The Curse of the Labrador Duck (31 page)

We thrust ourselves back out into the daylight, eighty-six floors up, to confront a view like no other: the ultimate array of endless architectural erections, home to millions of people who lived, played, loved, and died below us. I looked deep inside myself, and then out over the city, for inspiration, wondering what would make people pay $13 and stand in line for so long to see it. If it were an eighty-six-story view down on the grand creation of virgin Brazilian rain forest, I’m not sure that it would have been as popular as the Empire State Building. Could it be that this was one of the world’s best views of what humankind is driven to create by urges that we cannot fully understand?

Being a little less philosophical, and a little more task-oriented, it occurred to me that a good chunk of all the Labrador Ducks on my quest had been shot within the panorama before me. Indeed, the very reason that Labrador Ducks went extinct may have been staring at me. It seems completely unlikely that my ducks had become extinct because they were harvested at an unsustainable rate. It seems a lot more likely that their numbers had spiraled down because of the increasing number of inhabitants of the eastern American seaboard in the 1800s. All of those people, making all of that sewage, all of it going untreated into the ocean, exactly where the Labrador Duck was
spending the winter. For millennia, they had passed the nonbreeding season feeding on mussels in the shallow waters just off the American East Coast, but then the human population exploded. I contend that my ducks were polluted into oblivion.

Back at street level Jane and I separated. She was interested in opportunities in the immediate vicinity, including art galleries and the like. I had an appointment with an intersection nearer the south end of Manhattan. The sun did its best to shine on me by peeping between skyscrapers along the Avenue of the Americas. En route, I met Shopping Cart Man, who stood in the middle of the avenue shouting, “Either you’re a Republican, and you’re
for
America, or you’re a Democrat, and you’re
against
America. You can’t go on dreaming anymore, Democrats!” Other than drivers who swerved to narrowly avoid hitting Shopping Cart Man, I was the only one to pay him any attention at all. Approaching Washington Park, I spotted Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon. She was reading the apartment vacancy ads in a free community newspaper while waiting for a bus. She was speaking Spanish. To herself. At least I think it was Yoko Ono.

In the 1800s, Mr. John G. Bell operated a taxidermy shop at the intersection of Broadway and Worth. Quite the destination in its day, Bell counted John James Audubon and Teddy Roosevelt among his patrons. Not surprisingly, given the location and Bell’s profession, several Labrador Ducks are known to have passed through his hands, including the beautiful drake at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and several fine examples that I was scheduled to see the next day.

Broadway and Worth may have been an interesting place in its day, but nowadays it ranks as one of the three ugliest intersections in North America. On the southwest corner stands the Steps Clothing Company (EVERY ITEM $10), and a Japanese-Chinese restaurant. On the northwest corner is a Strawberry Clothing store and a B’way Best Gourmet Farm. It isn’t really a farm. On the northeast corner are a thirteen-floor apartment block and the Independence Community Bank, featuring gargoyles with bat wings. None of these buildings has any apparent redeeming features, but each is a gothic cathedral compared to what stands in the southeast corner. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building occupies an entire city block, and does so without
grace. Forty-four stories by my count, it did as little to satisfy my soul as alcohol-free beer. This is one of the ugliest buildings in the world, so I just had to take a photograph.

This was a mistake. I walked closer and closer to the building across its courtyard, which was deserted on this Sunday afternoon, trying to get a camera angle looking almost straight up that would show most of the building’s magnificent homeliness. And then, just before clicking the shutter release, I heard shouting. Although at a distance, this was shouting at its best. I looked around and spotted a security guard, wildly gesturing and shouting. Since there was no one else in view, I assumed that he was gesturing and shouting at me. He motioned me over to his kiosk; if I was going to cause trouble, he wanted to be close to a telephone.

Up close, his dull face was in a state of extreme agitation; clearly he wanted me to speak first. “Good afternoon,” I said using a British-tinged Canadian accent. “Can I help you?” It sounded like a pretty disarming thing to say. He explained that the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building was a Federal Building, and that taking photographs of a Federal Building was against the law, and therefore I was in Big, BIG Trouble. “So what do you think you’re doin’?” he asked. Well, at that point I was thinking fast. Recognizing a dim-witted bully when I saw one, I also recognized that in an era of American paranoia, I might be in some actual trouble. At the very least, I might have my camera confiscated, and with a couple of dozen photographs of Philadelphia ducks on the film inside, I didn’t want to lose it.

