You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will? What's that Mango? So today we're going to talk about the very particular and particularly illegal hobby of egg collecting.
And I'm assuming you don't mean the easter variety. No, that's pretty above board as far as I know. And we're not talking about stealing eggs from the grocery store either, that is also illegal.
Today we're talking about the shadowy world of wild egg thefts. In fact, in many places around the world, even possessing wild bird eggshells, especially if it's from an endangered species or threatened species, can get you in lots of trouble, like prison trouble.
You know. It's a world of undercover cops, repelling down cliff faces, international criminality, and of course how to bring down an egg from a tree during enemy fire. You got to know this sort of stuff. But spoiler alert here, your dentist will not be thrilled.
It is going to be fun, So let's dive in.
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good friend Mangesh Hot Ticket here and somewhere behind that big booth. He's djaying today Mango, He's djang a medley of bird songs. I don't know if you knew he had this mixtape on hand, did you? I saw he put like bird is the word on their free Bird, Blackbird, three Little Birds, when Doves Cry.
You know, there's no shortage of songs.
When you start to see his playlist, you're like, this actually all makes sense, and.
There are a lot of bird songs.
There are a lot of bird songs for sure, And I honestly hadn't thought about how many songs there were about birds until he made this for us. That's our super musical and thoughtful producer, Dylan Fake so Will.
I'm obviously excited to talk about bird tufts with you, but I'm curious, like, are you a bird person? Like you've had pet rabbits, dogs, but do you like birds? Yeah?
I was actually just talking about this with somebody the other day because I feel like you get to a certain age and you're supposed to become a bird person.
Like you've seen those you've seen.
Those bird houses that like all of our parents have these days where you actually have a camera in there and you can watch the bird in there, and I.
Think I'm just not quite to that age yet.
I know that we'll be old when that officially it's around the corner soon where we'll be excited to watch birds on a camera, which is I don't know why that's different than watching them on TV, but I do think birds are very pretty. I don't like want to go out of my way and grab a pair of binoculars to go see them on trips or things. But I think it's cool that people are into it. How about you, Yeah, I think it's cool that people who are into it.
I mean it's funny, right you see these majestic birds and like an eagle and the Pacific Northwest or something, and it's like gorgeous to see. And then you know, I was getting lunch the other day and I was outside and I was at this table and these super fat pigeons just started charging towards me, and I kept like trying to shake them off and make these like big motions to get them away, and they just kept running and I had to keep moving picnic tables. It
was like embarrassing. They were so fat and they were fearless.
Man, that sounds actually to usually I'm not afraid of birds, but that actually sounds pretty scary. But all right, well, where do you think we should start this episode today?
Why don't we start with a bit of history, which is obviously where we love to start at. Collecting seems to have really come around in Victorian England. So we're talking mid to late nineteenth century here, and British explorers and scientists were traveling the world, oftentimes bringing back artifacts
from their exploits, and this included things like birds eggs. Now, at the time, collecting was a way to study the natural world, and the collection and study of birds eggs is officially known as oology, and back at Victorian times, equology was respected and legal. There wasn't real concern about any ecological effects from this past time, especially because it was all being done in the name of science, and
these guys were really dedicated. There is a story of one man, a guy named Charles ben Dyer, and he was a German immigrant who served in the US Army in the mid eighteen hundreds, and he was so committed to his egg collection that once he climbed a tree to grab a rare egg that he'd spotted. And this was during enemy fire. But then he got the egg and he had to get down the tree. Oh god, so what did he do? He puts the egg in
his mouth. Would not have been my first thought, like I would have put it in a pocket or something, But apparently the trick worked. He came down the tree. And this is a strange part of the story, and I don't entirely get the physics of this, but the egg actually got stuck in his mouth. Another guy actually had to take one of Ben Dyer's teeth out so he could remove the egg. Isn't that crazy? I mean, yes,
it is crazy. But also how did his friend know that he had an an egg in his mouth and that that was I guess the best way to get it out? I have no idea. But also like, I don't think there are any hobbies that I'd willingly lose a tooth for, right, Like I used to collect pet dispensers and magazines, but I'm not trading a tooth for one of those. It feels ludicrous anyway, Bird collectors weren't
just about taking risks and sacrificing teeth. They also happened to be meticulous, so they would take notes about where each egg clutch was found, the habitat, the environment, and they'd empty the egg of the embryo and catalog details like color and size. And these collections were good and important enough that a lot of them ended up in museums, specifically England's Natural History Museum at Tring. Have you ever been to Tring? I have not? No, where is it?
