, referring to the “almost full-term chicks.”
Even Whitaker was appalled. “The thing must have been nearly hatching,” he told me. “He punched a hole in the side and dragged the chick out. Now, any sort of responsible collector would never do that.”
Gonshaw was unrepentant. In fact, he said almost nothing in two pretrial interviews with Thomas and Rodgers, who typed up the transcript. “It was twenty-four thousand words,” Rodgers told me. “They were all our words.” At one point, they asked Gonshaw if he wanted mental-health counselling. He refused.
Thomas began to research the Anti-Social Behavior Order, a controversial penalty in the U.K. which amounts to a restraining order. No one had ever received an ASBO for a wildlife crime. In order to prove its merit, the prosecution would have to show that Gonshaw had caused “harassment, alarm or distress.” Thomas set up interviews with volunteers and employees at nature reserves. “When they were told, ‘Your nest has failed because it was taken by Mr. Gonshaw,’ we asked them, ‘Did you feel harassed, alarmed?’ And the majority of them did,” Rodgers, who helped Thomas conduct the interviews, told me.
Gonshaw pleaded guilty to ten egg-collecting and possession charges. On the day of his sentencing, in December of 2011, he entered the courtroom with his face hidden behind an army-green mesh mask and flipped his middle finger at photographers. The judge, William Ashworth, was not amused. “This represents a methodical and meticulous planned venture by you,” he said to Gonshaw, “targeting rare breeding birds, placing them in peril, and causing great loss to local communities.” He gave Gonshaw a six-month sentence and accepted the Crown’s argument that his eggs be destroyed rather than allow Gonshaw the satisfaction of seeing them go to a museum. (In a separate trial, Gonshaw was sentenced to six months in prison in Scotland.) When Ashworth read his decision, Gonshaw shouted, “It’s a free country!” The decision also drew a complaint from Douglas Russell, the curator at the Tring museum, who wanted the eggs. “The loss of data-rich material, in my view, compounds the crime,” he told me. “I’ve already spoken to Mark Thomas on this and made my views clear.”
While Gonshaw was in prison, first in England and then in Scotland, hearings in the two countries resulted in both imposing the ASBO on him. In effect, Gonshaw was banned from Scotland during the breeding season, for life. Gonshaw’s lawyer called the English ruling “draconian.” Gonshaw immediately appealed.
Gonshaw was released from prison last August, just as the entire birding community was headed to the Rutland Bird Fair. The event draws twenty-five thousand people; six football-field-size white tents housed hundreds of booths, featuring birding equipment and clothing, bird-watching vacations, books, and representatives from conservation organizations. Thomas didn’t expect Gonshaw to be there. “It’s not his thing,” he told me.
When I saw Thomas at the R.S.P.B. booth on the first day, he caught my eye and indicated that we should rendezvous behind a tree. “The shrike failed,” he told me. Having seen no signs of life, one of the volunteers had finally approached the nest. There was one chick inside; it was dead, from malnutrition. It seemed unlikely that the red-backed shrike would return to the U.K. “Maybe it’s not meant to be,” Thomas said.
There was other news. Several collectors were on the premises, including one of the only serious collectors the R.S.P.B. had never been able to nab. The team had raided his house several times but come up empty. The man was believed by the R.S.P.B. to have moved his collecting to Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Scandinavia and to be shipping eggs to secret locations; Thomas had been in touch with Interpol. Gonshaw had not been seen.
As I walked away, an announcement came over the public-address system: “Jim Whitaker, please come to the information booth.” Soon, I was standing with four other people, all of us looking for Whitaker. The next day I found him walking around in a beige safari hat, shorts, and long white tube socks reaching almost to his knees. He was carrying a single copy of his new book, the second volume of “The Egg Collectors of Great Britain and Ireland: An Update.” “I brought it for you,” he said, when we sat down in a shaded rest area. Only dead collectors had been included in the book’s first volume; it was too risky to include anyone living. This time, Whitaker had allowed himself to be featured along with an old Jourdain colleague, also in his seventies. “I figured it’s going to be the last one,” he told me.
Egg collecting may be dying out in the U.K., but not in other parts of the world. Last June, police seized ten thousand eggs from a man’s house in Finland. The culprit was believed to belong to a network in Scandinavia, some of whose members were trying to sell the eggs. Nevin Hunter, the head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, said that Britain’s collectors had shifted their focus to photographing clutches of eggs as evidence of their having reached nests. No one had been jailed for it yet, Hunter said, but “the penalty is available.” Another wildlife group, the League Against Cruel Sports, had started using drones to do its own surveillance of hunters.
