The Curse of the Labrador Duck (34 page)

I
T WAS TO
be a big day. While Jane had a little lie-in, I prepared to swoop down on Harvard and the Museum of Science to snap up four ducks. If everything went according to plan, I would increase my total of Labrador Ducks seen to fifty-three, and decrease my total of unseen ducks to two. If everything went according to plan…With duck-detection kit in hand, I set off in search of wisdom and truth.

Random wandering brought me to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Plunked down right in the middle of the august campus, it is open to the public from 9 to 5 daily. Admission is very reasonable and anyone with Harvard I.D. is admitted free, although it seems to me that if you can afford to attend Harvard University, you can probably afford the price of admission to the museum. The research collection of animal bits and pieces goes by the rather grand name of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Louis Agassiz, a brilliant zoologist and the museum’s first director, founded the institution in 1859.

Alison Pirie, Collections Assistant in the museum’s Department of Ornithology, met me in the museum’s lobby and took me to the zoology research collection. In the elevator to the third floor, I told
Pirie how keen I was to see the collection’s three ducks. “Two ducks,” she corrected. I thought about this for a minute, and said, “I’m pretty sure you have three ducks.” “Well, yes,” was her reply. “If you count the one on display.” Oh, God, please. Not again. Please, please, please tell me that I will get to examine the duck on display. Coolly, I said, “It won’t be a problem to examine the third duck, will it, Alison?”

I was told that the fellow with the key, Ed Hack, was just back from holiday in Hawaii, and was too busy that morning to pull the Labrador Duck from its display. “How about if I come back to the museum after lunch?” Pirie put in a call. Yes, it seemed that arrangement would be satisfactory to Hack. Sight unseen, I started to dislike Hack.

So I settled in to work on the two ducks immediately available to me. Unlike most museum workspaces, this room was flooded with light pouring in through large arched windows. A space had been cleared for me at a bench.

These Labrador Ducks are both study skins. They were listed as a hen and an adult drake. The female certainly seemed to be all of that, and I felt a little bad that she seemed dull to me. Nothing too very special about her; she was collected, by persons unknown, while migrating through Nova Scotia sometime around 1857. At the time of her demise she was kind of dull brown and slatey gray. Her legs, toes, and toenails are all very dark brown. One of the three tags around her legs indicated that she was “—very rare—” but that didn’t keep her from being rather dull. She had been given a little too much stuffing, but these things happen. The only peculiar thing about her was a piece of wire poking out of her forehead, just above her bill.

The male was a bit more interesting to look at. Although listed as an adult, he clearly wasn’t. His neck ring was dark brown instead of black, and his cheeks were gray instead of white. At the time of his demise, he must have been one molt away from adulthood. His bill, unpainted, sported colors of all the most valuable woods. The records I had been provided with said that nothing was known about his history. The tags around his legs were a little more illuminating.
Apparently, he had been in the collection of George Warren of Troy, New York, and was then bought by Dr. Thomas Heimstrut, also of Troy, and subsequently found his way into the collection of William Brewster before settling in at Harvard.

Harvard University doesn’t sleep, and construction of a new building was under way next door. Workers must have been driving pilings, because about once per minute the whole museum shook. With each crash, the duck I was working on made a small leap off the desk. Being a jumpy sort of person, with each crash I made a somewhat bigger leap out of my seat. It was a bit like the scene in Jurassic Park with the steps of an approaching
Tyrannosaurus
making ripples in a glass of water, only worse. And with ducks.

After lunch I set off for the underground portion of Boston’s public transit system, affectionately known as the T. I had been told that the Green Line would, if taken in the right direction, deposit me at Science Park, home of the Boston Museum of Science. Some of the route was a bit scary. Dimly lit offshoots of the main tunnels seemed to be the sorts of places where you might find a lost tribe of trolls. Construction on the line meant that I needed to take a shuttle bus to the museum.

The people of Boston are lucky enough to have two Labrador Ducks on display. They can see an adult drake up the road at Harvard, and a younger drake at the Museum of Science. I was met at the museum by Shana Hawrylchak, Collections Intern, and Curatorial Assistant Andy Grilz. Grilz is as big as Hawrylchak is slight. In the short time I was there, Grilz gave me the impression that he took joy in everything and pleasure in the company of everyone.

