The Curse of the Labrador Duck (29 page)

It was soon time for our appointment with Labrador Ducks at the Smithsonian. Arriving at the staff entrance, I signed and printed my name, and was directed to the Visitors’ Office, where I signed and printed my name again. Collections Manager James Dean came down to meet us. Dean is a lot of human being but, despite his imposing presence, he let me direct the conversation. Perhaps he is a tad shy and more comfortable with birds than with the peculiar people who study them. He explained that he had been at the Smithsonian for twenty-six years, in a position that was just too good to leave.

The Smithsonian proudly counts four Labrador Ducks among its enormous collection of stuffed birds. Two are study skins, and two are taxidermic mounts. The museum’s adult male study skin looks a bit like a torpedo, very efficient for storage purposes, but rather shy on artistic flair. He was accompanied by a zip-lock bag containing roughly twenty of his feathers that had fallen out over the years. Two more fell out while I was examining him. In spots, the feathers that should have been white were a bit grimy-yellow. His legs and toes were honey-brown, and the webs between his toes were dark brown and gray, with small pinholes. The museum’s female study skin is a little worse for wear, having been transformed from a taxidermic mount to its present condition. Her speckled gray and brown feathers would have made her the pinnacle of camouflage while sitting on a nest. Her right foot is broken and is missing its hind toe, her tail feathers are worn, her neck is bashed up, and she has only one glass eye. Word on the street is that both of these specimens were shot at Martha’s Vineyard by Daniel Webster, Massachusetts senator and presidential wannabe. Webster gave the birds to Audubon, who then gave them to Professor Baird, who saw the specimens safely into the Smithsonian.

There are two good stories associated with these specimens. The first is that Audubon used them as models for his life-size painting of
Pied Ducks
. Given the shape the specimens are in, you have to give Audubon extra points for interpretation. I wondered if the pinholes in the male’s webs were the result of Audubon’s pinning the feet into just the right pose. The second story involves ornithologists Phil Humphrey and the late Robert Butsch. In the 1950s, these gentlemen borrowed the adult male from the Smithsonian so that they could x-ray it and take it apart to see what they could learn about its muscles and bones. Butsch then reassembled the duck as a study skin, and prepared to ship it back to Herb Friedmann at the Smithsonian. Being something of a joker, Humphrey came up with the idea of gathering up some old bits of duck skin and feathers they had lying around, and shipping those to Friedmann along with profuse apologies, explaining that they hadn’t been able to reassemble the duck
properly after their examination. Better judgment prevailed, and the real Labrador Duck was sent back.

The museum’s other two Labrador Ducks are both drakes. The first is an adult, donated by the American Museum of Natural History in 1872. Nothing is known about where he was shot or by whom. For reasons unknown, his tail is particularly worn and frayed. He is a bit greasy around his brown glass eyes and the base of his bill. His feet and toes had been painted battleship gray, and his left foot is a bit mangled. He stands on a block of white foam, and no matter how I turned him, his big brown eyes always seemed to be staring at me. The Smithsonian’s final specimen, a young male, was apparently shot on Long Island, New York, in the fall of 1875, possibly by New York City taxidermist John G. Bell. If the information is correct, it provides the poor young drake the dubious distinction of being the last reliable sighting of a Labrador Duck. Like his adult companion, he sits on a block of white foam and is held to the base by delicate white ribbons. Like his companion, the proximal part of his bill had been done over in thick orange paint. When not being poked at, he has a small plastic bag over his head because his feathers are falling out. An ignoble end of the road for a species.

