The Curse of the Labrador Duck (18 page)

The Frankfurt museum collection was founded in the early nineteenth century by the Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, but it was based on the even older collection of B. Meyer. It contains about 90,000 bird specimens of 6,000 or 7,000 species. In addition, the collection has 4,000 skeletons, 3,375 birds in alcohol, 5,050 sets of eggs, and many fossils. Indeed, much of the scholarly work by museum personnel is done on bird fossils, or “paleornithology,” if you are trying to impress your friends with your big vocabulary.

This Labrador Duck didn’t come to rest in Frankfurt in the nineteenth century along with most of the rest of the collection. It was acquired in an exchange with the American Museum of Natural History in New York in December 1931. As rare and beautiful as Labrador Ducks are, Frankfurt got kind of cheated on the swap by New York’s Dr. L. Sandford. Frankfurt received the Labrador Duck in exchange for a type of finch that lived on the Japanese Bonin Islands before becoming extinct. Stuffed Bonin Island Grosbeaks are even rarer than Labrador Ducks, but, having two, the folks at Frankfurt were willing to swap their female for a duck.

Mayr set me up in the
Bibliothek
, and brought me a tray with three birds, all extinct. The first was a Pink-headed Duck, the second was a Norfolk Island version of a pigeon from New Zealand, and the third was my Labrador Duck. Mayr’s predecessor, Professor Dr. D. Stefan Peters, had sent me photographs of the specimen some years before, and so this one was a bit of an anticlimax. It is an immature bird, and although it is a study skin today, the wires running through its legs suggest that it might have once been a taxidermic preparation.
There cannot be much doubt that it was a male, as areas destined to be white were lightening up, and areas destined to be black had been getting darker before the terminal shotgun blast.

After taking my measurements, and putting the Labrador Duck safely back in his cabinet, Mayr showed me some of the museum’s other treasures, including a stack of Carolina Parakeets and a selection of extinct Hawaiian birds; the bright feathers of these species had been used to construct ceremonial robes for Hawaiian kings, which probably hadn’t helped their long-term survival prospects.

In a story that I was to hear again and again in Europe, Mayr explained that, during the war, Frankfurt’s natural history collection had been split up and moved to several sites outside the city, which explained how so many specimens had avoided being blown to kingdom come during Allied bombing. We also chatted about the city of Frankfurt in general terms. He said that many first-time visitors were quite shocked by the overt use of hard drugs, and put it down, in part, to Frankfurt’s liberal treatment of drug users. I said that I had been rather surprised by the overt prostitution and live sex shows. “Yes,” he said, “but that’s not Frankfurt. That’s Germany!”

And so having completed my official work, Mayr took me back through the collection and released me into the public displays. Not for the last time, I got to see a great museum without paying for it. And this was truly a great museum, assembled with love and care, of the sort that I wish my university students had access to. There was a curious mixture of displays, both traditional and contemporary. The dioramas that featured large mammals were so well constructed and subtly lit that I was moved to whisper so as not to disturb the scenes. A little further along, stuffed birds, mammals, and fish were on display in supermodern glass cabinets with good lighting, so that if I were to set out to learn how to draw animals, this would probably be a very good place to start. For me, a highlight was the display of specimens of
Riesenalk
, the Great Auk. Museum visitors were able to see a stuffed bird, a skeleton, and an egg, although the last may have been a model. Also on display was a Dodo skeleton, and the skeletons of three species of extinct New Zealand moas. Display cards that accompanied many of the bird specimens indicated their conservation status. On the card in front of endangered specimens like the Kakapo
was a big red circle. Three-quarters of the circle was filled in red for less-endangered species like the Sun Conure, and a red semicircle, like the one for the Purple-naped Lory, indicated that the species wasn’t quite so entirely doomed yet. Accompanying extinct species like the Carolina Parakeet was a small map of the world with a big red X through it, indicating their current global distribution.

A very large gallery was devoted to dinosaurs. While examining the
Tyrannosaurus
, I had a delightful little experience. Three children, two boys and a girl, all about ten years old, came up to me and said, “
Entschuldigen Sie bitte
,” followed by a lot of German that I couldn’t keep up with. Instead of saying something vaguely German like “
Ich spreche kaum Deutsch
,” or “
Ich verstehe nicht
,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak German.” They looked at me hopefully, and thrust a small disposable camera at me.” “Oh, you want me to take your photograph?” “
Ja!
” “In front of the
Tyrannosaurus?
” “
Ja!
” I was pleased to find that society hadn’t frightened them into avoiding contact with strangers at all cost. I crouched down as far as I could to frame them with as much of the dinosaur as possible, and clicked off a photo. “
Danke. Danke
.”

I set off in search of more Frankfurt sights. Tour books speak of the not-to-be-missed opportunity to scan all of Frankfurt afforded by the observation deck of the Main Tower. After paying the
4.50 entry fee, I had to pass through a security check as rigorous as that at any airport. I was directed to walk through a metal detector, while my keys and coins were thoroughly x-rayed and found to be harmless. A lady with a hand wand checked my trouser zipper with a degree of enthusiasm that didn’t seem entirely professional.

After a high-speed elevator ride, I found the view from the observation deck to be truly grand, even though it reminded me that I suffer from a bit of vertigo. The tower’s observation platform is 650 feet above the street, fully four times higher than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. If I were a young lover calling Frankfurt home, I could imagine proposing marriage on the deck on a summer evening as the daylight faded. I could see that Frankfurt had only twelve or fifteen really tall structures, depending on the definition of “really tall,” as most other buildings restricted themselves to just six or seven stories. I spotted the natural history museum with ease, as well as the Frankfurt airport
in the distance. I could see the
Dom
, and the small Römerberg district that somehow missed being destroyed by Allied bombing. But then I had a disquieting thought. I suppose mine was much like the view of Frankfurt for Allied bomber pilots that had come to destroy the city.