Hawrylchak and Grilz pulled the young bird out of the display cabinet that it shares with an Eskimo Curlew, a Passenger Pigeon, a Heath Hen, and an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The duck is the star of that show. They set me up in a windowless workroom. Before departing, Grilz pointed out that the room had a closed-circuit televison camera. Not that he expected me to do anything wrong, but that I might want to avoid scratching myself in private places if I didn’t
want to end up on the blooper reel shown at the museum’s Christmas party.

As was claimed when the duck was first noticed, well over a century earlier, hiding in the depths of the museum’s collection, this male had come to the end his life while still in immature plumage. He was still brown in places that were destined to be black, and gray where he might have eventually become white. Someone had tried very hard to make this a pleasant specimen, although I suspect that the taxidermist had been handed a big job. The legs and toes had been treated with some thick touch-up compound, probably to cover damage. The proximal portion of his bill was painted a color that I had never seen before. Not just on ducks; I had never seen this color before on anything. It was light orange-yellow-pink. His glass eyes are hazel. Many of the specimens I had seen had badly worn tails but nearly immaculate wing feathers. In this case, the tail and wing feathers were both frayed and a few were broken. Even so, his posture was jaunty and his heavy plaster base had been painted to look like a seaside rock, gray and green as though coated with algae. What more could a dead duck ask for?

A
ND SO IT
was back to the shuttle bus, and onward to the subway’s Green Line with a transfer to the Red Line, and then off at Harvard Station for my last American duck. When I called for Ed Hack at the museum’s reception desk, I expected to be met by some miserable old sod who couldn’t be bothered to help me that morning. Instead, he struck me as the smaller, quieter member of the magician duo Penn and Teller. Penn, I think. Or maybe Teller. He had the smile of someone who had dropped off all his troubles in Hawaii and didn’t mind being back at work at all. Hack had, in the interval, retrieved Harvard’s third Labrador Duck from the display cabinet that he normally shares with an assortment of extinct and endangered birds, including a Passenger Pigeon, a Whooping Crane, a Great Auk, a California Condor, and one of only nineteen extant stuffed Guadalupe Island Caracaras. The cabinet may have been long on spectacular contents, but was rather short on style. Personally, I would have thought that Harvard would want to invest in some slightly nicer displays.

I found the duck to be a very pleasant-looking adult male, standing on an unmarked white wooden kidney-shaped platform, normally held to the backdrop by a metal L-bracket. His left side faces out toward visitors. His bill, legs, and feet had all been painted over in yellow, orange, and black, but I was getting rather accustomed to that. Whatever tags might have once adorned his legs had been discarded. If I screwed up my eyes, he seemed to be leaning forward ever so slightly, as though about to take flight. Not taking flight when he had the chance is probably what got him into the display cabinet.

T
HE DAY HAD
left me beat. I dragged my duck-detection kit back to the hotel to wait for Jane to complete her day of touring. When she arrived, I admitted that if we didn’t get going right away, I would probably crash and be lost to her for the night. After a pizza, we decided to spend the remainder of our last night in America back in the “English pub” close to the university. Not quite so crowded as the night before, it still had about 250 patrons. But for four of them at a table in the corner, I was the oldest person in the bar. I got the first round of drinks in to celebrate a very successful duck quest. Jane grabbed
us a bit of table space and introduced herself to two attractive young ladies seated there. When I arrived, Jane introduced me as her friend “Greg.” I reintroduced myself as Jane’s friend “Glen.” Honestly! You put a couple of pretty faces in front of some people, and they go all to pieces. The ladies were in the first year of university, studying Spanish, a program which they expected to finish in five years. I asked what one did with a degree in Spanish. “Teach Spanish,” they said in unison. I was relieved that they hadn’t asked me what one did with a degree in ornithology. I might have had to tell them the truth.

