The Curse of the Labrador Duck (14 page)

T
HE NATURALIST
Charles Darwin will always be best known for his ideas on natural selection as the driving force behind evolutionary change. He published these ideas in a book whose rather ponderous twenty-one-word title is usually abbreviated to
On the Origin of Species
. He is considerably less well known for having written on a number of other topics, such as corals, carnivorous plants, and earthworms. The work that concerns us here is a two-volume doorstop entitled
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
.

I would be lying if I said that I have read the whole thing, but it would be only a fib to say that I have read chapter eight in volume one, which considers geese, peacocks, turkeys, guinea-fowl, canaries, goldfishes, bees, silk moths, and domestic ducks. In this chapter, Darwin explained that, in the nineteenth century, “Labrador Duck” was a name given to a breed of domestic duck, which was also known as the Canadian Duck, the Buenos Ayres Duck, and the East Indian Duck. Darwin kept Labrador Ducks at his home in Kent. It seemed pretty obvious that if I were ever going to see a live Labrador Duck, it would have to be the domestic version, most commonly known today as the Black East Indies.

It had not been easy finding a breeder of Black East Indies. They may have been popular at one time, and goodness knows there are a lot of domestic-duck enthusiasts in the world, but not a lot of them breed Black East Indies. In the end I found a breeder, Margot Morris, hiding away in the vanishingly small community of Riverside-Albert in New Brunswick. Morris came out to greet us as we pulled up her drive. She must be a septuagenarian, but she had the sort of sparkle in her eyes that I normally associate with glass lenses inserted as part of a cataract operation. She was demonstrative and laughed easily and was genuinely happy to see us. We met her donkey and her horse, who both looked thoroughly pleased with themselves. Welcoming us into her home, Morris introduced us to her blue heeler, Shadow, who was very keen to thrust a wet chew toy into the lap of my white trousers. Morris’ budgie, Maxie, remained politely in his cage, keeping all of his toys to himself.

This menagerie was all well and good, but there wasn’t a duck to be seen. I had been led to believe that something like ninety ducks, geese, and swans had been sharing Morris’ life. It seemed that Morris was ready to call it a day after fifteen cold, wet winters in New Brunswick, the most recent of which had been an absolute nightmare, with one great dump of snow after another, temperatures that turned her house into an icebox, and a winter virus that had been unwilling to turn tail. She was going to move to Ontario to be closer to her family. She had sold off her waterfowl in preparation for the move. Hence, there were no Labrador Ducks/Black East Indies for me to see.

We did have a lovely hour-long chat about waterfowl in general,
and Black East Indies ducks in particular. Morris explained that as newly hatched chicks, Black East Indies are black all over, except for a few white feathers on the breast. They develop a green sheen as they age. She said that “the little devils run fast.” Morris claimed that she was not particularly fond of ducks, and then chuckled when she realized how strange that sounded, given her hobby. She said that ducks, unlike geese and swans, are flighty and nervous. “You can argue with a goose,” she said. “You might not win, but at least you can argue with them.” The same is not true for a duck. She explained that duck flesh tasted bad because of their diet, which included just about anything they could catch, and gave the example of Jim Blewett, a singer-songwriter, who had been picking one hundred slugs a day out of his garden. After purchasing a couple of ducks from Morris, his slug problem disappeared. As a result, he was working on a folk song about ducks and slugs. Something along the lines of “You can have slugs, or you can have ducks, but you can’t have both.”

In my email messages many months before, I had asked Morris to set aside a particularly valuable prize. Domestic ducks were derived from Mallards through selective breeding. That is why Darwin was interested in them. Thinking that the DNA extracted from a Black East Indies duck might give me some insight into the eggs analyzed by Sorenson, I had asked Morris to set aside some eggshell fragments when her ducks bred in the spring. Morris had done much better than that. Before selling off her menagerie, she had set aside three intact duck eggs. They had been sitting in her kitchen beside the stove in a Tupperware container for two months since she collected them. As we spoke, Morris worked her way through a pack of Black Cat cigarettes, while the eggs stared at me from the container on the kitchen table. They bobbed slightly in half an inch of evil green ooze. Despite the best intentions of the engineers at Tupperware International to keep freshness locked in, the container was emitting the unmistakable odor of horribly rotten eggs. Perhaps after years of chain-smoking, Morris had completely lost her sense of smell. I felt really badly for poor Shadow.