I haven't either. Tring is located about thirty miles outside of London on the estate of one Lord Walter Rothschild now Lord Walter began collecting specimen when he was a young boy, and by the time he was ten he'd started his first museum. This was in the backyard garden shed, which sounds pretty cute, right, But by the time he turned twenty one, his parents realized this was not just some childhood phase and so naturally they built him his own museum, which is you know, I guess what happens
to lords who grow up and have odd interests. But this museum ends up being called Walter's Zoological Museum, and eventually this became part of the country's Natural History Museum. Today, the Tring actually houses the largest zoological collection that was accumulated by one person, though it has to be noted that Walter, who was better known as Lord Rothschild, actually
spent most of his time at the museum studying. All these new species that came in the collections mostly came from the four hundred people around the world he had traveling on his behalf. That's an impressive number of people. That's pretty amazing. And the Tring actually has the largest bird egg collection in the world, more than two million items.
And one of the things that's really interesting is that the Tring collection in particular was crucial to helping scientists understand the damage that DDT had on birds.
And if I'm not mistaken, DDT was the pesticide that made eggshells like really.
Frail, right exactly. But you know, scientists didn't know that at first. They just saw that raptors like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon weren't reproducing, which is obviously a huge problem if a species is going to continue to exist.
But because the collection that the Tring was so thorough and so detailed, scientists were actually able to compare all these contemporary eggs to the older eggs from this collection, and you know, it existed from well before the time of DDT, and they discovered that the contemporary eggshells were not only much thinner, but also weaker, and they were able to connect this change to the introduction of DDT
into the environment. You know that this of course made its way up into the food chain, into bird's diets, and affected the composition of the female's eggs. In fact, the pesticide made the shell so brittle that they'd actually break under the weight of a parent bird just sitting on the egg during incubation. That is wild. But of course DDT has been banned since then. Yeah, and some egg collectors like to cite this example as a benefit of their work, like, thanks to them, there was this
history to be studied and to be learned from. But today scientists are still allowed to apply for permits to collect eggs for research. But you know, the idea of this gentleman collector who's just out for his own pleasure, you know, that doesn't happen anymore. In fact, it's.
Pretty frowned upon and is basically gone underground. Well, speaking of that, that's actually where I'm going to take the baton. But before we do that, why don't we take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about egg collectors and this strange world of rare egg theft. So will you were just about to tell us about how egg collecting moves from this genteel hobby for naturalists to something a little darker. That's right.
I think it feels like time to go a little darker here. So this comes from a twenty thirteen New Yorker article. This was by Julian Rubinsteinde. Toward egg collectors really starts to change in the nineteen twenties. So the Royal Society for the Protection for Birds or the RSPB, they warned that this gentleman collector form of ooology was threatening the survival of species, which of course made the
egg collectors pretty mad. For example, your friend Lord Walter Rothschild teamed up with another collector, a guy by the name of Reverend FCR. Jordaane, and they started their own group, the British Euological Society, and it was renamed the Jordaane Society in nineteen forty after Jordayne died. Now its members were pretty exclusively men, no surprise, they're given the time and it claimed to be the only organization in England.
Dedicated to egg collecting.
Now, they took their work very seriously and even after it was illegal, it actually didn't really stop them.
So when does egg collecting actually start to become illegal?
Well, stealing wild bird eggs has been illegal in the UK since nineteen fifty four, and then in nineteen eighty one it was illegal to even possess a protected wild bird's egg. But as we know, just because there is a rule, that does mean that everybody follows it, and that adage seemed to especially apply to members of the Jordaane Society. The New Yorker goes on to say about the nineteen nineties, more than half of the society's members had convictions for egg collecting.
Half of the members. Amazing, it really is.