F
or a child in Britain, the most familiar comic book isn’t
Fantastic Four, Archie,
or
Batman
. Instead, it’s
The Beano,
and has been since 1938. Short on storyline but long on puns and characters playing naughty pranks, Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx, Dennis the Menace, and other chums with the middle name “the” have been encouraging young readers for the better part of seven decades. As a youngster in Canada, my family managed to find me the occasional copy of
The Beano
, possibly to promote a sense of my British Heritage.

A few years back,
The Beano
decided to get its young readers more involved in the comic by publishing their photographs, jokes, and drawings. The single best way to ensure that your picture appears on the Reader’s Corner page is to have Mom or Dad snap a photo of you reading the comic while standing in front of some notable foreign monument, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge or Reactor 4 at Chernobyl. Darned and determined to get my photo in
The Beano,
when Lisa and I were ready to dash off to Russia to see my second last Labrador Duck, I made sure that I had a recent issue stashed in my luggage.

By all rights, St. Petersburg should be absolutely swarming with
tourists. For those with a sense of culture, St. Petersburg offers more than three dozen museums, including the Bread Museum, the Artillery Museum, the Toy Museum, and the Museum of Hygiene. The more adventurous visitor from abroad need never feel homesick with bars and nightclubs like Saigon, Manhattan, Liverpool, Havana Club, Hollywood Nites, and Mollie’s Irish Bar. The exchange rate of yen to roubles is a steal. All Sunday newspaper travel supplements have advertisements for package tours to Moscow and St. Petersburg, although none seem to feature ads for travel to sunny Novosibirsk or perky Yekaterinburg. People should be keen to travel to Russia if only because, until recently, it was almost impossible to do so—the place cries out for tourists.

But then comes the strange bit. Even at the height of the tourist season, Lisa and I found foreign visitors to be pretty scarce, and I think I know why. Most countries seem ever so keen to earn some extra cash by encouraging visitors from abroad. Yet, while America claims to be fighting a war on terrorism, Russia would appear to be fighting a war on tourism. In most countries, one need only show up with a credit card or some cash, a valid passport, and no more than a modest criminal record in order to be ushered in with open arms. Not so Russia. A visa must be applied for, specifying exact dates for arrival and departure. Don’t even think about enjoying your stay enough to want to extend it a day or two.

After our passports had doubled in weight from all of the new glue-ons and staple-ins, the paperwork still continued on the flight from London’s Heathrow to St. Petersburg. We were instructed to complete a registration card to get in, a registration card to get out, a customs declaration to get in, and a customs declaration to get out. The forms asked all the typical stupid questions, and a few more besides: “Are you carrying a gun? Are you importing a car? Are you exporting a car? Are you reexporting a car? Are you a descendant of the last czar intent on reestablishing imperial Russia through a bloody coup?” We wouldn’t dare forget to register with the Visa Registration Department within three days of our arrival, unless we wanted a nasty surprise. Finally, we were not to pay the cab fare in anything other than roubles, even if roubles were the last currency our cabdriver wanted.

Our cabdriver, Ivan, looked as though he had, until recently, been a hockey player waiting for his big break into the National Hockey League. He sported broad shoulders, chiseled good looks, and a broken nose. His cab sported an air freshener with a picture of a naked woman and a tiger; neither seemed to be enjoying themselves. St. Petersburg can boast a little more than 4 million residents, making it more populous than Berlin or Los Angeles but slightly smaller than Calcutta or Wuhan. St. Petersburg has built out rather than up, and Ivan swept us 9 miles through the city’s sprawling south end to our hotel. He had to wait in the lobby until we could trade in some dollars for roubles to pay the fare.

Our hotel was one of the big ones, with nearly 1,000 rooms, but it all looked a bit tattered. While registering, we were told that the tap water was perfectly safe for brushing our teeth, but that we weren’t to swallow any of it. Having seen a bathtub full of it, I can see why—its hue was somewhere between Danube Canal green and dog wash brown.

St. Petersburg is a long way from anywhere. Except Helsinki, which is just 188 miles away. Since we hadn’t flown in from Finland, Lisa and I were dragging our tails after a long day of travel. Dropping off our bags and grabbing a bite at the hotel seemed like the best option. I ordered a vegetarian pizza and a German beer; there was no Russian alcohol on offer. Lisa was a little more adventurous, ordering a
Brokkele Paste
off the English menu. Her meal had a remarkable resemblance to broccoli pasta.