With my feet back at street level, I aimed for the Römerberg, a district of cafés, trinket shops, bakeries, jewelry stores, and a rather peculiar toy store that featured in its windows an impressive assortment of railway cars, teddy bears, and playing cards with pictures of naked women. I didn’t buy any. Honestly. I did buy a sandwich, chowing down while looking up at Frankfurt’s
Dom
, which is not really a cathedral because it doesn’t have an archbishop. Even so, it is quite a sight, constructed of the same sort of beautiful sandstone that was so prominent on the museum. At least, the chunks that I could see were constructed of sandstone—much of the church was hidden from view. Completion of renovation efforts were long overdue, but it was still being rebuilt when I visited in 2004, and the main tower was hidden in a multistory drape. Curiously, this shroud had a giant picture of a racecar advertising Panasonic. I had to wonder what God would think about having His house of worship covered in a giant advertisement. I hope that He would be pragmatic and not at all vengeful.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I earned a few points for gall, at least in my own mind. The only reason I had for traveling to Mainz was a letter written in 1959, housed in the files of Paul Hahn at the Royal Ontario Museum. Someone with a scrawled signature had returned Hahn’s letter of inquiry, indicating that the three Passenger Pigeons, Great Auk, and Labrador Duck in the collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Mainz had all been burned. No further details were provided. Presumably the fire had something to do with World War II. I had sent letters and email messages to curator and zoologist Ulrich Schmidt, but these had all gone unanswered. This could, of course, be taken as a signal to stop pestering him, but a small nagging voice inside me urged me to travel to Mainz anyway, just in case the man with the bad handwriting had gotten things wrong. At the very least it was
the opportunity to visit the site where a stuffed Labrador Duck had resided before its fiery end.

Mainz is a community of 200,000 residents. The trip southwest from Frankfurt was on one of Germany’s less zoomy train lines. Not nearly as stylish as an ICE or an EC, an IC, or even an IR, it wasn’t quite as far down the list as an S-Bahn, but it was certainly in the second half of the alphabet. The train stopped at the Frankfurt airport and a lot of little communities where no one wanted to get on or off. The one fellow who detrained at Raunheim seemed frightened. Perhaps it is the site of a Cold War nuclear waste disposal facility.

Unlike the region around the main train station in Frankfurt, rich in drug addicts and sex shops, the region around the main train station in Mainz was rich in pastry shops and schoolchildren on day trips. Instead of using the small map of Mainz that I had ripped out of my guidebook, I chose to follow a pulse of children on the assumption that they were heading somewhere wonderful. This didn’t work out at all, partly because the teacher was having trouble keeping the children all together, so that both the head and tail of the group were moving at a treacle pace, with the middlemost bits pulsing forward and back. I finally consulted my map, looked at a few street names, and then pulled out my compass. The task was compounded by roads with their own festive sense of direction, street names that changed every 50 yards, and a sudden and unexpected reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles. My map could not possibly have been right. The streets of Mainz may be navigable if you were born there and had never left. They may be just the ticket to confuse an invading army of foot soldiers, but they were completely useless to me on my first hour in town.

A kindly-looking gentleman getting ready to cycle away watched me with sympathy. Or possibly scorn. When asked, he graciously got back off his bicycle, pulled out his reading glasses, and peered at my map. After more than a minute of peering he was able to use my pencil to mark where I was.

After passing down some improbably minor streets, and rechecking my orientation at every intersection, I found a building labeled
Naturhistorisches Museum
. In fact, I found two. One looked likely
to house the public display, and the other to house administrative offices. I entered the latter. I explained to a very helpful receptionist that I was looking for Dr. Ulrich Schmidt. She said that they had no one by that name, but that they did have someone named Dr. Ulrich Schmidt. My German accent must be absolutely awful. I asked if I might see Dr. Schmidt, but was told that this would be a problem because he was in Rwanda. Surely I misheard. Instead, she took me to see the Assistant Director of the museum, Dr. Herbert Lutz, a scholarly-looking fellow with speckled gray and brown hair and beard, who took my business card and read it from start to finish. My speech about Labrador Ducks and the reason for my visit to Mainz seemed to genuinely interest him, which was particularly gracious considering I had dropped in without warning (at least to him) and was asking for his time in what was likely a busy workday.

Lutz started to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Dr. Schmidt was indeed in Rwanda. The museum had been working on ties with colleagues in Rwanda for quite some time. Personnel from Mainz had trained two Rwandans in curatorial skills, but both had been killed in the recent war. Despite horrific setbacks, the Rwandan museum of natural history was ready to throw open its doors to the public and Schmidt was there to help. Lutz went on to explain that the gentleman with the really bad handwriting who had written to Hahn was named Stadelmann, who served as a museum director of sorts in the years following the war. In the spring of 1945, like just about everything else in Germany, the museum had been hit by bombs, reportedly the night before evacuation of the natural history collection was due to begin. The bombs completed their intended job of making a hellish mess of the building, destroying much of the collection and its records. However, anything that could be salvaged from the wreckage was set aside. With a charred foot over here, a blackened fossil over there, and almost no surviving paperwork, sixty years later the museum was still trying to figure out exactly what was what. Lutz explained that by 1959 it was unlikely that Stadelmann had come to terms with everything that had survived the bombing. There was a chance that the Labrador Duck, or bits of it, might still be in the collection. Quite likely the museum had no written record of having ever owned a Labrador Duck. Lutz took a photocopy of my letter from
Stadelmann to Hahn and we went in search of the person who could give me a definitive answer.