And there's this one story about a nineteen ninety four raid where British investigators found out about a meeting that the Jordaane Society was having at a hotel, so they went under cover. One of the investigators was a woman, and she hung out at the hotel bar and she'd start chatting up its members. And remember this a real boys club, so apparently just by showing some interest in
their hobby. This agent got at least one collector to show her photos of birds, nests and other incriminating things.
So I'm guessing this led to some convictions. Oh, it definitely did.
It was enough evidence that the entire meeting was raided and thanks to the raid, police were able to seize eleven thousand eggs. Six Jordaane Society members were fined from this whole raid. It was pretty wild, but.
I mean, if the Jordan's Society felt like they could hold meetings at hotels, right, they clearly were that afraid of the consequences.
No, and the fines didn't seem to be all that effective. There's a story of this one collector named Colin Watson who throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties had been fined almost six thousand pounds, which obviously didn't stop him. He continued until the day of his death. Literally, he died after falling from a tree trying to get to a nest. I think these people were pretty focused on this whole legg collecting.
Thing, I know, dying doing what he low.
Yeah, And the thing is people are still stealing and collecting eggs, even as recently as November of twenty twenty four, a collection of five thousand rare eggs was discovered and seized in rural England.
So what about this Jordaane Society? Does this still live on?
Well, it hasn't been a recognized charity since two thousand and one, and also happens to be the same year the UK changed the law. So now if you're caught with wild eggs it's more than a fine, you could potentially serve jail time, which is a much bigger deterrent. And it's also helped that investigative techniques have gotten more advanced, like using or veillance cameras near popular collecting routes in
order to be able to track these license plates. And that's opposed to putting microphones in trees, which is what they used to do, just hoping to overhear illegal activity happening in these trees.
That is ridiculous. You know what. One other way that I've read in the Guardian that people have been caught is quote disgruntled wives who have played second fiddle to their husband's obsession over bird eggs for decades.
Yeah, there are public informants too, like the New Yorker article I mentioned also tells the story of how authorities once caught this other collector. This was back in the early two thousands, and the collector's brother was in a pub. Someone there overheard him talking about bird eggs. This good samaritan then followed the brother out of the pub in order to take down his license plate number and then report what he'd heard to authorities.
I can't imagine like overhearing someone talking about bird eggs and being like, oh, I should probably report this. That's kind of amazing. So let's switch tacks a little bit here and talk about who some of these collectors are.
So I don't know about two bell I'm picturing like Indiana Jones, but more like Indiana Jones with binoculars and a field guide.
What about you? I mean, I think they like to think themselves as like that suave and to be honest, like, there definitely are some real physical skills involved. So these guys are often excellent tree climbers. Often they climb up like one hundred foot tree trunks sometimes to get to these rareness. They're also insanely knowledgeable, like they know a ton about birds and their habitats. But egg collecting isn't
really like a young man's game, right, Yeah. You don't see like kids into egg collecting in the same way that you see like older men. And most of these people had started taking eggs when they themselves were kids after World War Two. There's actually this documentary about this world called Poached, which is really interesting. It came out in twenty fifteen and it follows some of these collectors now.
According to director Timothy Wheeler, the impulse to collect does often start with a true childhood love of birds, but it moors from that pretty quickly into an almost addictive behavior. One British investigator said that when the police arrived to this collector's house and found thirty six hundred eggs, the guys started crying and said, quote, thank god you've come.
I can't stop. Oh my gosh. These guys are also experts, and many argue that they aren't hurting the birds because they're often cracking breeding schedules, and when they do take the eggs, they take the entire clutch, and they claim that this means the bird will lay a whole new clutch that same season, which you know is sometimes true, but it's not always the case. For example, birds like golden eagles and ospreys, they really only lay once a season.
Well, and I know from my reading for this episode that the extinction of the red back strike in the nineteen eighties is actually attributed in part to collectors.
That's right. And while egg thivery is certainly not the reason why bird species might go endangered, you know, none of this really helps. There are all sorts of other conditions that lead to the endangement of birds, from habitat, food lass, climate change, you know, overhunting, things like that. But as you can imagine, these bird collectors aren't really interested in common birds like you know, like the finch
or the crow or the robin. They want rare bird eggs, especially if the only way to get them is to repel down a cliff or climb a really tall tree or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it makes the egg feel more like a treasure in that case, and a story or an adventure to be able to tell about exactly.
