The Curse of the Labrador Duck (5 page)

One question that O’Connell answered without being asked was how he felt, in an era of great environmental concerns, about having collected all of those eggs. He explained that his collection had been amassed in a different era with different priorities. Collecting natural history artifacts had been a gentleman’s pursuit. Even so, O’Connell felt a degree of remorse over his collection. Lisa and I had made a new friend. We were invited to stay longer, but we didn’t want to tax the hospitality of an elderly gentleman in discomfort. We were off, still hoping to be in bed within our twenty-four-hour limit.

It was a long tramp back up to the Falkirk train station, but by 4:30 p.m. we were roaming the streets of Edinburgh, looking for a quick meal. The early evening found us on the bus to the airport. Our 8:50 p.m. departure time came and went with a big blank spot on the tarmac where our airplane should have been; the airline seemed insensitive to our self-imposed twenty-four-hour time limit. We arrived at Gatwick fifteen minutes late for the 11 p.m. coach. Finally arriving at Oxford at 3 a.m., we found plenty of kebab wagons doing a brisk business, but no taxis, and so had to hoof it. We arrived home at 4 a.m., twenty-eight hours after leaving.

And so, despite having missed our target by four hours, I had all of the material needed to determine whether or not the carefully guarded egg of O’Connell was something rare and valuable or something rather more ordinary. Was I in for a long and expensive trip to see the desolate spot in the Canadian Arctic where the egg had been laid? Michael Sorenson sent me a message with the results of the genetic analysis of O’Connell’s egg. Like one of the eggs in Tring, rather than being worth its weight in precious metals, the egg turned out to be the product of a Mallard. It would be a while before I could sample the last six egg possibilities.

To date, my search for the remains of Labrador Ducks had been something of a bust. I had visited the spot in Labrador where Audubon’s son almost certainly didn’t find Labrador Duck nests. I had scampered over Great Britain in search of eggs that hadn’t been
produced by Labrador Ducks. It was time to change my luck, and so I set off in search of stuffed birds. No one could say quite how many stuffed Labrador Ducks were waiting for me. Published records told me that I could expect something like fifty specimens scattered among the world’s greatest natural history museums, but some of these seemed more legend than substance. One specimen was to be found here, and another one way over there. Twelve countries…thirteen…perhaps more. Given that I had a life to live and a living to earn, this was going to take some time.

T
o this point I had been something of an imposter, claiming to be the world’s most noted authority on something that I had never actually seen. Even though I had been reading and writing about Labrador Ducks for seven years, and despite having traveled to Labrador and Europe chasing down eggs and other leads, I was part of that enormously vast majority of humans who had never actually seen any of the surviving specimens. It was time to join the small but elite band of explorers who had lost their Labrador Duck virginity.

My journey to examine every stuffed specimen in the world could have started anywhere. I could have dashed off to somewhere exotic and romantic like Paris or New York City, and yet, since the species probably bred in Canada, that seemed as good a place as any to start. More importantly, having just finished a month of fieldwork on songbirds in California and Oregon, I was trying to get over a near-fatal encounter with poison oak. Even though the vesicles on my legs had stopped weeping, somehow I just couldn’t get myself in the mood to struggle with the intricacies of the public transit system in Prague or explain my quest for dead ducks to Russian customs and immigration officials—yet.

Having tricked my wife into two Labrador Duck–related trips,
I felt I might just be able to pull a similar stunt on an old university friend. I was able to hunt down Gina Brown-Branch and her husband, Steve, in Ontario. We agreed that sixteen years, fully one-fifth of a lifetime, was too long without a visit; we should try to get together for a reunion.

“Well, you know, I do have research to do in Ontario and Quebec. What do you think about a road trip to see some dead ducks?”

Gina and Steve own a magnificent old farmhouse in Cambridge, Ontario, about an hour southwest of Toronto, dating back to the first European settlement of the area. The house was added to and subtracted from over the years, and passageways were inserted and then plastered over, but it still maintains a lovely cool atmosphere on a hot summer afternoon, as though too proud an old lady to allow herself to become overheated. The yard has many impressive trees, and one grand oak in the backyard was probably well along when vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons passed through that part of the province, roosting in trees of exactly that sort.

Steve and Gina breed autos in their yard. Gina drives a tank-size 1984 Mercury, while Steve drives a living room on wheels, more commonly known as a 1988 Lincoln Town Car. These vehicles are only stand-ins while Steve works on a 1960 Gentleman’s Hot Rod T-Bird for himself and a 1954 Series 62 Fleetwood Cadillac for Gina. They are also restoring a giant silver bus big enough to accommodate a high school marching band on a three-week tour of the American Midwest. An assortment of other immobile cars that don’t seem to fit a theme may have just pulled into the yard for a rest, liked the view, and decided to retire there. Luckily, the yard is big enough that the neighbors haven’t yet pilloried them. They have hidden most of the good stuff in a newly constructed garage just a little smaller than Boeing’s aircraft assembly building.

