The Curse of the Labrador Duck (15 page)

In the museum’s library I found Anneke Gichuru and said that I was interested in information about notorious duck killer Simon Cheney. She explained that the Cheneys were a renowned seafaring family that still lived on the island, including Captain Craig Cheney. Gichuru suggested that the best person to contact would be island resident Brian Dalzell, who knew as much about the birds of Grand Manan as anyone. When I reached him on the library’s telephone, he asked, “Are you a birdwatcher?” “Well, sort of,” I replied. “I’m an ornithologist.”

I told Dalzell about the Labrador Duck quest and my search for Simon Cheney. He said that Cheney was something of a mysterious figure, well known to the naturalist community of the day, but largely unknown today. Dalzell was unaware of any photographs or written records. He added a slight twist on the specimen shot in 1871, claiming that Cheney’s stuffed-bird collection had been purchased by the owner of a general store on Grand Manan called Newton, who recognized the value of the Labrador Duck and sold it. In any case, the specimen is missing.

A crush of cars was trying to leave the island, and we were lucky that Sarah had booked a spot in advance. Our second sailing through the Bay of Fundy was as calm and foggy as our first. We saw many dozens of porpoises and hundreds of shearwaters. When we got back to Black’s Harbour, we stopped near a convenience store to use the phone booth. This would have been a much more useful exercise if there had been a telephone in it. We went into the store where the lady behind the counter explained that youths had ripped the telephone out of the box so many times that the New Brunswick telephone company now refused to fix it. I made what I thought was a very reasonable suggestion. If the box didn’t have a telephone, wouldn’t it be more sensible to take away the box so that people wouldn’t stop mistakenly? No, I was told, because then people wouldn’t come into the store looking for a pay phone there.

“Does the store have a pay phone?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t that irritate people?”

“Yes, sometimes, but they usually buy something anyway.”

And so Sarah and I were on our way across New Brunswick to her home in Knowlesville. Like me, Sarah prefers back roads, and there weren’t any highways that could have got us there any faster anyway. We passed beautiful lakes with a surprisingly small number of cottages. After getting through cottage country, we passed through sparsely populated countryside. Most towns had a church, a cemetery, and a few houses. Each town seemed to be populated by folks trying their best to scratch out a living, sometimes by means that you just knew couldn’t possibly work. In the middle of nowhere, one person had set up an ice-cream stand, and a few miles down the track, another had set up a car customizing shop.

As we approached Knowlesville, I suspected that Sarah was taking a random series of turns. This wasn’t overly disturbing, as we passed a lovely selection of covered bridges and many signs that directed the traveler toward even more of them. We passed through a community boasting the province’s greatest number of churches per capita. Citizens of the community had apparently used a plebiscite to vote down the opening of a liquor store.

We did eventually get to Sarah’s home, at the Falls Brook Centre in the New Brunswick wilderness. Falls Brook is a nonprofit organization devoted to sustainable development. The facility seemed to be populated mainly by young women working for room and board. Sarah’s home was composed of a tiny kitchen-cum-dining-roomcum-living-room, a small bedroom, and a third room with a shower and sink. The outhouse was a short stroll down a grassy trail.

In the months leading up to my trip, Sarah and I had been teasing each other about going skinny-dipping. After all, we were hearty Canadians in the hinterlands of New Brunswick, and Sarah claimed to know a great swimming hole along a creek. And so after dinner, we took to the roads again. Back roads turned into very back roads, and I was convinced once again that Sarah was making up the route as she went along. Perhaps there was no swimming hole, and she was hoping that we would stumble across something appropriate.

But, good to her word, Sarah found the spot, and after a final unlikely turn and a short trip down an unlikely dirt track, we found ourselves next to a Quonset hut used in making maple syrup. It was
a really dark night, and we used flashlights to follow a path to the promised creek. In the flashlight’s beam we spotted crayfish, and when Sarah picked one up, it nipped her. Off with the clothes, I followed Sarah in the hopes that the crayfish would get her before getting me.

At this point, I have to defend myself by saying that I have participated in two New Year’s Day polar bear swims in the north Pacific Ocean, and one in the northern reaches of the Atlantic. I know what cold water is. However, it was clear to me that the water in this creek had just melted from a previously undiscovered glacier about 50 yards upstream. By the time I was in up to my knees, my brain had lost all control over the muscles in my legs, which were shaking uncontrollably. With every step I took, I knew that Sarah was a few steps further, a few steps deeper, showing herself to be a few steps braver. She kept coaxing me on, but when the water got to within a couple of inches of my delicate bits, I had a decision to make. I could bail and risk being teased, or go further on and risk alienating my testicles, perhaps permanently. I bailed.

