Librarian singing timbuktu which told a riveting story of how timbuktu in northern probably managed with very brave helpers smuggled more than 350,000 historical manuscripts out from under militant to safety about 600 miles away. The book was a bestseller established as someone for truly, a great story. And hes done it again with his new book which recounts another to tail of adventure. This one about wildlife. Josh is a journalist by trade and hannah, a pretty adventurous globetrotting run himself, working for newsweek over nearly two decades. He joins this week in the late 1980s in the business and cleanup writer, is off to cover the rest of the world on postings that based him in berlin, jerusalem and back here in the u. S. In los angeles. For the past decade and a half, hes continue to report and travel widely, a range of publications. Four years ago, he won the National Magazine award and reported for peace title, nurses are dead and i dont know if im already infected. [laughter] it was still a prizewinning story. Told a story of a physician who led the effort to control the ebola outbreak. In addition to the timbuktu book, hes written three other previous works, one about his younger brother who became originalist religion fundamentalist. A nativity in bethlehem. Ive heard about the deadly 1923 earthquake and fire in japan. Its been said, he reports like a journalist and right like a novelist. That is certainly the case with his work in the falcon place. The book describes jeffrey flynn, notorious wildlife lover who for years, stole highly valued birds of prey and selling them to enthusiasts where falcons and other rafters are used for sports. The other central character in joshs story is a detective from the Wildlife Crime unit, Andy Mcwilliams. Specializes in mythological crime solving. And was determined to catch one. The book is a thrilling fastpaced chronicle but more than that. Its more than just a detective story set in a rare world filled with unusual characters and astounding birds. As one reviewer noted, its a cautionary tale about the love of nature can go very wrong. What happens when precious wildlife becomes a status symbol on the planet where nature is increasingly in peril. Welcome joshua. [applause] great detailed introduction. Thank you. I think this will always be my favorite bookstore and venue to talk about these things. Thanks everybody for coming out tonight, im amazed anybody goes to book events at all. Okay, its recorded. [laughter] anyway. Over the course of doing this particular talk now, three or four times since i got to new york, basically present a narrative without giving away the entire book. Illustrating cap narrative with pictures that i think help bring that story to life. I will very quickly start with an introduction how this, i presume most of you have not seen the book, how i stumbled into this thing. It came out in 2016 and its been a story that i followed for many years, beginning is achieved for newsweek, i made a couple of chips to timbuktu and continue to visit over the years and i got a couple of assignments to write about the assignment of timbuktu. I was briefed in that story when al qaeda invaded the country and people i know caught up in the violent of the capturing of the entire two thirds of the country. It was a story that i owned, i felt in way and it made sense that the book would come out of it. This is something completely different. Its like an act of desperation. I was looking for im of the product and i had thrown it out, terrible ideas including one about the, or even want to go into them. [laughter] fortunately, one day in 2017, i was with my kids and i picked up a london times and it was sitting in a cafe and there was a short article, about page 12 or so about this character named jeffrey, Something Like fief on the wing again. They love those bad ones. This was a story, all it said was this guy, a notorious thief known for helicopter ring and repelling down cliffs to reach rare falcon eggs dubai and it vanished and rearrested to prison in brazil and disappeared. Now the world, conservation world and Wildlife Police were alarmed. He might be coming back on the hunt. That was enough to ignite my interest and i began investigating it further and further and deeper and deeper. Coming obsessed in a way with the eggs. Which is sort of what a writer, a journalist does. Fiction, nonfiction, plunging deeper and deeper into a subject so without introduction, i will tell you a bit about the story as it unfolds in the books with some coherence. Without giving too much away. This story begins in a shower, emirates First Business class lounge at the International Airport in the uk. Where a very vigilant manager janitor notices a middle age white fellow, under script character coming into the washroom, the child all of his baggage, three thanks. Disappears in there for 20 minutes. Good janitor is waiting to keenly the place, he doesnt know whats going on. Security monitor looking at hundreds of closed captions in a Shopping Mall so he was trained to observed. After 20 minutes, the janitor goes inside the bathroom and sees absolutely nothing has been touched. Everything is completely dry, unused. Towels still folded. Toilet, nothing. So immediately he got suspicious. He starts rooting around and after five or ten minutes of looking through Ceiling Tiles and whatever, he finds a diaper, he sees a diaper in the corner of the room and opened it up and sees an egg at the bottom of the diaper with a single red painted red egg. Like an easter egg inside. He figured it was left by the guy just enough so hes completely mystified and somewhat alarmed. What could this possibly mean . Its probably something to do with drugs, hes not sure. Long story short, the Counterterrorism Police came to the scene, they take him away and stripsearched him and find beneath his tshirt, a hospital cost wrapped tightly around his body and inside the gauze are woolen socks. Inside the socks are 14 of these. They dont know what they are. The Counterterrorism Police are not trained at all in understanding what they are so they asked jeffrey, they looked at his passport