And one of the most infamous thieves is a guy the press is dubbed Pablo Excobar, and in many ways he fits the profile of these Jordaanan Society members, especially that adventure adrenaline junkie sort of profile we've talked about. I love this all right, So you got to tell me more about Pablo. So his name is actually Jeffrey Lendrum, and he's a really interesting character. He grew up in what is now Zimbabwe, and he spent a lot of
time outdoors with his dad, who was also really into birds. Now, by the time he was eight, little Jeffrey was known for his ability to climb trees and rocks and cliff faces, you know, all the spots where birds' nests are conveniently located. Now, Jeffrey and his dad were renowned enough that they were asked to volunteer on surveys and observation studies for different
birds in the area. So they legitimately knew birds and I guess, more importantly, how to find these And according to an article in Outside magazine, Jeffrey and his dad would do some pretty skilled and dangerous things to find these birds, Like they would actually throw claws into trees as climbing aids. Like it sounds pretty amazing.
I'm curious, Like, how does this zimbabwe boy scout end up growing up to be on Autubn's Most Wanted list well.
Over time, it became clear that Jeffrey and his dad were doing more than just studying the birds. Other volunteers started to notice some small lies and inconsistencies that they tell, especially when talking about fledglings they claimed to have observed.
In nineteen eighty three, when Jeffrey was twenty one, police raided their house and found more than eight hundred eggs as well as these live peregrine falcon eggs, and there were also allegations that Jeffrey was selling these live eggs on the black market, but none of that was ever proven. He's still eight hundred that's a lot of eggs. Yeah, and both father and son were found guilty of theft
and fraud. They were fined, they were given probation, but you know, as we've learned, it's not a huge deterrent for these sort of committed thieves, and so Jeffrey spent the next couple decades going to super remote places around the world stealing eggs. We know that he took at least two trips to northern Quebec to take ger falcon eggs, which build nests and depressions in Arctic cliff faces. There's also a terrific book about Jeffrey by the writer Joshua Hammer.
It's called The Falcon Thief and a lot of this research comes from that. So Hammer actually spoke to a former friend of Lendrum's who accompanied him on these Canadian trips, and this friend said that Lendrum would hire a pilot and rent a helicopter to get to these nests.
Wow.
And if anyone asked, their alibi was that they were filmmakers with National Geographic. Basically, the pilot would hover next to the cliffs and then Lendrom would actually lower himself down from the helicopter on a rope mission impossible style to these nests. That is incredible. Yeah, And this friend said that over the course of a week they went
to nineteen geerfalcon nests and stole about twelve eggs. Now, Lendrum, who is continually denied they stole these eggs, then wrapped the eggs and socks and put them in his carry on for the flight to London and then finally Dubai, where they were likely sold on the black market. But
the next trip, the guys weren't that lucky. This time, the pilot they hired didn't buy their filmmaker story and instead he tipped off the authorities and Lendrom and friend were arrested when eggs and incubators were found in their hotel room. They were fined just about seven thousand dollars and then they were set on their way.
I mean again, though, when you talk about these fines, it still doesn't seem like that much of a fine.
It's not that much of a disincentive because eight years later he was arrested again, and talk about wild This is a crazy story. So in May twenty ten, Lenderham was in the Emirates Executive Loune in the Birmingham, England Airport and he had a ticket book to South Africa with importantly a fourteen hour layover in Dubai. Now he's in the lounge, he asked to use the shower and will I don't know about what you normally take the shower, but Lendrom decided to bring with him a bag and
two small suitcases. I mean, I can't say that's typically in my shower padding no mine either, And it was unusual enough that it attracted the attention of one of the cleaners, who then also noticed that Lendrom spent a long time in the shower. So when Lendrom left the room, the cleaner, who was a former mall security guard, went
to check it. And he enters the shower, but instead of finding I don't know, a suitcase full of bubbabout salts and a loofa, the shower was completely dry, and the towels were dry too, and they were folded, I mean a little suspicious there, So he knew something was off. He looks under the towels to see if there's anything there.