It was a really dark night, both moonless and cloudy. The fireflies didn’t seem to mind, winking a cool blue light. I suppose if you are a male trying to get a little action by signaling to females with a flashlight on your backside, the darker the evening the better. Using great patience and a gentle hand, we caught a couple. At some point in the past, I had probably learned that fireflies aren’t really flies, but beetles, but it came as a surprise to me on that night. Standing naked beside a woman who wasn’t my wife, I was reminded of a predatory bug that mimics the flash of male fireflies. When the lady firefly arrives, the predator devours her.

M
y grand quest was, of course, designed to allow me to have a little poke at every Labrador Duck in the world. A search for some of the ducks, or even most of the ducks, wouldn’t be nearly so challenging as having a go at absolutely every single specimen, no exceptions, period.

The quest led me down some dark and strange alleyways. After hearing one of my talks, a woman named Sandra Kaufman told me that she had seen a stuffed Labrador Duck in the post office of the tiny community of Ilulissat, Greenland. She said that the store was in the northeast corner of the town’s main intersection. The duck itself was on a high ledge on the east wall of the store toward the back. Before shelling out a good chunk of my year’s income on a journey to somewhere a little beyond the back of beyond, I sent off a couple of letters. Less than a week later, I heard from Ulf Klüppel of the Ilulissat Tourist Services, who told me that the bird Sandra had seen was an eider, not a Labrador Duck. Ulf’s message saved me a long and costly journey, followed by crushing disappointment.

Not all leads were quite so easy to follow. In 1992, Stanford University Press published a tidy little book about extinct and endangered birds, written by Paul Ehrlich, David Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye. The
Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, and Labrador Duck each have their lives summarized in six brief paragraphs, one each about their food, their nesting habits, their range, and so on. The same treatment continues for not-quite-extinct-yet species, such as Bell’s Least Vireo, the California Condor, and the Whooping Crane.

For the Labrador Duck, under the heading “Notes,” the authors state: “Until recently, it had been assumed that there were 31 specimens in North American collections…” which is reasonably close to the truth, “…but recently another one turned up at a garage sale!” Having been to a few garage sales, I have rarely found anything worth opening my wallet for. It really annoyed me that someone else might have found something as valuable as a Labrador Duck, and probably picked it up for about a buck and a half. Keep in mind that no new stuffed ducks had been discovered since the late 1940s. If such a specimen existed, then I had to see it. No exceptions.

I went to my copy of
The Big Book of North American Ornithologists
and found the postal address of the book’s senior author, Paul Ehrlich. I wrote asking him to fill me in on this “new” specimen. He ignored me completely.

So I wrote to the book’s second author, David Dobkin, again asking after the garage sale duck. He joined his colleague in enthusiastically pretending that I didn’t exist. I couldn’t find an address for the third author, and working on the theory that if a fly buzzes you often enough, you have to slap it, wrote to Ehrlich again. He slapped me. He returned my letter with the following note scribbled at the bottom: “sorry—no longer have a clue try David Dobkin.” I did, and was ignored as thoroughly as the first time.

Then, three months later, I got an email request from the editor of the academic journal
The Condor,
asking me to review a research manuscript. Academics are asked to review manuscripts all the time as a professional courtesy, and refusing to help is considered to be bad form. Hence I immediately responded that I would be pleased to help out and then sat staring at my computer screen. My brain said that I should be able to recognize something about the message from the journal…something vaguely familiar…My brain said, “I need a better hint.” Perhaps it is something about the origin of the message…“Nope, try again.” Maybe I should have another look
at the name of the editor of the journal, the fellow who sent me the message…

There it was! The editor was David Dobkin, the extinct bird book’s second author who had been ignoring me so effectively. I figured that I had him now. How could I be so polite in agreeing to do work for the journal and have him ignore my simple request for help? I quickly dashed off a second email message, reminding him about my query about the garage sale duck, and immediately got a huge and enthusiastic response. He suggested that I might want to try the third author, Darryl Wheye, who was living in California. I got a telephone number from the Internet, made a couple of false starts, but finally caught her, out of breath having just finished a bicycle ride. She got right on the case.