And so I decided to tell this fellow my story in mind-numbing detail. He heard about Labrador Ducks, about John G. Bell, about nineteenth-century taxidermy, American natural history museums, about the talks that I give to interested groups, and about how these talks were illustrated by photographs I took along the way. He also heard that I hadn’t actually taken a photograph of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building; he had interrupted me just before I had tripped the shutter.

“I saw you takin’ pictures. I saw you. You are in Big, Big Trouble. Big, BIG Trouble.” So I played the trump card he hadn’t expected. I pulled out my Canadian passport, and said, “Here. Look at this.” I suspected that if he had taken my passport, or written down any
details about who I was or what I was doing, he would be forced to spend the rest of his Sunday afternoon filling out an incident report. It worked. “I don’ wanna see that! I don’ wanna see that!” he said. After telling me twice more what Big, BIG Trouble I was in, he sent me on my way. Later investigation on the Internet made it abundantly clear that taking a photograph of an American federal building is/is not against the law. Take your pick.

I
F THERE WAS
to be one really big day in my Labrador Duck quest, this would be it. After dashing hither and yon for years, measuring one specimen in Belgium, a pair in Austria, and a pair in the Netherlands, I was now poised to tick off a stunning eight Labrador Ducks in one building. This would be three birthdays and two Christmases rolled into one.

Surely there is no one in New York who doesn’t know where the American Museum of Natural History is situated, even if they have never been inside. With a postal address like Central Park West at Seventy-ninth Street, the city block on the Upper West Side occupied by the museum must be among the most valuable chunks of real estate in the world. Unlike the foreboding Academy in Philadelphia, the monolithic AMNH is set back from the street and built of a light stone that fairly screams, “Come in! Fun stuff is happening inside these walls!”

Shannon Kennedy, a scientific assistant in the Department of Ornithology, led us to the deepest inner sanctum of the museum’s research collection, where its most precious specimens are kept. Shortly afterward we were joined by Collections Manager Paul Sweet. He assured me that
all
of the institution’s Labrador Ducks would be made available to me, even the four on public display. He seemed like the sort of fellow you would want backing you up if you were trying to capture a rattlesnake. Sweet was endlessly polite to Jane and me, making him a good guy in my books. As I settled in to work on the Labrador Duck study skins, Jane disappeared back into the maw of New York City.

I poked and prodded and snapped photos. If the AMNH had just these four ducks, it would easily be the best collection in the world. They were simple, mute representatives of their kind. A study skin, specimen 45802 shows the combination of gray breast and belly and white throat and upper neck that mark the immature male. He is unique in having tags attached to both feet, and a third tag attached to his bill by a bit of string. It is a beautiful representation of the preparator’s art. Almost as beautiful is specimen 45803, an adult male study skin. I found him a little greasy around his eyes and on his right wing, but otherwise perfect, with immaculate white feathers. The second adult male study skin, specimen 734023, was stuffed a little full for my liking, particularly on the forehead, making it seem that he was suffering from some disfiguring brain condition. The specimen was heavier that I would have expected, and I wondered what he might have been stuffed with, if not the usual cotton batting. The final study skin, number 45802, has been described in most publications as a female, although the white feathers of the throat and the uniform gray belly tell me that it is very likely an immature male. The region around his cloaca is a bit mucky, and his bill has a couple of small holes, attributable to the shotgun pellets that brought him to an end. Otherwise, like the three specimens before him, he is spectacular. I was grateful that no one had given into temptation and obscured details of the bills and feet by painting them.

When I finished, Sweet was still waiting to hear from a representative of the exhibitions staff who could open up the Labrador Duck display, so I headed off to the library. I wasn’t worried. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t worried. Sweet knew what he was doing, right?