He looks in the garbage can and there's nothing. But then he looks in this baby changing area where there was another plastic garbage bin for diapers, and inside the bin there there was an egg cardon with one single egg in it, dyed bright red.
And it kind of reminds me of those old CIA spy transmitters that were like hitting in doggy dew and stuff like that. Like, I bet he really thought hiding an egg in the diaper garbage was, you know, pretty full proof because who's going to look in there?
Yeah, But but the lounge attendant's hunch was right, like something was clearly up. And what does a red egg even mean, so in any case, he calls authorities, and the authorities search Lenderm's luggage, where they find insulated bags, some camera equipment, a walkie talkie, a bunch of cash, a thermometer, and two more egg cartons. One of these cartons is empty and the other one has quail eggs along with proof of purchase from a supermarket. I mean,
all of this sounds so bizarre, Mango. And then it gets a little weirder because when the officers actually search Lendrom himself, they find fourteen small, multicolored eggs wrapped in wool socks and taped to his abdomen. So he's basically caught in the act here. Yeah, so here's a completely hypothetical situation I'm making up out of nowhere. You're illegally smuggling live eggs into another country by strapping them to
your body to keep them warm. But then the police find them, what do you tell them by way of explanation? I don't know.
In this case, I feel like I'd probably just try to run, because he's pretty obvious what's going on.
I mean, that seems like the better option, but him and said tells the authorities they were duck eggs, and he was bringing them to his father in Zimbabwe. And why weren't these colorful eggs and a carton. Well, Lenderham had a bad back, and with the long flight ahead, his physical therapist had told him that strapping something fragile against his stomach would causes muscles to tense up and strengthen his lower back.
I don't know, I'm kind of buying that's a really creative story.
It feels elaborate enough that it must be trued right At this point, though, airport authorities they don't know a lot about wild bird eggs, but they do know lender is lying through his teeth, so they call him the big Guns. And in this case, the Big Guns means Britain's National Wildlife Crime Unit. Oh and while they're waiting for the crime unit to arrive, airport authorities keep the eggs warm by storing them on their computer markers.
I mean, there's actually something kind of heartwarming about the image of a bunch of cops trying to keep these eggs alive.
I mean, the amazing thing is that it actually worked. Like twelve of the eggs, which weren't ducks but peregrine falcon eggs hashed a couple of weeks later, and actually eleven of those birds were able to fledge in the wild, so it's kind of a happy ending. Oh what happened
to Lendrom? Well? After more interviews, Lendrom finally admits, okay, he might have been taking the peregrine falcon eggs from a cliff in Whales with the intent of hatching and breeding them in South Africa, but when he thought the eggs had died, he didn't want them to go to waste, so that's why he wrapped them around his body to
keep him intact for the family's egg collection. Yeah collection, We already know they'd gotten in trouble for Yeah, and I assume you neglected to mention that he'd been arrested for this crime in the previous place. But you know, also, the peregrine falcon is the highest level of protected bird species in the UK, so this isn't especially bad. Look anyway, he has all this expensive contraband that he's taped to himself,
and this actually isn't the only evidence. Authorities also find in his car in the parking lot that there's an incubator of ropes carabineers and GPS devices, which is clear evidence he knew what he was doing. He would repel down the cliff faces to the nest, stealed eggs, put them insulated bags, and then climb back up. So obviously he's not a novice.
I mean, it feels dumb to keep all that stuff so close by, right, Like he clearly didn't think he was going to get caught.
Definitely not. But one of the other things the authorities found was actual video footage from his exploits in Quebec, from when he was hanging from the helicopter. Like Lenderham tried to deny all this for a while, but there was enough evidence that he was arrested, found guilty, and that he spent eighteen months in prison. But my question
is was the cleaner everthing actually he was. The reward for his eagle eye was a limited edition print of an avoset, which is a type of bird eye, and he was presented it by the country's environmental minister.
And this was a print I guess, I mean, I guess it's a beautiful art print, but I don't think he was unhappy about it.
But amazingly, our bird smugglers. Story doesn't end there. We actually have more on Pablo Xcabar right after this break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking all about the highly secretive world of rare egg smuggling. All right, So Mega, when we left off, you were telling us how Jeffrey Lenderm was serving time in England after being caught stealing wild peregrine falcon eggs. So does all that time behind bars curb his bird obsession?