Wheye found that the comment about a garage sale duck had been provided by James Tate Jr. of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I contacted Tate, and although he couldn’t remember the story exactly, he thought that it was based on a conversation that he had had many years before with John P. Hubbard, Bob Tordoff, Robert Storer, or Norm Ford while they were all at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As Tate remembered it, he and Hubbard had been at the university’s Museum of Zoology discussing some recent interesting developments in ornithology. Hubbard told Tate about a fellow graduate student who had found and bought a stuffed Labrador Duck at a garage sale in Ann Arbor and turned it over to the museum. “Apparently my memory is faulty,” wrote Tate.

Tate was in touch with each of his former colleagues, and claiming that his big mouth had gotten him into trouble again, asked if they could remember the conversation from so long ago. The responses came back one at a time. No. No. No. And then, fully two years after I started searching for the garage sale duck, the answer came from Robert Storer. “I think I have the answer to your questions,” wrote Storer, “although it is surprising how rumors have altered the facts.” A taxidermic mount of an adult male Labrador Duck, it was in a group of specimens that had been lying neglected in the University of Vermont’s small museum. The museum’s director wasn’t interested in birds, and so they were sold to an antiques dealer in 1957. Folks at U.S. Fish and Wildlife heard of the transaction and insisted that the
dealer return the birds to the museum. A graduate student identified the Labrador Duck and convinced the people at the University of Vermont to donate the specimen to the outstanding museum at the University of Michigan. Storer catalogued the stuffed duck on May 21 as specimen number 152,253. Storer explained that there were no data to go with the specimen, but suspected it to be one of a pair of Labrador Ducks described on old lists as being in the collection of the University of Vermont. A search was made for the female, but she was never found.

So there you have it. There never was a garage sale duck. After searching for it for two years, I was able to dig up a photograph of the specimen in my files less than a yard from my left elbow, and Lisa and I were off to Ann Arbor to see it.

A
T THIS POINT,
I would have traded any two of my teeth for a good long sleep, preferably one that lasted until my next birthday. And yet, just ten hours after setting down in Calgary after the long flight from New Brunswick, I was in the air again, this time with Lisa. Having flown the width of North America the night before, I was now jetting the 1,364 miles back to Illinois. My duck quest was turning into an obsession, as quests so often do.

The first target of this quest was the 121st annual conference of the American Ornithologists’ Union at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I was scheduled to make a presentation on my birdsong research and chair a session. By delightful coincidence, the conference was not far from a couple of museums that housed Labrador Ducks. My duck business would follow the conference, but getting everything done would require rather precise timing. Lisa had booked passage on the 6:10 a.m. Amtrak train out of C-U for Chicago, where we would catch a taxi to the Field Museum of Natural History before returning to the train station at 2 p.m. for the journey east, bringing us into Ann Arbor, Michigan, around suppertime.

Monday morning we were up at 4:30 so as to get a hearty breakfast at the twenty-four-hour “We Never Close” restaurant next to our hotel. They were closed. “Sorry for the inconvenience” read the hand-printed sign on the door. Not an auspicious start. As instructed, we got to the train station twenty minutes before departure, only to
be told that, due to mechanical difficulties, our train was running two hours late. The purveyor of this information had the look of someone for whom 90 percent of his job is passing along bad news to irate customers. I started to see why Amtrak is so unpopular with my American colleagues.

Incredibly, the train from the south spent the last fifteen minutes of its journey traveling backward into Chicago’s Union Station at glacial speed. America’s Second City. The Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Pride of the Rustbelt. That Toddling Town. Hog Butcher to the World. Somehow, backing into town several hours behind schedule didn’t seem to be a fitting way to enter Chicago for the first time. Luckily, Lisa was able to convince an Amtrak representative to trade our 2 p.m. train tickets to Ann Arbor for tickets on the 6 p.m. train, giving us time to complete our Labrador Duck work.

When we arrived at Chicago’s great Field Museum of Natural History, David Willard came straight down to meet us. Willard is the manager of the bird collection in the museum’s zoology department. He was tall and clean-shaven, and sported the big black-rimmed glasses that are so hard to find in a world full of miserly wire-rimmed granny glasses. Willard grabbed one of our suitcases and we followed him up a flight of stairs to the museum’s behind-the-scenes collections. Given our arrival time, he had guessed that something had gone wrong with the train. Not much of a stretch of imagination, he suggested.

