The Curse of the Labrador Duck (17 page)

A very large group set off, but as we snaked through the early Friday evening, the group budded and then divided again. I was keen on pancakes, but the remainder of the group wanted Mediterranean food. I found myself in a Greek restaurant with a group of twelve, including Bob McGowan from Edinburgh, Fisher from Liverpool, and Katrina, Russell, Walters, and Prys-Jones from Tring. My two highest priorities were an exchange of lofty thoughts and getting something into my stomach that would sop up the beer, and so I ordered the first vegetarian dish on the menu. And more beer.

We drank and laughed and drank some more. Food was mixed
in there somewhere. The restaurant was typically European, fitting more patrons in a small space than my high school geometry classes said should have been possible. I was the filling in a sandwich between Katrina and Fisher. Katrina proved herself very good at flirting. Rather than ask me to pass her the salt, she put her right arm around my shoulders and reached with her left. Her leg grazed mine more often than expected by chance. She spoke to me in a breathy voice that grazed my cheek. Later that evening, while walking back to her hotel, she fell into a canal while peeing behind a bush. Sneaky things, those Dutch canals.

R
IGHT UP TO
the last moment, I had expected Errol to show up to take his share of the blame for our talk. There was no sign of him. I tried not to see it as an omen that the building I was to present in, the Pesthuis, had been constructed in the 1650s to house victims of bubonic plague. Surrounding the facility was a moat, although it was officially described as a canal. We learned that there had been a second moat separating the men on one half of the compound from women on the other half. Call me a hopeless romantic, or call me an incurable sex maniac, but if I knew that I had only twenty-four hours to live, and was separated from a willing partner by a moat, I think that I could find the energy for a quick swim. After the plague epidemic passed, the facility was used as a prison for military convicts, and then as a mental hospital.

In a move almost guaranteed to inflame, my talk was scheduled as the first one of the conference. I was nervous. After all, I was about to give the group a long list of the things that they were doing wrong. Well, not exactly, I suppose. I was going to give them a long list of things that could be done differently to make the life of the museum user a bit easier. Each conference attendee had received the abstract of each talk in advance, and perhaps I was being a little paranoid, but I got a sense that the audience might have been a bit tense, like spectators at a public execution.

I launched into the twenty-five-minute talk, entitled Views from the Other Side of the Bird: Users’ Perspectives on Bird Collections. It came off well enough. I didn’t stumble too often, although I was more reliant on my prepared notes than usual. A few chuckles came at appropriate
times. When my allotted time was up, a little yellow light illuminated on a panel on the podium. It was beside an equally small sign saying
Stopen.
It seemed a lot more friendly than the German equivalent,
Halten,
and so I politely stopped speaking, and invited questions and comments. There was a stony silence. Dekker stepped in and lobbed me an easy question about the use of museum collections by captive bird breeders, which allowed me to emphasize a couple of my earlier points. This opened the floodgates, and questions and comments came flying. One fellow took particular exception to my suggestion that policies about collection use should be explicit and published, claiming that museums should have the flexibility to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. I countered that explicit policies helped to ensure that decisions were neither arbitrary nor petty. Luckily, I had already done all the work I needed to at his institution, because I think it unlikely that I will ever see the inside of it again. Afterward, a junior member of the same museum took me aside and in a small voice claimed that my talk had “said what needed to be said.”

The remainder of the day was filled with talks and a formal tour of the museum, including the research collection. The tour of the gleaming new facility was preceded by a talk by the building’s architect, who was clearly proud of the climate-controlled closed system that he had designed. The interior of the building never wavers from 67 degrees Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity is always exactly 54 percent. It was equally clear that many of the curators from other institutions were envious, if only of the endless row of cabinets that were not yet filled to overflowing. I gather that space is at a premium in most facilities.