Rejuvenated by the food, we found enough zip for a short walk along the Fontanka River. The canal-side avenue was quite choked with couples smoking, drinking, and snogging in almost equal measures. The waterway was choked with tour boats, although the boats were not choked with tourists. Despite the late hour, the sun was a long way off the horizon. By good fortune, we had arrived in late June. St. Petersburg is sufficiently far from the equator that at that time of year, the sky remained illuminated around the clock.

Looking back at our hotel, we had no trouble spotting our room; it was the only one with its window open. Odd, we thought. As we tried to drop off to sleep, it became apparent why all the other windows had been closed. Built on a big, fetid swamp, St. Petersburg is
ideal breeding habitat for mosquitoes, and most of the year’s bumper crop had found their way into our room. Every ten minutes, we had to get out of bed, turn on the lights, and try to swat the new pulse of mosquitoes that had snuck out from behind the curtains. This game of nude mosquito-bashing continued until about 2 a.m. Not that we had killed them all by then, we were just too tired to care anymore.

V
IENNA IS OLD,
Paris is antique, and London is practically fossilized. By comparison to other European centers, St. Petersburg is a bouncing baby boy. A slip of a lad himself, Peter became czar of Russia in 1682 at ten years of age. Peter wasn’t particularly keen on the city of Moscow, possibly the result of having watched the bloody murder of his family there. Hence, he sailed down the Neva River to the Baltic Sea and set up shop in 1703. It can hardly have evaded Peter’s notice that the area he had chosen for his new city was a great stinking, mosquito-infested swamp. Swamps don’t make good building sites, and at least 40,000 people died trying to get the whole thing to stand up. Even so, by the time Peter died, in 1725, St. Petersburg was home to 40,000 residents. Strange numerical coincidence, there.

Peter the Great is credited with a pretty hefty range of rascally behaviors, including subordination of the church, subjugation of the peasantry, and the execution of anyone who ticked him off. It was also kind of sneaky to name his new city after a saint who shared his name. But whatever else Peter might have been accused of, you have to give him bonus points for his position on equality of the sexes. Initially, it might seem a bit extreme that William Mons was executed for sleeping with Peter’s wife, Catherine, and that his pickled head was put in Catherine’s bedchambers as a reminder. However, seeing both sides of the coin, Peter had his own lover, Mary Hamilton, executed and pickled as well. Peter’s motto was apparently “I am one of those who are taught, and seek those who will teach me.”

Despite the popular image of Russia as the new center of capitalism and everything nasty that goes with it, organized-crime bosses in Russia have bigger concerns than fleecing tourists. In St. Petersburg, tourists have less to fear from the mafia than being robbed and/ or beaten up by thugs dressed as police officers. How comforting.
Indeed, there are really only six important threats to tourists to St. Petersburg:

1. Maniacal drivers have no respect for pedestrians. It is said that the majority of drivers do not have liability insurance—or brake pads.
   
2. St. Petersburg pickpockets display a remarkable level of industry. Curiously, German tourists are particularly frequently targeted. The police telephone hotline for foreigners is 278-30-18.
   
3. Missing manhole covers are an ongoing problem. I can’t claim that we saw more than two dozen gaping manholes and managed to avoid every one.
   
4. Every guidebook warns of Romany beggars, while claiming not to be bigoted toward any particular ethnic group. Begging can quickly turn to flagrant theft when women work with children trained to rifle through pockets.
   
5. The drinking water is contaminated by heavy metals, bacteria, and a nasty intestinal parasite called
   Giardia lamblia
   . Having suffered through giardiasis in Canada, you can trust me—you don’t want this one. Unless vomiting and explosive diarrhea are a priority for you.
   
6. The final great tourist problem is a national toilet paper shortage. The last two problems may be related. Carrying a small satchel of toilet paper is said to be the best way to go.
   