At the end of an hour, we thanked Morris, wished her the best of luck in selling her home and with her move to Ontario, and drove off with our little Tupperware prize. It was all Sarah and I could do
to keep our breakfast in place. Even though it was raining, we drove with the car windows wide open. We had to do something quickly. In the most remote corner of a parking lot, I pried open the container’s lid and started to heave. Imagine hiking through a sulfurous swamp for a week. At the end of your trek, take off your hiking socks, and fill them with Parmesan cheese and vinegar. Then have a baby puke on them. That is the smell of two-month-old Black East Indies duck eggs. I decanted the ooze, swirled the eggs in some fresh water, and decanted again. I resealed the container, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and put it back in the car’s trunk to simmer.

We drove on to Saint John, the second-largest city in New Brunswick, and all too frequently confused with St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador. Our hotel gave us a dripping faucet. Rather than let all of that fresh water go to waste, I turned on the bathroom fan, opened the egg container, and placed it under the drip, allowing the water to carry some of the stench down the drain. We abandoned our room and found a very nice Mexican restaurant with a flamenco guitarist.

Too afraid of the smell to return to the hotel room, we allowed ourselves to be drawn to the waterfront by the sound of music coming from that evening’s incarnation of the Saint John Festival Summer Stage. In a waterfront bar patio, with the delicate scent of the evening sea washing over us, I ordered a beer and Sarah ordered a tonic water. The beer’s plastic cup, the umbrella above us, the music stage, and two giant inflated beer cans were all courtesy of Alpine Bière Lager Beer, maritime brewed (Brassée dans les Maritimes) by Moosehead Breweries.

On stage, a group of four young people played hits by the Doors, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Led Zeppelin, and Pat Benatar. They all seemed to be too young to drink the product of the sponsor. The bass player might have received his guitar as a present at his recent bar mitzvah. The lead singer’s breasts seemed impossibly close together, and my second beer had me trying to figure out the hydraulics of her situation. The gathered crowd was sparse, made up mostly of friends of the band, also too young to drink legally, drinking surreptitiously at a frantic pace.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
found us traveling south along the Trans-Canada Highway, along the coast and past dwarf coniferous forests toward the community of Black’s Harbour. The ferry just beyond would take us to Grand Manan Island, another Canadian site of Labrador Duck slaughter. Or so it would seem. The Field Museum in Chicago was home to two Labrador Ducks that I would soon be visiting. The good folks at the museum are not at all certain where the ducks were resting when blown to kingdom come, but one of their best guesses is Grand Manan Island.

A little more certain was the killing of a hen Labrador Duck off the coast of Grand Manan by a gentleman named Simon F. Cheney. Indeed, having been shot on its northward migration in April of 1871, it was one of the last Labrador Ducks ever collected. According to Cheney, just before it shuffled off its mortal coil, the hen had been eating small mussels and had been diving with Oldsquaw ducks. Without preparing the hen taxidermically, Cheney passed the skin along to Harold Herrick, who then passed it along to George A. Boardman, who then passed it along to John Wallace of New York so that it could be prepared properly before finally passing it on to Professor S. F. Baird of the Smithsonian in Washington. But just as a rumor can get distorted as it passes from one person to another, a duck passed from one hand to another can go astray, as this one did. Not recognizing the value of the hen, Wallace let the skin get away from him, and it has been missing ever since.

Regrettably, we got to the Grand Manan ferry two minutes late for the 9:30 sailing. Sarah was philosophical about it and politely suggested that I might want to have a go with the eggs, which were, quite frankly, causing her car to be unridable. The tide was out and I took the eggs and Sarah’s pocketknife down the gravel embankment to a spot where a rivulet of fresh water ran down to the ocean. I steeled my nerves and, following in the long tradition of egg collectors, but fearing an explosion, I poked a very small hole through the shell at the blunt end.