I mean, will you know that the man is addicted? In twenty fifteen, he goes down to Patagonia where he climbs inside volcanoes and repels down cliff faces looking for raptor nests, which is incredible, and he's caught at the sau Polo airport with four rare, white chested peregrine falcon eggs. He's tried, he's found guilty, and he's sendenced to four and a half years in prison. But plot twist, he
never serves any time. While he's out on bail a waiting appeal, he high tails it to Argentina, where he books a flight to South Africa, where of course he's a citizen.
And was his scouting put to use, Like was he wondering jungles and evading patrols to get to Argentina or what.
That's actually the story he kind of paints for himself. But his Brazilian lawyer said Lenderham just took a bus. But since then, his most recent arrest was in London in twenty eighteen. He was coming from South Africa with nineteen eggs from endangered birds of prey strapped to his body, two of which had already hatched. I mean, a.
Squawking baby bird has to be harder to conceal than a nice quiet egg.
So does he end up serving time for this? Yeah, he got sentenced to three years in prison, and.
So at this point he's been arrested, he spent time in jail. He's a fugitive in Brazil. I mean, he must be on watch list all over the world. He's got to be making bank for all this risk if he's doing this right.
It seems likely though the writer Joshua Hammer mentioned that at least when he visited Lendroham in South Africa in twenty seventeen, he really didn't seem to have any of the trappings of wealth. But there's definitely money in the business. For example, it was estimated he could have made around one hundred thousand pounds for that eighteen hall that got them arrested.
You know, one of the things I'm always curious about is is, honestly less who's taking the risk to sell these things? Because they're making a lot of money, they made this decision to do this stuff, But I'm always wondering who's buying this stuff, Like who in this case, who's buying these eggs.
Authorities can't say with one hundred percent certainty, but it seems very likely that the eggs were for ultra wealthy buyers in the Middle East, which you know, as we alluded to before, is notable not only because of the money there, but especially because of the long history of falconry. Like falconry in the Middle East goes back thousands and thousands of years to the Bedouins, and deserts, as you
can imagine, are really hard places to find food. So the Bedouins would capture these migrating wild falcons, they'd train them to help hunt for things like rabbits and other prey, and that's how they'd feed themselves.
Yeah, you know, it's actually looking at falcons this week, and it's amazing how good they are at hunting. Like a falcon sees eight times better than a human, and it has such a strong beak that it can actually sever the neck of the animal that it's hunting. And maybe most important, it is super fast. So on average, surfalcons fly between fifty and sixty eight miles an hour and up to one hundred and thirty eight miles an
hour when they're diving. Meanwhile, a peregrine falcon can reach speeds of up to two hundred and forty miles an hour while diving. I would have never guessed anywhere near that. It makes it actually the fastest animal on earth. So of course, if you're like a falcon meal, you really don't stand a chance.
No, you really don't.
So falcon hunts are now officially banned across many Middle Eastern countries, but obviously there's still this very venerated tradition of training falcons. So in the early two thousands falcon racing started up, where you know, it's about strength and speed but not actually hunting. There are very lucrative falcon races from the UAE to Saudi Arabia where the purse
could be millions and millions of dollars. Falcons, like jur falcons and peregrins, they're some of the most sought after birds for these competitions, and there are falcon breeding programs in places like the UK and the US and western Europe where they're allowed to export to the Middle East.
So today female jur falcons might cost between fifty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand pounds each, and in twenty thirteen, a pure white jur falcon was sold to a buyer and Katar for two hundred and ten thousand pounds, which of course is quite a status symbol.
That's pretty incredible. And obviously having a winning falcon is kind of like having a winning thorough bread, right like it's a huge status symbol like you mentioned. And of course that's really where Lendrom comes in, because there's a belief, right or wrong, that wild falcons are stronger and faster than the falcon's bread and captivity and because you know, many governments on the Arabian Peninsula have been the capture
of wild falcons. There's this entire underground market and network where wild falcon fledglings or chicks might go for three hundred thousand pounds or even more money. And wild eggs are a little easier to pass off and get through customs than a massive bird. Yeah.
