Poached

[soft instrumental

music playing]

[birds cawing]

No, no.

Police won't get us.

In the past,

I've quite often thought about

doing documentary work

and, um,

putting videos out

and footage.

I've never been able to get

the opportunity because

of me having past

convictions and things.

The authorities will

never take me serious.

We try and keep it

secretive and all.

We don't want people

recognizing the faces and that.

We wear a lot

of camouflage gear and that.

So that if anybody

does come, you know,

we could obviously blend

into the woodlands.

[jaunty instrumental

music playing]

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Bird off!

It's an easy climb.

[grunting]

What's in it?

- Three.

- Three eggs. Are they nice?

Yes, actually, fantastic.

You keep your eyes open.

[Birds of a Feather playing]

[crowd clamoring]

[song ends]

I've got over

a hundred eggs this year.

Some of them eggs

are osprey,

golden eagle, and...

Oh, some avocets.

[wind blowing]

I've got about

3,500 odd eggs

in the collection.

It's so simple to just

not get caught.

[whispering]

You are a rascal.

You are a rascal.

Go on. Away you go.

Bugger off.

Bugger off.

[chuckles]

You'll never

eradicate all crime.

You'll never

eradicate all thefts

and breaches of the peace

and murders and rapes,

nor any egg collectors.

The best you can do

is to minimize it.

[bell ringing]

Why is it particularly

the English

that are involved in this?

I don't know.

It's weird.

[chuckles]

It's totally weird.

There's no other

word for it, really.

Egg collecting is almost

seen like pedophilia,

and that's a term that

I quite often hear.

And it disturbs me

very much, that.

[Alan] When I was very young, I

used to collect birds' eggs,

as did most people

at that time.

Most young boys

collected birds' eggs.

I can't understand it

because I was saying,

I never knew any

girls to do that.

Nope, all boys.

[Andy] It used to be

quite common for kids

to get involved

in egg collecting.

And as you get older,

you know, kids mature.

They find other things

to do, and it's something

that they grow out of.

But certain individuals, I think

they just become obsessed with it.

I couldn't stop collecting eggs because...

A bit of an addiction, I'd class it as.

It could be like a drug addiction.

I've never had a drug addiction, really, but

it could be like that.

It's a bad addiction.

The ultimate thing would

always be the golden eagle.

'Cause it's like, the

ultimate bird in the book and

used to always

dream about them.

You love them that much

you covet them.

When you find

a prize there

that's good.

[Andy]

It's strange.

It's not like they go out and

they take one egg from a nest.

They'll take the whole clutch,

and they will collect as many

of that particular

species as they can.

Mmm.

[soft instrumental

music playing]

Egg collectors have different

passions for difference species.

But there is no doubt the rare

birds are the ones that are of interest.

These people are not in it for

the money. It's obsessionally driven.

As I say, it's this

trophy hunting.

With a lot of

rare breeding birds,

they only get one breeding

attempt during the year

so if you take that clutch of eagle

eggs or the eggs from the osprey,

that's the end of the breeding

season for that bird for the year.

Birds like the

red-backed shrike

were lost in Britain because the last

pairs were really targeted by egg collectors.

I think if you've ever

seen anyone approach a nest,

you know how disruptive, how

distressing it is to the birds.

It will come in and fly over. It will

do everything to protect that nest,

its young, or its eggs.

I would say you really seriously we need to

look at yourself if you're into egg collecting.

It was one of the biggest

operations of its kind,

planned by police

for two years.

Officers seized more than

12,000 rare birds' eggs

when they raided the

homes of three collectors.

[Guy] In 1964, we got an act which

covered the whole of Britain

and made it illegal

to take eggs.

However, it wasn't illegal to

possess eggs until about 1982.

If you've got eggs now,

taken in the last 30 years,

we will be on your back.

We will be chasing you.

A serving police officer kept an illegal

collection of wild birds' eggs.

[female reporter]

When police raided this house,

they discovered wildlife

photographer, Dennis Green,

leading a double life.

It's a matter of pride that we

want to stop people from the UK

going and plundering the eggs.

Operation Easter

started in 1993,

and it has developed

since that time.

It now involves every single

police force in the UK and RSPB.

So we all work together

to catch egg thieves,

rather than each force

working independently.

One thing we will

be looking for

is obviously birds' eggs,

which may be well hidden.

In the past, we've

come across them hidden

in false bottoms on drawers.

So they will go to

extraordinary lengths

to actually hide

their collections.

As Andy has outlined, basically

treat it like a drug search.

[Andy] There's still a hard

core of collectors out there.

These are people who are

probably never going to stop,

and they are people who have

amassed huge collections of eggs.

These people want their place

in egg collecting history.

There was a very notorious

egg collector called Colin Watson,

who had a total of seven

convictions for egg collecting.

And he was a fairly

outspoken Yorkshireman,

and he was once being interviewed

by a TV crew about this.

I am a conservationist

at heart,

although it wouldn't appear

so from the hobby I pursue.

[Guy] He ran this campaign

of terror for over 20 years,

and he rampaged around the UK,

taking eggs of very rare birds.

He was often seen as

public enemy number one.

[male reporter] I believe I'm right

in saying that as many as 70

clutches of chough have been taken

by this particular egg collector.

They take those

choughs' eggs away.

And the chough's

not a common bird.

That puts me in a position, if

I want to carry on collecting,

that I have to replace

some of those eggs.

So inadvertently, the RSPB,

by confiscating the eggs,

are doing more damage

than what they would

if they left the owner

with the possession

of the eggs.

Seeing Colin Watson, you'd

interview him, you'd think,

"Whoa, that's the man, that." You

know, he's the, like, father of it all.

Whoa, great, you know.

I'll climb the tree

and check this nest,

and you'll wait at the

bottom of the tree, okay?

[John] Towards the end of his

life, he wasn't collecting eggs.

But he'd gone into just

photographing eggs in nests.

[Guy] He climbed up to look

into the nest of a sparrowhawk,

a bird of prey,

and he ended up falling out of

the tree and dying as a result.

[Mark] Watson was kind

of before my time.

But in the last 15

years, I've been

investigating some of the most

serious egg collectors in Britain.

The most infamous current collector

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