We were shown one room after another full of stuffed birds, some as study skins and some as taxidermic mounts. I pulled out a tray with an impressive series of birds from New Guinea called pitohuis. I called over one of my Spanish colleagues and asked if he could do me a favor. “Sure,” he said. I asked, “Would you mind licking one of these birds for me?” “Sure…what?…why?” I explained that it had been discovered recently that, as a means to defend themselves against predators, pitohuis had evolved poisonous feathers. It is said that if you lick a pitohui, your tongue goes numb. Or you might die.
I wanted to know if it were true. He gave me a disgusted look and walked away. Perhaps my humor isn’t sufficiently subtle.

We were then given the opportunity to tour the myriad exhibits on public display. Everywhere there was something interesting to see: stuffed birds and mammals, skeletons of whales and dinosaurs, insects, shells and fossils; all were displayed to advantage. Cooperative signs offered explanation to visitors in Dutch, English, and French. In a cabinet constructed of bulletproof glass was the skullcap, molar, and leg bone of a near-human creature that lived about 1 million years ago, collected on the island of Java in 1891. I confess that I didn’t have the energy to do justice to the assembled menagerie. It is the sort of facility that has to be approached fresh, with the energy and enthusiasm of a child.

Afterwards, catching a second breath, the conference mob again hit the streets of Leiden. We passed only two bars before settling on one situated beside a canal, advertising Heineken in large, friendly letters. I downed one Heineken before settling in for a good long sup on wheat beer. I didn’t get the chance to pay until the fourth round, by which time the bull was really flying. There was a lot of talk about colleagues who weren’t in attendance. Someone suggested that it was really mean of Errol to leave me high and dry, but someone else suggested that his absence greatly decreased the probability of a punch-up. When challenged, Fisher swore that she was not the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the sort of energy that suggested that she was. As tipsy as any of us, she said, “Would the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury use the expression ‘Up yours’?”

W
ALKING FROM THE
hotel to Naturalis for the final day of presentations, I had a bit of fun with street signs and billboards. I speculated that a building, labeled Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, was a place where I could be treated for plague, should the need arise. “Te koop” seemed to indicate that an empty home was for sale, or perhaps awaiting demolition. The sign at a construction site proclaiming “Onderzoeksgebouw LUMC” completely befuddled me. On a quiet residential street, I cobbled together contextual clues, and gathered that “aanbiedplaats minicontainers niet parkeren UO 7.00–16.00

UUR” meant that between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., I was not to park my minivan in front of an aanbiedplaats.

And so the day was occupied by talks about type specimens, about the collections of specific museums, and about the use of museum specimens as sources of DNA. Some of it seemed a bit much like stamp collecting, but with birds instead of stamps. I was pleased that several people made reference to the presentation I had made the day before, and that none of those people used vulgar language. After the last talk, we all gathered for a group photograph. There was a brief discussion about publishing the proceedings of the conference, and about the next European Conference on Bird Collections, to be held two years hence in Spain. With that, the Leiden conference came to an end.

At most conferences I had been to, the last evening was occupied by a banquet, and attendees dispersed back to their home countries the next day. In contrast, almost all of the people in Leiden were driving or flying away on Sunday evening. I wasn’t scheduled to fly out of Amsterdam until the following morning. As much as I had enjoyed Leiden, I didn’t particularly relish the thought of spending my last evening in it alone. Luckily, Katrina was staying over, as she had some work to do at Naturalis the next day. We agreed to make an evening of it.

We went in search of beer and food. Since Katrina claimed no special preference, I chose a pancake restaurant. I ordered a pancake with cheese and mushrooms, and Katrina opted for something with spicy beef. There was a mix-up with the order, and Katrina got cheese and ham but decided to eat it anyway. She was talking intently, and I was listening intently, and after a few mouthfuls, it was apparent that there was a second mistake with our order. I had been eating the spicy beef pancake. To help explain myself, after twenty-five years as a vegetarian, I really don’t remember what meat tastes like.