I mean the thing is, even if you're a shake and you have hundreds and hundreds of falcons, there's going to eventually be in breedings. The wild eggs are also useful and expanding that gene pool.
So back to London for a second. Lenderm does deny that he was contributing to this black market. When he was stopped by customs officials in twenty eighteen, he told them he was just rescuing the eggs to save them from the habitat destruction in South Africa, and he claimed he was playing to take the eggs. Who are birds of Prey center in England at Lendrom. Such a stand up guy, but I'm curious where is he now? I
hope his back is better. As far as we could tell, he hasn't been arrested again, but he is trying to make himself harder to track. It turns out that in twenty seventeen he'd officially changed his name to John Smith, and that dude never gives up. You do have to give him that, right. I have a feeling this isn't the last we've heard of Pablo Xcabar. And on that note, I think it's not for a fact off.
All right, Sondram was stealing new eggs, but I actually want to talk about old eggs for a second. In twenty fifteen, an intact eggshell from the long extinct elephant bird was put up for auction at Sotheby's. Now, the elephant bird when it was around, it weighed more than one thousand pounds. You see where they got the name elephant bird.
It's kind of heavy.
So the eggshell is one hundred and fifty times bigger than a chicken, one hundred and fifty times bigger than a chicken's egg. Though it didn't end up selling, the asking price was between thirty thousand and fifty thousand pounds.
That's amazing, And I have no idea how big one hundred and fifty times a chinz egg is. I'm picturing like a house, so personally, I'm saving my pennies for a great auk egg, which is another extinct bird. Now. Victorian collectors were especially obsessed with ox in their eggs. There are thought to be only about seventy five eggshells left around the world, and twenty twenty three an egg was auctioned for one hundred thousand pounds. Wow.
All right, Well, a handful of years ago archaeologist in England came across this basket with four eggs still inside it. Now, three of the eggs disintegrated when they were excavating them, but they were able to successfully keep one fully intact. And they took that egg and they sent it to a lab and it's thought to be a chicken egg that's at least seventeen hundred years old. Now, even more exciting than that, it still has liquid yolk. How wild is that? That is insane and possibly delicious.
I don't think some ango. We think eggs are expensive now, but after the California gold Rush started in the late eighteen forties, eggs were so scarce out west that a single chicken egg might go for a dollar in the city or three dollars in the mining camps, which is the equivalent of thirty dollars or ninety dollars today per egg.
That's pretty expensive, But actually it relates to my fact here and it's about an all American classic known as the Hangtown Fry. Now. The story goes that one day in nineteen forty nine, a prospector ran into a saloon in nearby Hangtown, California. He had just struck it rich, and so to celebrate, he told the cook that he wanted quote, the finest and most expensive meal that he could possibly make him, which at the time was a
combination of eggs, bacon, and oysters. As far as I can tell, the Buttercup Diner is the only restaurant in current day Hangtown that still serves this. They modernized it slightly by adding cheese on top, but the dish comes with a warning. It says eat at your own risk and just as a copyat to that. In twenty eighteen, the La Times wrote a piece about the Hangtown Fry where they interviewed the owner of the Buttercup, who called
it quote disgusting. He said, only tourists and people nursing hangovers ever order it.
Do you know what it tastes like?
I found a review from this guy online who says it was on his bucket list to try, and he said, quote, it's reminiscent of a plate of liver with scrambled eggs but chalky and oyster fishy tasting yuck yum. Maybe anyway, that was the review, but for whatever it's worth, he also did add that the more he ate of it, the quote easier it was to eat.
I don't really understand that thing. Well. I think for surfacing the world's most luxurious and most disgusting egg dish, I think you have to win this one. But that is it for today's Part Time Genius. We'll be back with brand new episodes very soon. If you like the show, remember we're on Instagram at part Time Genius. Be sure to drop us a line because we love hearing from you. Also, this week, we have to give a big shout out to our writer and researcher Marissa Brown, who dug into
the weighty topic of egg thefts for us. Thank you, Marissa, and from Dylan Gabe, Mary, Will and myself, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongish Heatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the Wonderful Dylan Fagan, with support from Tyler Klang.
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shory. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.