My peeking and poking took three and a half hours. With no opportunity to sit for any of it, I was a little bagged by the end. Dean and I returned the four specimens to their locked cabinet. The Smithsonian counts something like 600,000 bird specimens in its collection, and I asked Dean if he had a favorite. He didn’t have an immediate answer, but then opened a drawer to show me a Hudsonian Godwit, a long-billed, long-legged wading bird. Charles Darwin had collected it on East Falkland island. The look of reverence on Dean’s face told me that he had a particular fondness for this specimen.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Jane and I relaxed as our Amtrak train zipped north, taking us past branches of Chesapeake Bay. According to John Audubon, this region was as far south as Labrador Ducks ever got. The bay was flat, gray, and protected by a line of deciduous trees on the shore. Ducks floated near the bank, but the train was moving too fast to see what sort they were. Almost certainly not Labrador Ducks. In the past I have moaned about the inability of Amtrak to get me
where I needed to be when promised. Well, so far on this trip, they were doing a perfectly good job, and Jane and I found ourselves in Philadelphia smack on time. Still early morning, we dragged our luggage from the train station to Philly’s Parkway Museum District, site of the Academy of Natural Sciences, home to five Labrador Ducks.

Before going on to be nasty about Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, I feel I should give it a really big buildup. The academy is the oldest natural history institution in the Western Hemisphere, established in 1812 for the “encouragement and cultivation of the sciences and the advancement of useful learning.” I would be keen to know what constitutes “useless learning.” With much fanfare, the institution threw open its doors to the public in 1828. After outgrowing its housing a couple of times, it settled in to its current location on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1876. At one time on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the academy is now in the heart of everything important, roughly halfway between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and City Hall. Its scientific collection contains 25 million items, including the first dinosaur skeleton discovered in North America and the only meteorite ever collected from New Jersey. The Philadelphia Academy: big research projects; big education programs—on the whole, a pretty fine place, wouldn’t you think?

But then it all starts to fall apart. The short walk from the train station was pleasant enough, but as we approached Logan Square, we faced the disturbing image of a large community of homeless persons living at the center of a fountain, now dry. The academy itself scared me, reminding me of the sort of Home for Naughty Boys that my parents pointed out when I was young as a way of frightening me into good behavior. If not quite a late-nineteenth-century reform school, then perhaps a penitentiary for wayward Walmart employees.

At the main entrance, Jane and I were directed through an improbable series of hallways to a reception desk near the back. There we were issued with the customary VIP visitor passes and waited for the collections manager, Dr. Nate Rice, to gather us up. He led us through the catacomb of nonpublic areas to the bird collection. Rice unlocked the cabinet of extinct treasures to reveal three of the collection’s five Labrador Ducks, explaining that the other two were on public display. “Shall I measure these three first, and get to the two
on display later?” I asked. Rice got a really embarrassed look and said, “Uh…” “Is there going to be a problem, Nate?” I continued. “Uh…” continued Rice. Despite having given him nine months’ notice of my arrival, and despite my reminder two months before my arrival, and then again eight days before the big day, Rice still hadn’t made arrangements for me to have access to the ducks on public display. I settled in to examine the first three ducks, while Rice left to put in frantic calls to folks in the exhibitions department.

When it comes to Labrador Ducks, the folks at the academy seem to have inherited some rather slipshod bookkeeping. And so, after a lot of digging and prodding, here is what I have managed to figure out about the ducks in Philadelphia. Late in the nineteenth century, the academy had three Labrador Ducks—two immature drakes and a hen. Fast-forward seventy years, and a fourth duck appears on the records, this time an adult male. Today the collection includes a fifth duck, another adult male. All five are taxidermic mounts.

More than a century ago, leading ornithologist Whitmer Stone had a good look at the three ducks in Philadelphia. He concluded that the female and the immature male with slightly more white on his breast (catalogue number 5579) were probably from the same collection, as they were mounted in the same fashion. Based on his knowledge of labels and stands, Stone speculated that they were from a collection in the Pennsylvania or New Jersey area, “most likely by Krider or Cassin,” who were probably important people in their day. The female was one of the two specimens locked away in the public display area.

The tag around the leg of the immature male in this pair originally had a 鞒 symbol, but this had been imperfectly erased and replaced by a 鞒 symbol. In ink, the tag also read NO DATA. He is in rather rough shape, with broken tail feathers and a damaged right leg. The glass eyes were in need of cleaning. A repair job on the bill suggests that the taxidermist might have started with an imperfect specimen. Some sort of compound had been applied, presumably to patch up holes, but that material had blistered, leaving the bill warty. A few feathers
on the back of his head stuck out, as though the bird was facing into a very strong headwind.