We walked along Leiden’s canal system, gabbing about loves won and lost. We walked past several grimy-looking bars, but eventually found a good one that was broadcasting gentle jazz workings into the night. The Dutch have no concept of a large glass of beer, and so we had to settle for beverages in little glasses, one after another. We talked about art and birds and other bits of nature. We flitted between topics like global climate change and the latest theories on human sexuality.

And then it occurred to me that Katrina had been carrying the few belongings she needed for the three-day conference with her. With the end of the conference, she had lost her roommate and was now in need of a hotel room for the night. It seemed to me that her chances of getting a reasonably priced hotel room at 10:00 on a Sunday evening in an unfamiliar city in a foreign country were rapidly diminishing to zero. Putting the offer in as gentlemanly a way as possible, I offered her the second bed in my room. She accepted, and I got another round of beer.

Rather than paying a few extra euros, and registering her as an official hotel guest in my room, Katrina preferred to sneak past the front desk as I was retrieving my room key. Perhaps she liked a sense of danger. Perhaps she was really short on cash. While she was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, I changed into the green cotton surgical garb that I use as pajamas when the situation requires me to wear clothes to bed. These apparently disturbed Katrina, so I switched into a gray t-shirt.

At one point in the night, Katrina woke a bit, and in the pitch dark room called out, “Are you still there?” Trying to call myself from a deep sleep, it came across as “Bzz bzz bzzzz bzzzz?” She called out again, a little louder, “Are you still there?” “Yes,” I said, “I’m still here. Go back to sleep.”

Having not paid for her part of the room, Katrina was not keen to join me in the hotel breakfast foyer for breakfast. I lingered over toast, scrambled eggs, and juice, and in an attempt to keep up appearances as a gentleman, I brought coffee and a croissant back to the room. She snuck by the reception desk as I checked out. We walked into town so that I could catch the train to Amsterdam’s airport and she could get a proper breakfast before the museum opened. At the train station, at the top of the stairs to my platform, I looked back. Katrina was waiting to wave good-bye.

Two more ducks were behind me, but I felt it was time to quicken my pace. I had two semesters of teaching ahead of me, but then my university had granted me a year-long research sabbatical, and that would be enough to snap up every remaining duck in the world. If everything went according to plan.

A
ltenburg is a tiny community in the northeast corner of Germany, not far south of Leipzig and an equally small distance west of Chemnitz. Chances are you have never heard of Altenburg and will never hear of it ever again. From all of the material sent to me by the Altenburg tourist information bureau, it seems a perfectly charming place. The most exciting thing that ever happened in Altenburg was the kidnapping of a couple of young princes by the evil warrior knight Kunz von Kaufungen in 1455. The princes were retrieved none the worse for wear, and naughty von Kaufungen was publicly beheaded in the town square. The second-most-exciting thing to happen in Altenburg was the development of the card game skat between 1810 and 1815. Although I have never played skat, I am sure that it is big barrels of fun—the sort of thing you might turn to if German television ever gets rid of free porn.

Altenburg’s Naturkundliches Museum Mauritianum has a modest collection of dead birds. When Paul Hahn wrote to the museum in the late 1950s, asking about stuffed specimens of extinct North American birds, H. Grosse, the museum’s director, wrote back to say that he was in charge of one Eskimo Curlew, one Ivory-billed Woodpecker, two Passenger Pigeons, one Whooping Crane, one Carolina
Parakeet, and, best of the lot, one Labrador Duck. Grosse didn’t provide a long treatise on where, when, or by whom the duck was collected, or how the museum came to have it. Instead, he wrote “one.” This makes it the single most enigmatic Labrador Duck specimen in the world, with no information about its sex or age, or whether it ever really existed.

The current science director of the Altenburg museum, Dr. Norbert Höser, told me that he has examined the collection and found no Labrador Duck specimens. And so, despite the opportunity to visit a community famous for the manufacture of playing cards for more than four hundred years, with a museum of playing cards to prove it, I did not travel to Altenburg, Germany. (If you do, and see a stuffed Labrador Duck, it will be worth your while to read this book’s epilogue.) I did, however, have seven other German cities to visit.

