A birder’s paradise in Zimbabwe
the height of the Rhodesian bush war that brought the guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to power, Lendrum began climbing into Matobo’s hard-to-reach nests as a boy. He would later turn his agility and ornithological expertise to controversial ends, roaming from Tierra del Fuego to northern Quebec, and snatching the live eggs of wild falcons — reportedly on behalf of wealthy Arab falconry enthusiasts. (Lendrum was convicted of stealing eggs in Britain in 2010 and in Chile in 2015, and served time in prison, but insists he did it to save falcons that would otherwise have perished in the wild.)
In the course of my reporting I have begun tracing Lendrum’s footsteps around the world, viewing the aeries of peregrines in the Rhondda Valley in Wales, and flying with a falcon in a hot-air balloon in Dubai. Now I had come to southern Africa see where his journey had begun.
Brebner and his wife, Jen, another bird enthusiast, picked me up at my guest cottage in Bulawayo in their four-wheeldrive vehicle, and we headed down a twolane tarmac road toward Matobo. It was just two weeks after the military coup that had unseated Mugabe after 37 years in power. “The roadblocks are gone now,” Brebner said, referring to the ubiquitous checkpoints that had appeared in the last two years of Mugabe’s rule. Desperate police officers, he explained, had extorted cash from drivers to replace their unpaid salaries.
The co-coordinator for the last seven years of the African Black Eagle Survey, one of the world’s long-running ornithological studies, Brebner has spent hundreds of hours in Matobo, observing the mating, nesting and fledging of this coal-black raptor.
Also known as Verreaux’s Eagle (Aquila verreauxii) after Jules Verreaux, a naturalist who collected specimens in the early