T
HE ZOOLOGICAL INSTITUTE
was not scheduled to open until 11:00, which gave us time for a bit of a lie-in and a leisurely stroll along the Fontanka River and the Voznesenskiy Prospekt. This neighborhood isn’t the core of the tourist map, but lies well within its southern limits. The community had the sense of loving neglect—a place where people get on with their lives. Nowhere were the buildings crying out for repair, but everything was in need of a good scrub. We passed workers removing pink and purple graffiti from a pillar, but no one was working on the general grime with a brush and bucket of soapy water.

After crossing a couple of canals, our aimless wandering brought
us to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, one of the biggest churches in the world. The engineers responsible for St. Isaac’s should get big kudos for managing to erect it on swampland. Its gold dome is a great navigational landmark, visible for miles. Ironically, during the Soviet era, St. Isaac’s was converted into a museum in celebration of atheism. Since my second-most-important task in St. Petersburg was to get my photograph published in
The Beano,
I brought out my camera and asked Lisa to snap a quick one of me holding up the comic with St. Isaac’s in the background. I tried to look impish.

Passing through the park surrounding the Admiralty, we got our first look at the magnificent Neva River where it divides into the Bolshaya (Great) Neva and Malaya (Small) Neva. Crossing the river at Dvortsovy Most, the Palace Bridge, we arrived on Vasilevskiy Island, which Peter had intended to be the focal part of his new city. There were some initial problems with frequent flooding and lack of reliable river crossings, but Vasilevskiy Island did eventually catch up with the rest of the city.

We sat to gather our thoughts in the park across from the Naval Museum. Lisa noticed that the residents of St. Petersburg are not shy about making eye contact, but also not in a big hurry to return a smile. We were later told that this reluctance is a holdover from the Cold War era, when it was not at all clear who were your friends and who was likely to turn you over to the authorities.

In essence, the city’s zoological collection was established by Peter the Great, just ten years after he established St. Petersburg. The Zoological Institute, formally inaugurated in 1832, consists of some 15 million specimens of 280,000 different animal species. According to the institution’s website, 40,000 of these specimens are on exhibition in the public galleries. Putting many Western facilities to shame, the institute’s library has more than 500,000 books and journals. The website also provides a delicious quote about St. Petersburg’s Zoological Institute that seems an equal mixture of pride and propaganda. “Solidarity, devotion to their work, and enthusiasm characterize the staff of the Zoological Institute. These number approximately 500 people. As a rule, scientists and technicians work at the Institute for many years. For many of them, the Institute is their only work place during their lifetimes.”

The magic appointment hour arrived and we walked to the entrance of the Zoological Museum and Institute. From the entrance-way, it didn’t seem sufficiently posh, and we wondered if we might be in the wrong place. For such a grand institution, the cubbyhole of an entrance seemed better suited for a junior high school in a small prairie town. As we entered we passed a group of students, no doubt about to get a tour, composed of fourteen bored-looking sixteen-year-old fellows, and one really excited-looking, estrogen-fueled sixteen-year-old girl. After they cleared the foyer, I called Dr. Vladimir Loskot on the first rotary telephone I had seen in about thirty years.

Loskot, Leading Research Fellow and Head of the Department of Ornithology at the institute, looked to be somewhere in his early sixties. This may be entirely unfair—ornithologists generally look quite a bit older than they are, having endured the ravages of sun and wind in the pursuit of birds. Loskot explained that his previous thirty years had been spent at the Zoological Institute. He led us through a level of public displays, through a security door, and into the troglodyte world of the institute’s research collection. Underfoot, the concrete floor was crumbling in places and excavated in others, with some of the more dangerous bits covered with metal sheets. We passed a small mountain of rusting radiators that had been ripped out awaiting replacement, hopefully before winter set in. We spied a slightly smaller hillock of fluorescent tubes. Whether new or burned out, they were covered with a layer of dust thick enough to be called soil. Indeed, the whole tunnel system was dusty enough to support its own ecosystem. We passed a cleaning lady who, in the ultimate act of futility, was trying to clear away some of the dirt with a small brush. Loskot called the elevator. It was one of those remarkable optical illusions—much smaller on the inside than it appeared on the outside. With the three of us inside, there was enough air to fill only one pair of lungs, so we had to breathe in turns. In broken English, Loskot used one of his breaths to explain that we should avoid touching the elevator’s walls as they were probably dirty.