The next time I passed the R.S.P.B. booth, Thomas was standing with Phil Beard, the carpenter and Jourdain member. Beard, who is in his fifties, had a snaggletooth and wore a black baseball cap pulled low on his head. On his polo shirt was a pin featuring a spoon-billed sandpiper, a bird that breeds in Russia and is near extinction. “I hope to God they save that species,” he said. “What a beautiful bird it is.”
Beard said that he had quit collecting. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still photograph the occasional nest site,” he said. He also went to Jourdain Society meetings, but attendance was down to only fifteen or twenty people. “I’m probably one of the youngest members there,” he said, then corrected himself: officially, there were no members left. Afraid of legal exposure to prosecution as a criminal enterprise, the Jourdain Society had deactivated all its members, reinstituting them as “honorary members.” “We wanted to, if you like, clean the group,” Beard said.
His opinion on Gonshaw was simple: “What he’s doing is lunacy.” But he said that big industry, not collectors, was the real threat to endangered birds. “Guys like Shorrock, they go around the country doing everything they can to find egg collectors,” he said, raising his voice and pointing an index finger, which was wrapped in gauze, at me. “These guys breathe and sleep what they do. They’re extremists. At least they get paid.”
When I asked Shorrock later for his reaction, he threw his hands in the air. “This country, through Parliament, has decided we don’t want grown men wandering around the countryside, taking eggs out of birds’ nests,” he said. “That’s the reality of it.”
Gonshaw lives in the back half of the last apartment building at the end of a long L-shaped cul-de-sac. On my last day in England, I decided to stake it out.
The neighborhood is a multicultural, working-class area that has begun to gentrify; rents were going up, and several new pubs had opened. For a while, I sat on the curb at the entrance to the street, watching for people who looked like Gonshaw, and once rang his buzzer, which was draped by a spiderweb. Finally, I retreated to one of the pubs, from which I made three more sorties. On the third, a voice barked back from the intercom: “Yeah?”
I had sent Gonshaw a letter in prison and I asked if he’d received it. The connection went dead. I was about to leave when, through the glass door, I saw a man bounding down the stairs. He was wearing only a pair of tight black underwear. As he reached the foyer, he pulled a royal-blue T-shirt over his head, opened the front door, and leered at me. Photographs from his younger years depicted Gonshaw as a handsome man, but his face had become gaunt and his hairline had receded. He looked slim, fit, and unpredictable; his eyes darted nervously back and forth. “I don’t give a fuck about my reputation,” he said.
He had spent twenty years planning and executing demanding excursions to assemble a prodigious egg collection. The loss of it seemed to be something he was still figuring out how to process. “It’s not so much the prison,” he said. “I had some really rare eggs. It’s all gone now. It doesn’t matter, you know what I mean?” He paused, as if he could picture them in his mind. “If I had my own way, I’d have a big room full of cabinets of eggs and bird books. It would be my study room.”
I had just seen Gonshaw’s eggs: they were sitting on cotton balls in a locked evidence room at the R.S.P.B. headquarters, where Thomas would soon destroy them with a hammer. When I mentioned this to Gonshaw, he flew into a rage. “They’re house thieves,” he said of the R.S.P.B. “Common bloody house thieves!” He began to rant about big business and agriculture—removal of hedgerows, drainage of marshes, loss of habitat. “That’s why birds are becoming scarce,” he said. “All the seabirds are becoming scarce because all the Scottish fishermen are leaching everything out of the sea.”
A loud commuter train drowned him out, screeching past only fifty metres from the building. I asked Gonshaw if he planned on continuing to collect, but he wouldn’t answer directly. “It’s just something that is ingrained in some people,” he later said. Our conversation ended when I mentioned that I’d spoken to some members of the Jourdain Society. “What?” he said, opening the door wider and stepping toward me aggressively. “Are you trying to fuck with my head?” He slammed the door and went back upstairs.
On September 7, 2012, Thomas took the train down to London for the appeal hearing of Gonshaw’s ASBO. The hearing would set a precedent, whichever way it was determined. If upheld, Gonshaw would face five years in prison and a fine of up to twenty thousand pounds if he was caught in Scotland again. “I don’t see it stopping him,” Thomas said. He waited in the courtroom all day, but the case was not heard. By default, the judgment was upheld: Gonshaw never showed up. ♦