Stone wrote that the second immature male specimen “was procured by Dr. Thomas Wilson, through Verreaux, and was probably included in the collection of the Duc de Rivoli. This bird was presented to the Academy by Dr. Wilson with the rest of his collection.” This specimen is known today by catalogue number 5577. Stone wrote about a small label attached to the specimen’s leg that didn’t have any worthwhile data. I found a small card on the specimen’s base indicating that the specimen may have come from the Sanford collection, possibly with a link to Berkley through Beck. All of that may mean something—or nothing. He is, however, the best specimen of the three in the research collection, mounted in a posture that suggests alertness, but with a sense of economy of space. Strangely, his legs and bill are varnished and look almost like carved wood.

The third duck in the research collection, catalogue number 30245, is one of the two adult males. A tag on his right leg suggests that he was acquired from the Carpenter Collection. A similar notation appears in Hahn’s 1963 summary. All of this suggests that the adult male on public display is the one the academy picked up most recently, from person or persons unknown. The drake in the research collection had beaten-up feathers and his legs and bill were inexpertly painted and varnished. The taxidermist had mounted his body too close to his feet, and his head too far from his body. The specimen’s eye sockets and the base of his bill are greasy, and he was given yellow glass eyes too big for his head, making it appear as though he has an overactive thyroid gland. Poor sod.

I was feeling more and more down as Rice made repeated trips to my workspace without any good news about the two specimens locked up in the public galleries. Rice probably comes from good Christian stock, and may even have done some good and noble deeds in his day, but on that particular day I was just about ready to make disparaging comments about his parentage and his chances of achieving everlasting salvation. It was then that I realized I was coming down with a stinking great head cold, probably something that I picked up on the flight over the Atlantic. With ten days of touring ahead of me, the timing wasn’t good.

At this point, there seemed to be nothing else for it. On the third floor of the museum’s public galleries, at the end of the endangered species hall, I looked into the glass-fronted display cabinet that contained a handful of extinct birds. It wasn’t a big cabinet, depicting a rocky cliff face, with a two-masted sailing ship in the distance. Small it might be, but it contained some great treasures—a Great Auk, two Eskimo Curlews, and my two Labrador Ducks. I felt sick, and it wasn’t just because of my building cold. My quest to examine and measure each and every stuffed Labrador Duck in the world looked to be at an end. After thirty-seven Labrador Ducks, here were two that I couldn’t examine at close quarters. They were just a few inches away from me, but on the wrong side of a sheet of glass. I could even see the door at the back of the display through which I could gain access, if someone would just hand me the key. I made notes about what I could see from the wrong side of the glass. Their bills appeared to have been painted in black, custard yellow, and baby blue, and the legs were painted gray. The female was better lit than the male, and her tail and flight feathers were less worn than in most specimens.

Then I backed up a couple of yards, sat on my camera case, and watched to see if anyone looked at my ducks. Most of the museum’s patrons were members of school groups. Almost all strolled by the display without a second glance. Two skinny boys in baseball caps, a year or two from the start of their college days, looked at the display for a full ten seconds while being teased by a tangle of hormone-fueled girls of the same age. Then a couple in their seventies came by. They spotted the ducks and took a good long look. Perhaps they had the patience of age. Perhaps they were a bit more sympathetic to the plight of Labrador Ducks, being a little closer to extinction themselves. After twelve seconds, they wandered away.

When I left the academy, Rice had my business card in hand, with the telephone number of our hotel and our room number. Rice had promised he was going to try really, really hard to get me access to the display ducks before Jane and I left Philadelphia the following morning. Well, I suppose we all live in hope.

I met up with Jane and we dragged our bags to our hotel, which,
luckily, had a bar, where we downed beer and sandwiches for lunch. Maybe I could poison my cold virus with alcohol. Maybe I could drown my unflattering thoughts about the academy. I flirted briefly with the lady behind the bar, most of our conversation circling around professional wrestling.