and establish his identity. What are these . He tells them, they are duck eggs. They say okay, what you mind telling us why you are carrying raw duck eggs attached to your body . Your belly. He explains that his chiropractor told him he needs to where raw eggs wrapped around his body because it will prevent him from stooping and lead to tightening of his lower back muscles. [laughter] okay so they just dont know what theyve got on hand. [laughter] it at that time that they summ summon, they make a phone call to Andy Mcwilliams, if any of you have seen the reviews of this book, there have been a few good ones, they are satisfying to read but they tend to give short shrift to annick mcwilliam, this is a bad guy, good guy, hero and antihero. Any mcwilliam, might call him britains most famous Wildlife Police with a specialty in ornithological crime. He heres the story, realizes it may, breeding season. Incubating, nesting season. He realized the guy carrying eggs on his body, probably not to hide them but to keep them warm from the description, he instantly knows they are parent falcon. I had a better if an inch of one but some reason it didnt download. This is anyway, thats basical basically, this is a highly protected bird, a raptor, the fastest bird on the planet, it can going to a stupid dive to kill another bird in mid air. At the speed of up to 180 miles an hour. Mcwilliams knows they are highly prized by falconers in particular, especially the wealthy shapes of the united arab but hes never actually, hes heard rumors about this market, this black market to bring in these protected raptors into the emirates. He believes from a description, counterterrorism crops you may have a smuggler on his hand. So he derived drove down to where hes from, this is jeffrey, a portrait of him in 2010. This was in may 2010. Thats what he looked like back then. He comes down and interviews this guy, he still flying and telling the same story he told the Counterterrorism Police. He pretty quickly lets him know hes not dealing with an idiot. All wildlife expert, raptor expert, he knows exactly what hes doing. He finally gets him to admit that yes, he was stealing from. He took them but the eggs were dead. The eggs were dead and he was only bring them down to south africa for his private collection. He was pretty sure he was lying. He also admitted he had been, he retrieved these eggs from cliffs and whales. This is up picture of the vall valley, one of the greatest concentrations of falcons in the uk and possibly the world, this former coal mining area known for its cliffs, amazing landscape and these ledges that are sheltered from the wind. Howling winds at the top of the trees and cut down decades and even a century or more ago. Basically find this incredible network and coal mines built over the centuries as part of the uk. His parents landscape and fierce wind and these ledges here, protected from the wind where they lay their eggs. That really messed or create nest, they just find ledges and maybe put a few stones and pebbles around it to protect it from rolling off and you have to imagine this landscape, a huge wilderness area. Youre able to have acquired 14 of these eggs. Hes got a professional one. This was taken a couple of years later, seven years later following the footsteps, fact Andy Mcwilliams. I may give you a quick background sketch. Hes a liverpool cop, working class family, grandfathered in world war i. Father worked at a marine, grew up with no options but the police, he didnt have, he barely finished school but he became a cop, a liverpool cop, really quite well known investigator in a midlife crisis, he decided he was tired of drug busting, drug addicts and drug pushers and suicide and murder, he wanted to get away from that. It was a very talented rugby, fierce rugby player. He gave out because of injuries, he became a birdwatcher and he found that he loved that and it led him to this hidden subterranean world, blackmarket bird trader, killers of peregrine falcons, people who loved pigeons and killed falcons or destroyed their eggs because falcons on the mortal enemy of the kitchen. So exotic birds, smugglers stick birds inside tubes and sent them on a 24 hour horrific journey to the amazon to the uk to satisfy the hunger of these birds, rare birds. Also another odd little activists from egg collectors. Very british phenomenon, middleclass men, middleaged men, sorry who spend their time going off to some remark corners of the uk, northern scotland, wales, stealing eggs of rare birds, protected birds. Blowing up embryos and mounting them in the collection. Their own collection. They have to keep them secret, they hide them in their addicts and go up there and spare the eggs. Mcwilliams found this whole subculture, and ended up basically pursuing these guys, hundreds of them. Almost singlehandedly driving this, operation easter, is a major crackdown on these guys. This is his background. By the time he comes across separate hes well first and he knows almost all most as much about protected birds as he does. This is the market mcwilliams knew existed and he suddenly presented a concrete image of. This is a picture taken in dubai so falconry has been around for at least 3000 years. A lot of people believe it started in the arab world. Migration over the desert, they trap the birds, pull them out of the sky basically and train them to hunt. They started out as hunters essentially helping them put food on the table. Even before the arrival of islam. And over the centuries, this falconry developed and traders brought it to europe and china and all around the world and become more of a sport and recreational thank them unnecessary way to feed yourself. Its essentially this interaction between man and bird and train a bird, maybe some of you have read the book, you probably know a bit about this but this became, even though it spread around the world, it did kind of die out in the uk and europe, and never really expanded beyond a Certain Group of people. In the arab world, it became closely identified with arab culture. Even though the desert was kind of pretty much seriously eroded over the