T
HERE WAS A
time when airline travel was something a bit elegant. I’ve seen the photographs. Men wore business suits and smart hats, and women wore elegant dresses. In the era when only those with quite a bit of spare cash could afford to fly, I am sure that in-flight emergencies were greeted with expressions like “What’s that? An imminent crash, you say? Oh dear. Bad show! One had better buckle up, I suppose.” Today, any old rabble can fly. Me, for instance, and I find myself asking if I want to fly with any airline that would have me as a passenger.

But there I was, buckled into a seat on an ultra-low-cost flight from Glasgow to Frankfurt. These unbelievably inexpensive airlines are able to cut costs by using some of the less popular airports, including facilities normally used by crop dusters and zeppelins. In order to save myself a few pounds, flying into “Frankfurt” didn’t mean arriving at the great hub of international transportation, and home to a wide selection of cafés and bars and Germany’s only airport sex shop and X-rated movie theater. Instead, I arrived at an airport adjacent to the minuscule community of Hahn, in an entirely different state. The airline must save even more by flying at unpopular hours, and so my cheap flight to “Frankfurt” deposited me several hours from Frankfurt, a few minutes before midnight. After explaining to a very polite but incredulous customs agent that I was in his country to
see dead ducks, I went in search of my hotel with a website claiming that it was just 800 meters from the terminal. This statistic is known in the business world as “creative advertising.”

The next morning, my luggage and I wandered “800 meters” back to the airport to wait for the bus into Frankfurt. I passed what appeared to be an American military base. A big billboard for an American sports bar described itself as “Your favorite place on the base.” With no frame of reference, I couldn’t disagree. A couple of flights disgorged their passengers just before the coach departed, and there wasn’t room for everyone. As we pulled away from the terminal, I saw a dozen travel-weary and dispirited passengers left behind on the sidewalk.

The bus carried us past grain fields, soon replaced by deciduous forests perforated by massive wind turbine farms, a few orchards, and a very few vineyards. We dropped folks off at the real Frankfurt airport and then proceeded to the
Hauptbahnhof
, from which I needed to catch several trains over the next few days. To get a sense of orientation, I wandered through the train station and picked up a sandwich for
2.60. I mention this only because I like to use the “
” button on the keyboard. I used the WC (
0.70), and stored my luggage in a coin-operated locker (
3.00).

It was too early in the day to go to my hotel, and too early in the week to see the Frankfurt duck, so I set off in search of adventure. At first it rained lightly, which was surely no impediment for a jaunty traveler. Then it rained more heavily, which was nothing to an intrepid adventurer, unless he had left his umbrella at home and his rain hat in his luggage in a train station locker. I walked east through the heart of Frankfurt’s financial district. I saw a lot of gleaming great office towers, top-end hi-fi stores, and men and women in tidy haircuts and expensive gray suits. I also saw the most amazing array of sex movie houses, continuous live sex shows, and shops for women’s underwear of the sort that aren’t really meant to be worn under anything at all. The passing traffic seemed to be mainly composed of Mercedeses, BMWs, and Audis, with a few Ferraris thrown in to liven up the mix. There was also almost endless opportunity to drink beer at sidewalk cafés, had the weather been better, and if the neighborhood hadn’t been full of so many scary, nonbanking characters. I
take it that this part of Frankfurt is the German center for banking, prostitution, and nonprescription drug abuse.

Knowing that I couldn’t possibly get any wetter, I continued my walk east and then cut south to the river, crossing to the far side at the Alte Brücke bridge. The Main is a truly lovely river, although almost completely devoid of commercial or pleasure craft. One entirely beautiful exception was a luxury cruise ship, registered at Strasbourg, tied up near the Untermainbrücke. Despite being absolutely spotless, it was being scrubbed vigorously by some members of the crew, while others laid a sumptuous meal for guests. This is the sort of ship that I will only ever see from the outside.