The home’s interior decor has been changed a bit since it was built. Most of its nooks and crannies are occupied by an amazing collection of automobile memorabilia, and the floor has been reinforced in places to support stacks of car magazines. Even so, visitors to the house are likely to be on their third of fourth visit before they notice the car theme. This is because most walls of the house are occupied by gigantic paintings of nude women. If I wanted to display one of
these paintings in my house, I would have to raise the ceiling a yard, and hire a good divorce lawyer. The women in these paintings are altogether, completely, emphatically, undeniably undressed. They are in the downstairs living room, the upstairs lounge, the dining room, and (God help me) the guest bedroom. Most were painted by a single artist, who really, really loves to paint breasts. I found it more than a little disconcerting that some of the paintings were of Gina. Her university degree is in zoology, but she now makes her living as a nude model for artists and art students. The three of us spent a day cruising the back roads of southern Ontario, getting caught up on our lost years, before Gina and I left Steve behind and set out for Toronto in Gina’s Mercury.

T
HE AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION’S
guide to Ontario explains that “most visitors are likely to be pleasantly surprised by Toronto’s weather.” Reading between the lines, this means that foreign visitors, completely ignorant about all things Canadian, and expecting to find the city dotted by igloos on an otherwise barren and frozen landscape, will be pleasantly surprised to find that the dogsleds operated by the Toronto Transit Commission generally give igloos a wide berth. Gina and I were heading for the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada’s largest museum of human culture and natural history, with more than 6 million artifacts, and my first stuffed Labrador Duck. A pretty good chunk of the story concerning this particular specimen revolves around the late Paul Hahn.

Hahn might be just about the perfect example of a biologist-wannabe. He didn’t have a degree in the field, but, like so many other natural history enthusiasts, he probably dreamed of spending his life chasing sparrows through alpine meadows, pretending to be a critical analytical thinker hot on the trail of some pressing and important question that only other ornithologists would care about. Hahn made his living by selling and restoring pianos. He satisfied his biology cravings by becoming involved in the activities of the Royal Ontario Museum, and he contributed as a patron of the work done by the institution.

In the late 1950s, Hahn took on the interesting but almost certainly futile task of documenting the location and history of every
stuffed specimen of the extinct Passenger Pigeon in the world. This task was futile because, unlike the handful of Labrador Duck corpses still around, thousands of stuffed Passenger Pigeons remain, and many of these are found in the most unlikely places, including the trophy cases of small-town high schools.

Hahn sent questionnaires to every museum in the world that might have stuffed Passenger Pigeons in its collection. While he was at it, he asked them about their stuffed specimens of other extinct North American species, including Great Auks, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Carolina Parakeets, and Eskimo Curlews. Almost as an afterthought, Hahn also asked museum curators about stuffed Labrador Ducks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he exchanged thousands of pieces of correspondence with museum curators, and in 1963, the results of his noble quest were published as a book entitled
Where Is That Vanished Bird? An Index to the Known Specimens of Extinct and Near Extinct North American Species.
The book is, in essence, hundreds of pages of annotated lists. No one would describe it as a riveting page-turner, but more than forty years later it is still the most complete list of its kind. Although Hahn lived to the ripe old age of eighty-seven, he didn’t last quite long enough to see the book published. Instead it serves as a tribute to his energy and dedication to the task. It provided me with a list of fifty-four Labrador Ducks.

Hahn, like me, couldn’t bear to throw anything away, and the paperwork that accumulated in preparing his book now resides in the Library and Archives of the Royal Ontario Museum (the ROM). The museum’s head librarian and archivist was happy for me to dig through it all. Although it makes for an interesting read, the material is not well organized. Correspondence from museums in India is included in the file pertaining to Italy, and the folder for Hawaii contains material from Peruvian museums.

Today, with 134,000 bird skins in its collection, the ROM ranks somewhere around thirteenth in the world, but it is first in the world in terms of bird skeletons, with 42,500. It must have irritated Hahn that the ROM, with its large and growing collection of natural history artifacts, had neither a Great Auk nor a Labrador Duck, because he set his talents to helping the museum to get one of each. A hundred and fifty years earlier, if a museum wanted a Great Auk, it would
simply let it be known that it was willing to pay top dollar for a specimen. If the price was sufficiently outrageous, some debt-ridden collector would risk a trip to a remote island off the coast of Iceland to club one. Since Great Auks and Labrador Ducks are now completely and irrevocably extinct, the task becomes a bit trickier. Many museums have resorted to the next-best thing by having a taxidermist cobble together a fake from feathers of other species. For Hahn this wasn’t an acceptable solution. Clearly, the only route was to buy or trade for specimens in the hands of another institution. Apparently he didn’t think to steal one.