I suspect that more Christians would be frightened into good behavior if ministers described hell in terms of the smells that issued from that egg. Saving oneself for marriage would seem like the only possible course of action if the alternative was eternity exposed to
that smell. But to draw a parallel of that sort would be to tarnish the good name of hell. The moment that I pricked the eggshell, a geyser of frothy green liquid shot from the hole and arced before hitting the ground more than a yard away. Seconds passed, and the geyser didn’t stop; I started to fear for the local environment. Thirty minutes later, by poking and prodding and rinsing the egg under the rivulet, I had managed to get all of the contents out and leave the shell intact. After another thirty minutes of this disgusting display I had the second shell cleaned out. I didn’t have the heart to repeat the performance and, with the ferry pulling back into its berth, I tossed the third egg on a rock. It exploded.

Grand Manan Island has all the wonder of a tropical island paradise, without all the worry about coconuts dropping on your head. It is about 17 miles long and 7 miles wide, slung low in the middle but rising to a peak with a lighthouse at either end. It features lovely long beaches and quaint fishing villages. After dropping off our gear at a B&B, we drove to the island’s south end. Just before arriving at the lighthouse, we drove into a thick fog. In an attempt to repel unwary sailors, the foghorn sounded for five seconds out of every sixty, but some trick of the fog meant that the horn echoed for a further fifteen fading seconds. Walking along the bluff, we got intermittent glimpses of a crashing surf far below and imagined what the view would be like on a clear day.

Driving north, we stopped at a beach. I wanted photographs of a spot where Cheney’s Labrador Duck might have been shot. It was all idle speculation, of course; one spot was as likely as another. On that day, the surf was filled with sea ducks, foraging over the sandy bottom as Labrador Ducks would have done. Edible mussel shells that had washed up on the beach told me what my ducks had been eating.

All along the East Coast, fisheries are in decline. However, fishing seems to be alive and well in the waters around Grand Manan. We saw fishing weirs and salmon farm enclosures and an assortment of fishing boats. Everywhere the island had a fair perfume, a mixture of kelp, sea air, and fish processing. Not at all unpleasant. Just kind of fishy.

W
E WERE UP
early the next morning, hoping to fit a lot of living into the day. Our B&B hosts were apparently quite devout, as evidenced by the painting of a young sailor at sea, with a much larger-than-life Christ looking over his shoulder. Once again we seemed to be in the presence of folk who badly wanted Sarah and me to be married. Not wanting to disappoint, I didn’t do anything to convince them otherwise. When our hostess commented on how good it was of me to bring all of the suitcases to the car, I said, “Well, the missus has me well trained.”

In an attempt to see as much of Grand Manan as possible, we aimed for the northern tip of the island. There we came across the Swallowtail Lighthouse, hoping to find it fog free. No such luck, the foghorn sounded for three out of every twenty seconds. Even so, the walk was very pleasant, with steep cliffs and periodic views of a crashing surf and large seals or small sea lions. Back in the center of Grand Manan, we meandered a beach in a drizzle, hoping to find some marvelous treasure. I found a shard of blue crockery and managed to convince myself that it was from a shipwreck of 1620.

By this time the island’s two museums were open, and I was keen to see both. The first was the Whale and Seabird Research Institute Museum. For such a grand name, I expected a little more. There were a few stuffed birds, a skeleton of a minke whale, and an assortment of marine mammal vertebrae. In glass jars, we saw some preserved invertebrates, the eyeballs and kidneys of a seal, and the dung of a right whale. It might easily have been the vomit of a right whale, and I had to wonder who had collected it, why, and how.

The second venue was the appropriately named Grand Manan Museum. Looking quite worn from the outside, it turned out to be rather nice on the inside. It had displays of local geology, mineralogy, and island history, including fishing, churches, and shipwrecks, all closely intertwined. One of the odder items on display was the remains of a naked-lady masthead from a shipwreck. Whoever found the masthead was so incensed by the lack of modesty that he cut it off at the head and burned the torso. There was a very large display of stuffed birds from the collection of Alan L. Moss, 1881–1953, the “birdman of Grand Manan.” An annotated catalogue of the Moss collection included no stuffed Labrador Ducks, which wasn’t surprising
as the duck went extinct several years before Moss was born.