Wading through the museum’s 1889–1890 annual report, I found reference to a promise of construction of the Labrador Duck diorama by Jenness Richardson of the Taxidermic Department. In the 1890–1891 report, Richardson proudly reported that the Labrador Duck display had been completed. When he bragged once again about completion of the Labrador Duck display in the 1891–1892 report, I began to suspect that the taxidermic department didn’t have enough to brag about. The 1890–1891 report also contained an interesting
description of work that had been going on in the mammal exhibition. It seems that a great Indian rhinoceros named Bombay had died, and the Taxidermic Department had set about to stuff him. The first step was to remove his skin, which weighed 750 pounds. The skin was then placed in an antiseptic solution for four years to preserve it. Two men then worked for two months to scrape away at the inside of the skin to reduce it to a thickness of a fifth of an inch. This was then mounted on a wooden framework. So, no matter how bad your job gets, remember that your boss hasn’t asked you to spend two months scraping the inside of a rhinoceros hide.

At 3 p.m., Sweet came into the library and announced in a loud voice, “We’re in!” We dashed to the Chapman Memorial Hall of North American Birds, where a member of the exhibition department had removed the sheet of glass from the front of the Labrador Duck display. The display is an attractive one, meant to represent a winter scene at the margin of Long Island, with one duck swimming and the remainder sitting or standing on the shoreline. The group contained an adult male, two immature males, and one female. Except where a sheet of glass was used to represent water, the base of the display is covered in artificial snow. As I prepared to stick my face and arms in to measure the ducks where they sat, Sweet wondered if it were possible to pull them out of the display where they had resided for the past 115 years. He grabbed the adult male mounted in a swimming position, and POP! Out it came. He handed it to me while he went in search of a cart that could hold all of the ducks. The fellow from the display department went in search of a card to place in the display, explaining that the specimens had been temporarily removed for research purposes. So there I stood, in the public galleries, with a stuffed Labrador Duck in my left hand and a little innocent mischief in my heart.

In 2002, Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, was general manager of the Canadian men’s team at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Before the games began, Gretzky convinced the arena’s ice makers to embed a Canadian one-dollar coin
under the spot that marked center ice. The Canadian women went on to win gold. After the men managed the same feat a few days later, Gretzky went to center ice and dug up the coin. The coin now resides in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

So, standing in front of the world’s greatest public exhibition of Labrador Ducks, I wondered if I could pull off a similar stunt. I reached into my pocket in search of a Canadian one-dollar coin. I didn’t have one, but I did find a Canadian dime. It would have to do. Looking around to make sure that no one was watching, I inserted the dime under the artificial snow and smoothed it over, leaving no trace of my naughtiness—except now that I have confessed my actions in a book.

When Sweet returned with the cart, we took the ducks back to the rare birds room, where I made an examination in world-record time. If I had been working at my leisure, the whole thing could easily have taken four hours. I managed to work through them in ninety minutes, so everyone could leave work on time. My task was a bit easier, because the bills and feet of all the ducks in the display had been painted in exactly the same way. It wasn’t pretty. The distal half of the bills of each had been painted jet black. A thin line of baby blue paint had been painted along the midline of each bill. The remainder of each had been painted bright orange, except for two of the specimens with lime green paint in their nostrils. I snapped a photo of the group on the cart and, removed from the context of their artistically prepared display, they looked to be sharing a narcotic frenzy.

After years and years of digging through old literature, discarding rumors, and following hunches, I am now in a position to provide you with a brief history of every Labrador Duck that has ever been through the doors of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

1. Until 1872, the AMNH had an adult male from the collection of D. G. Elliot. That specimen is now in the Smithsonian in Washington. I had examined that specimen a few days before.

2. From October 17, 1921, to July 27, 1965, the AMNH had an adult male on permanent loan from Vassar College. It
had been in the collection of Jacob P. Giraud, first mounted by taxidermist John G. Bell in 1867, and later remounted by George Nelson in 1921. I had examined that specimen at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto some years before.

3. In 1931, D. L. Sandford of the AMNH managed to sweet-talk the Boston Society of Natural History out of an immature male Labrador Duck, which he immediately shipped off to the Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt in exchange for a female Bonin Islands Grosbeak, also extinct. I had examined the duck specimen the year before in Frankfurt. While at the AMNH I also got a look at the grosbeak. I wish that I could say she was pretty; she was dull brown everywhere, with an outsized beak and head that only a mother could love.