Hahn’s correspondence includes letters to museum curators that strongly hint that the ROM would be very keen to purchase a Labrador Duck or Great Auk if the institution wished to give theirs up. For instance, letters to Hahn from Professor F. Ronald Hayes of Dalhousie University in Halifax imply that Hahn had suggested a swap of Dalhousie’s Labrador Duck for a pair of the ROM’s Passenger Pigeons. The ROM has about 150 Passenger Pigeons, and this would have been a ridiculously one-sided trade of diamonds for glass; the folks at Dalhousie were not sufficiently gullible to fall for this trade. Hayes explained that, according to Dalhousie folklore, they had been offered $5,000 for their Labrador Duck and had turned the offer down. A handwritten note in the margin of one letter suggests that Hahn was going to try to get the vice president of Dalhousie to reconsider their position, given that the ROM has one thousand visitors for every visitor to the Museum at Dalhousie. The appeal was not successful, but the ROM did eventually get both a Great Auk and a Labrador Duck.

Somewhere around 1840, a Labrador Duck was shot by Jacob P. Giraud Jr. and mounted by a well-known New York City taxidermist, John G. Bell. Giraud collected most of his specimens in and around Long Island, and I might surmise that this Labrador Duck was shot there. In 1867 Giraud gave his collection of 800 mounted North American birds, including his Labrador Duck and Great Auk, to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where the duck sat until 1921, when it was remounted by taxidermist George Nelson, put into a glass and brass case, and placed in the capable hands of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The duck
arrived in the Big Apple in October 1921 and was promptly locked away. The ROM purchased it and the Great Auk from Vassar, receiving them in July 1965, thus moving the Labrador Duck from a locked safe in New York to a locked safe in Toronto.

The sale was arranged by Dr. Ralph S. Palmer, formerly a professor at Vassar, but at that time New York State Zoologist. The question of selling the duck and auk was apparently a delicate matter, for Vassar had refused several previous offers. The ROM’s James Baillie arranged a fund-raising campaign, and more than 200 individuals and organizations contributed. The birds came through at quite a bargain—$3,500 for the duck and $7,000 for the auk.

Gina and I were met at the ROM by Brad Millen, the museum’s database technician for the bird collection, who signed us in and had us fitted with Really-Bloody-Important-Visitor-So-Pay-Attention-Dammit badges. Pleased at the prospect of sharing some of the museum’s great treasures with people who would really appreciate them, Millen showed us a number of stuffed specimens of extinct birds, along with other beautiful creatures that have avoided extinction so far. While Millen and Gina continued their tour, I got down to my examination of the ROM’s duck.

My very first Labrador Duck is also the finest specimen in the world. In part, this is a tribute to the gifted taxidermist George Nelson. Millen showed me X-ray images of the duck, which revealed an amazing array of pins and supporting wires that resulted in a very lifelike pose. Between visits by ornithologists, the duck resides in its protective case in a fireproof safe, along with other particularly precious specimens like the Vassar Great Auk, two Heath Hens, an Eskimo Curlew, and two of the museum’s many Passenger Pigeons. It took me forty-five minutes to measure the bill and the wings, to make notes on the colors of the bills, eyes, and feet, and to take some photographs.

If you can’t afford to buy a Labrador Duck, here’s how to make one. First, obtain a reasonably cooperative medium-sized duck; a Mallard or a scaup should do nicely. Spray-paint it black. Then tip its head and breast into a bucket of white paint. (I realize that, as birds,
Labrador Ducks don’t have “breasts,” but it is a technical expression. Just trust me on that one.) Then paint the wings white, except for the ends of the flight feathers. The tips of flight feathers and automobile tires are black for the same reason—pigment makes them better able to resist wear. Then paint a black ring around the base of the neck, and a thin black stripe lengthwise along the top of his head. Voila! You have an adult male Labrador Duck. Females kinda got shortchanged in the beautiful plumage department, being mottled gray and brown all over. This is great for hiding from predators but not the sort of pattern that gets your picture on a stamp in Redonda. Depending on their age, the feathers of an immature male were somewhere between the color of a female and an adult male.

You can allow your more creative side to emerge when it comes time to paint the bill, because we really don’t know what color they were. Feathers generally retain their color after the death of the bird, but body parts like beaks and legs tend to fade over the years. It doesn’t help that some taxidermists painted the beaks and feet; they may have given those body parts the colors they had in life, or they may just have had some paint left over from bathroom renovations. The tip of the bill was probably black, and the base might have been brownish, but there might have also been some red and blue mixed in. We also don’t know the color of Labrador Duck eyes, because reports of the day were contradictory. The male in Toronto has dark brown glass eyes; perhaps John G. Bell was a sufficiently good taxidermist to peep at the eyes of the corpse before he put in glass eyes of a similar color. So, now that I had lost my Labrador Duck innocence and gone through Hahn’s correspondence like a smutty scientific voyeur, it was time for Gina and me to drive on in search of duck number two.