course of the last 50 years in the discovery of oil, falconry remained embedded in the culture. This is our trainer and a dubai desert training ground. This is the passion the wealthiest falconers had. This is the Veterinary Center for the crown princes dubai. The son of mohammed, a billiondollar ruler essentially built this. The state of the art hospitals with staff and veterinarians all over the world that they paid huge salaries to take care of their birds. In the last 20 years, the desert has gotten smaller natural prey of the birds has disappeared and you have this new phenomenon called falcon racing, even though your natural tendency is to drop, up to 160 miles an hour, they are trained using everything from little mini airplanes and drowned drowned to go horizontally and a gather at these racetracks, falcon racetracks and they place bets,y hundred are all over the world to find the greatest birds that will participate in these races. Its an obsession for these guys. You have breeders since the 70s, you cant trade almost every doctor in the world has fallen under severe restrictions as far as the only kind of commercial trading of these birds, only a handful allowed every year. Proving its scientific. If youre not part of a scientific group, you are forbidden from touching the groups. To see this great hunger for the birds, a breeding industry written up reading them in artificial environments, huge trade worth millions of dollars but the arabs, theres a Certain Group of arabs, wealthy ones who believe these captive birds cant be compared to the wild ones because Natural Selection read the birds over the centuries and millennia and wilderness environment and these are the birds they want. They are willing to go to any length because they are loaded with money. They will provide that and willing to take great risks to get them out. They only inhabit the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. One of them was jeffrey. Here we go. I became very curious to find out, as did Andy Mcwilliams to find out, he figured immediately or pretty quickly he had a global smuggler on his hands. If he let him go, he would go back. He became excited, 36 hours to persuade the prosecutor to hold him for basically carrying bird eggs on his body. He knew prosecutors had no clue about these wildlife birds. It was down to the wire trying to persuade these people, and egg smuggler to hold without bail. It is difficult to sell. He succeeded in doing it and kept him without bail while digging into his story. As i did when i found my way to jeffreys life. How does one become an egg smuggler . What led him to the arab world . It does raise the question of, what a background would have been to create this. He grew up in the second city of rhodesia. He grew up basically, his father was a thirdgeneration white african, parent from ireland. He grew up within shouting distance of this National Park. Is this magnificent geological phenomena and has these amazing rock structures, and this vegetation that makes it perfect for practice. This particular part, his greatest concentration of eagle, hawks and falcons on the planet. This was basically his backyard. He became involved with his father, he was born in 61 of the late 70s, he became involved in a survey of this bird called a black eagle which is one of the strongest eagles in the world which is found in huge concentration at this particular park and nowhere else in the world. They went on the field and they surveyed and spent months observing, this is where he learned to climb trees. And repelled down clips and this is a scene from a black eagle survey continued even now 60 years later. A black eagle, they lay eggs like the falcons do, high up, 80 to 200 feet off the ground. This is how he grew up, weird stuff. This is the kind of information you see. Perfect terrain for these creatures to thrive. Another bird, this is a crown eagle. The rarest raptor in the world, its known for having a giant talent, occasionally sweeping small children off the ground and making off with them. There are a few occasions that i know of. This was his world. At some. Okay, to sum up that story, a survey in the park with his father, learning everything about birds. At the same time, his father led him while he was there conducting this survey and burning for location by the park, they were secretly taking eggs, even as a team, putting them in their private collection, possibly never verified, selling them abroad. Even as a 17 and 18yearold, his father was leading him down and ethically challenged path. As he ends up being arrested for illegal possession of eggs, interests, it would have been zimbabwe in the early 80s. The consequence was was disgraced, flee the country, ends up in south africa and was led in to this Global Enterprise back at the very beginning, like the 90s when they were curing up to get their hands on the most beautiful, oil money was flowing. Falconry was thriving. The braces were about to begin. Theres a real hunger to get their hands on the most beautiful birds in the world. Its kind of hard to chronicle exactly what he did on his missions because so many of them, we believe they were, they never came to light. I found a compass of his who told me, not only did he tell me about one of these missions they were on together but he actually has a video to prove it. This particular mission went back to pursue this bird, doctor falcon, pure white not only. White by a pure white specimen, the biggest falcon in the world. They are incredibly difficult to keep alive. As a great challenge just to keep them alive in the middle east in the desert environment when they are used to places like green iceberg agreement and the subarctic and siberia. There was this growing desire among these crooked arab men. Very kind to find commercial breeders so the only way to get your hands on one was to send somebody like landrum up to embark up there, to get them off the cliffs. How do you do that . The accomplice told me the whole story, i will give you a little bit here. This is some video a shot of jeffrey back in his prime in 2001. His partner, a Rhodesian Army man, they st