The ducks were waiting for me, and my examination of them was straightforward. Both are taxidermic mounts. The drake has a particularly jaunty look about him. He sits on a plastic rock atop an oval board. His face is more appealing on the left side, but his bill is prettier on the right side. The hen is a little more beaten up, missing a toenail, and with holes in the webbing of her feet. Her bill was painted with unflattering gobs of yellow and gray paint, now flaking off. Unlike the drake with his cool plastic rock, she resides on a simple wooden base. Except when nosey ornithologists are poking
around, he has a plastic dust cover; she doesn’t. His catalogue number is 13352 and hers is 13353.

With Willard’s help, I had tried to sort out the origins of these ducks. It is abundantly clear that their origin is anything but abundantly clear. The Field Museum’s database claims that both specimens came from the Charles B. Cory Collection after being shot at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, where Sarah and I had been a few days before. However, just because someone enters it in a computer database doesn’t guarantee that the information is correct. Writing in 1959, Jim Baille of the Royal Ontario Museum claimed that the hen came from Swampscott, Massachusetts, about 1862, and that the drake came from Grand Manan Island about 1860. A note on file, in the handwriting of ornithologist Emmet Blake, explains that both specimens were shot near Calais, Maine, on dates unknown, and that the museum purchased them from George N. Boardman of Calais around 1880. The Calais locality seems to have been Boardman’s home, but whether the ducks were shot there is anyone’s guess. So, to summarize, the Labrador Ducks at the Field Museum in Chicago may have come from New Brunswick, Maine, Massachusetts, or somewhere else.

Having finished my work, and with some time to kill before our evening train, we told Willard that we were going to have a look at the museum’s exhibits. He replied that we were very welcome to take in the exhibits, but as guests of the museum, we were not to pay the entry fee. God bless this man. We carried our luggage to the coat and baggage check, and Willard explained to the lady attendant that we were valued guests of the museum, and that she wasn’t to charge us for watching our gear.

As we had seen, the two real Labrador Ducks are stored safely in locked cabinets, far from damage by light and dust. However, in tribute to creatures now extinct, the Field Museum has a replica duck on display, along with a replica Great Auk, and one real specimen each of extinct Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, and Eskimo Curlew. As Lisa and I stood in front of this exhibit, a family walked up—parents accompanied by a son and daughter, both in their teens, and both with neon-blue hair. To my absolute delight, the girl looked at the iridescent yellow and red Carolina Parakeet and said, “Can you
imagine being in a whole flock of those? That would be awesome!” I wanted to shake her hand for resisting the temptation to fall into the cynicism of youth, and for having the imagination to see that an extinction had denied her generation of a unique treasure.

We wandered through the other bird and mammals exhibitions and, like those patrons around us who had paid to be there, were very impressed. Stuffed specimens of fully 90 percent of all North American birds were on display, and each had sufficient room so as not to appear crowded. Some very large display cabinets had as few as one large horned mammal each.

Well into the afternoon, we stopped at the cafeteria for our first meal of the day. Shrink-wrapped white-bread sandwiches weren’t good enough for the Field Museum cafeteria. Lisa had chili, and I had pizza on focaccia bread. As we ate, we had a good gawk at the architecture. The building was clearly designed to say: “The contents are important, and we want you to be impressed.”

We missed the museum’s exhibition on baseball, but we did see some of the other very good exhibits, including displays of gems and human history. Surely no one would fail to be completely impressed by one of the Museum’s crowning glories—an almost compete skeleton of “Sue,” a
Tyrannosaurus rex
discovered in North Dakota in 1990, and the biggest one ever discovered. Nothing about the film
Jurassic Park
, even on a large screen, can prepare you for the enormity of the real thing, and camera flashes popped all around us. A recently published paper has suggested that
T. rex
might have been a scavenger rather than a fierce predator, but part of me wants to think that these devils once terrorized the Cretaceous landscape.

The train pulled out of Chicago for Ann Arbor on time, but that was little comfort, because for the first hour, our speed didn’t exceed 20 miles an hour. The journey was punctuated by long periods of immobility while the train caught its breath. Along with everyone else in our car, we tried to find seats as far away as possible from an obnoxious, loud, dysfunctional family. I realize that Amtrak is not responsible for the antisocial behavior of some of its clients, nor for the unappetizing view around the south shore of Lake Michigan. Where we should have been looking out over a Great Lake, we could see only factories, warehouses, steel mills, and water treatment plants.