As a banking giant, Frankfurt has its share of very tall buildings. Most are simple, black, imposing, and uninspiring, which may be exactly the sort of image that banks wish to project. Offices of the DZ Bank reside in an uninspired silver-and-glass tower that is saved by a whimsical statue of a giant necktie at the base. Some of Frankfurt’s skyscrapers are designed in a style that I think of as seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. For instance, the Messeturm is an 840-foot-tall building that starts off at ground level as a box. As it rises, its cross-section turns from a square to a star with too many points. Further up, the building loses all of its points and becomes a column. Topping the column is a pyramid. This has led Frankfurt residents to call the building
Bleistift
, but I swear it looks a lot more like a crayon than a pencil. Even the Marriott chain got into the act with an impressively tall building in which I will be invited to stay immediately after I get a ride on the Strasbourg luxury cruise ship. But aside from these exceptionally tall and grand towers, Frankfurt seems to have resisted the temptation to build upward, thereby ruining the view for everyone else.

After a shower and a quick nap at my hotel, I was off in search of more of Frankfurt. I was getting quite brave when it came to restaurant meals in foreign cities. Walking down Münchenerstrasse, I found a restaurant without white linen tablecloths, featuring both Indian and Italian dishes. Finding a column in the menu labeled
Vegetarische Gerichte
, I picked something with the word
milder
in the description. It was based on curried tofu and rice, and went very well with tonic water, which, strangely, translates into German as
tonic water.

Bless their little hearts; the editors of the Lonely Planet guide to travel in Germany provide descriptions of “Dangers and Annoyances” for each city. The guide is quite clear that the region around the
Hauptbahnhof
is the navel of Frankfurt’s underbelly. It goes on to explain attempts to tidy up the streets a bit. This involves
Druckräume
, buildings where an addict can inject drugs, away from prying eyes, and receive clean needles. I was even told where to find such a building, should I need one. Even so, the guide explained, I could expect to see junkies injecting and defecating on the streets near the main train station, and I wasn’t let down.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I strolled to the Forschungsinstitut und Naturkundemuseum Senckenberg, in search of my first stuffed Labrador Duck of the trip. The museum is housed in a magnificent old building surrounded by Frankfurt University. I started my visit by sitting in the park that constitutes the median of Senckenberganlage, so that I could have a good look at the museum. Portions of the building are constructed of the most beautiful salmon-colored stones with tan veins. At the peak of the building, above the main entrance, is a statue of a naked old man with wings, holding a scythe in his right hand and an hourglass in his left. Flanking him are a couple of cherubs, with a couple of nymphets a bit further along. Beyond the nymphets, on the right, a man is riding a half fish, half horse. On the left is an ample woman riding a half fish, half cow. (Some sort of early trial in genetic engineering gone wrong, I suppose.) As I snapped a couple of photographs of the museum, great hordes of schoolchildren arrived. They were enthusiastic but well behaved, and their handlers subdivided them into small groups to keep them from reaching critical mass.

I tucked myself into their throng and entered the museum. The lady at the till was rather too busy taking in the admission fee of hundreds of students, and so I found a likely-looking helper near the turnstiles. “
Guten Morgen
,” I began. “
Mein Name ist Professor Glen Chilton
.” “
Ja
,” he replied. “
Sprechen Sie English?
” I tried. And then in an accent straight out of Las Vegas, he said, “Sure, whadda ya looking for?” My new friend paged my contact, Gerald Mayr, a renowned researcher of avian fossils and the museum’s curator of ornithology.
When Mayr entered the throng a few minutes later, Mr. Nevada gestured at him, so that I couldn’t miss him. Like many other people in the business, Mayr is wildly enthusiastic about his work, and he was keen to make my experience entirely pleasant. He whisked me away from the crowd through secret doors to the behind-the-scenes world of the museum’s research collections.