The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  Among the birds that Audubon was keen to find, shoot, and paint was the Labrador Duck, known at the time as the Pied Duck because of the drake’s black and white feathers. The bird would have been something of a novelty in 1833, having been formally described just forty-four years earlier by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin. His description, in Latin, was accompanied by its first scientific name, Anas labradoria. This publication was followed three years later by the first-ever depiction of a Labrador Duck in a book about arctic animals by Thomas Pennant, a Welsh naturalist and antiques aficionado. Pennant briefly described the drake’s appearance; a white head and neck, with black back and belly. He then described the hen as mottled brown, white, dusky, and ash-colored.

  Audubon showed incredible optimism in his desire to shoot a Labrador Duck on its breeding grounds in Labrador. They must have nested somewhere, but Audubon had no better idea of exactly where this might be than anyone else. The stuffed specimens he had seen had all been shot on the duck’s wintering grounds between Nova Scotia and Chesapeake Bay. As a sea duck, it probably nested coastally, but which coast? Could it have been as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence or as far north as Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula? No one knew. The vast coastline of Labrador was largely unexplored by naturalists, but Audubon was a man who kept his eyes open.

  Created in 1792, this is the first depiction of a Labrador Duck. Less than a hundred years later, the duck was extinct.

  On his journey to Labrador, Audubon took along his twenty-year-old son, John Woodhouse Audubon, and four of his son’s friends. They departed Eastport, Maine, on June 4, on board a 106-ton schooner, The Ripley, having taken on two extra sailors and a “lad.” John Junior and his friends probably got the shock of their lives the first time John Senior woke them up at 4:00 to go out and shoot birds, particularly since the younger Audubon apparently had to overcome what his father felt was a nasty habit of sleeping late. John Senior remained back at camp in order to paint all day long. Not that this was his way of getting out of work. In his personal journal of his travels in Labrador, Audubon wrote: “I have been drawing so constantly, often seventeen hours a day, that the weariness of my body at night has been unprecedented.” The party returned to Eastport on August 31. Audubon had given himself three months without having to open a mailbox full of nasty letters laden with words like PAST DUE and vague references to collection agencies. The trip did, however, leave him a further $1,500 in debt.

  Luckily for us, Audubon’s personal journal of his trip to and from Labrador was particularly detailed, as it was for most of his major excursions. Unlike his other writings, his travel journals seem to have been a more intimate record of his journeys, meant to be read by members of his family, rather than an entertaining documentary for the public. Like Newfoundland and Labrador itself, he generally seems to have been of two minds. On days when the sun shone, and the blackflies were not too insistent, then everything about Labrador was a joy. “A beautiful day for Labrador,” he wrote on the second of July. “Went on shore, and was most pleased with what I saw. The country, so wild and grand, is of itself enough to interest any one.” However, when the roll of the sea brought a greenish hue to the faces of everyone onboard The Ripley, or when the blackflies made one afraid to go ashore, then Labrador was a place too vile even for Cain. They experienced “rainy, dirty weather” just six days later and “John and party returned cold, wet, and hungry. Shot nothing, camp disagreeable.”

  After several more days of rough seas, at daylight on July 26, The Ripley sailed into Bras d’Or Harbour, and moored snugly. You won’t find Bras d’Or on any recent map of the region. In its place, you will find a tiny community called Brador.*

  Although now little more than a spot on the map, in Audubon’s time the community of Bras d’Or was “the grand rendezvous of almost all the fishermen that resort to this coast for cod.” Audubon was caught completely off guard by the feverish activity of Bras d’Or after the desolation he and his company had encountered in previous weeks. Although a storm continued to bash the coast through July 27, The Ripley set sail from Bras d’Or for the four-mile run up the coast to Blanc Sablon.

  Audubon’s image of the Labrador Duck, known at that time as the Pied Duck, is not one of his most frequently reproduced images. It shows a hen and a drake on a hillside with an ocean view. The drake is engaged in modern interpretive dance, and is in line for a very bad review in the morning newspapers. The hen stands on a nearby rock laughing. The painting’s background looks much like Cartier’s description of rough and barren coastal Labrador, and if you squint and use your imagination, you can see The Ripley bobbing just offshore. Audubon knew that books of his paintings would sell rather better with some marginal notes about his adventures with each species. In his sixth volume of The Birds of North America from Drawings Made in the United States and their Territories, in the notes accompanying his painting of the Pied Duck, he wrote: “Although none of this species occurred to me when I was in Labrador, my son, John Woodhouse, and the young friends who accompanied him on the 28th of July 1833, to Blanc Sablon, found placed on the top of low tangled fir-bushes, several deserted nests, which from the report of the English clerk of the fishing village there, we learned belonged to the Pied Duck.”

  Not one of his best-known depictions, this painting by Audubon represents Labrador Ducks on their breeding grounds in northern Canada. The rendition is based on stuffed specimens now housed at the Smithsonian.

  Audubon followed up this introduction to the area with a description of the nests, claiming that they were similar to eider nests, formed of twigs and dried grass and lined with down. Since they were already deserted at the end of July, Audubon concluded that Labrador Ducks must breed earlier in the season than other sea ducks.

  And so there you have it. Written years after his adventures in Labrador, Audubon provides us with the only written description of the nests of Labrador Ducks. But you have to ask, if only because I told you to, is the account that accompanied his painting sufficient evidence that Labrador Ducks actually bred in and around Blanc Sablon? It seemed like a pretty good time to make a journey to Canada’s east coast.

  I WAS SCHEDULED to present a paper at an ornithological conference in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. I managed to convince Lisa that we really needed to take an extra week of holiday time, spend a lot of money on a rental car, drive around Newfoundland, take a ferry across the Strait of Belle Isles, and eventually wind up in Labrador. “After all, honey, when are we next going to have the opportunity to be eaten alive by blackflies in Labrador?” or words to that effect. For a couple of prairie kids, this was the perfect opportunity to see lighthouses, puffins, whales, and icebergs, and to cross paths with John James Audubon, who provided us with the only description of Labrador Duck nests.

  At first glance, the region around Blanc Sablon is something of a moonscape. Cartier wasn’t far off in describing it as frightful and rough. If you can’t feel at home without a lush garden, you should probably rethink your upcoming move to Labrador. The hills rising out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence support a few shrubs, but there isn’t a tree in sight. This tundra-like landscape is particularly odd because Blanc Sablon is almost exactly as far north of the equator as London, and is farther south than both Berlin and Warsaw. Much of the coastline in this part of Labrador has sandy beaches, but you would have to choose your day at the seaside with caution, to avoid exsanguination by blackflies. These biting demons are not only abundant but also sneaky, creeping up to your hairline to deliver a painless bite that bleeds long after the culprit has left. Once the flies have died off in the autumn, it is easy to imagine the wet winter winds blowing in from the gulf without a twig to stop them, chilling any creature with a heart. People may have originally settled the area because of cod fishing, but with that fishery nearly kaput, you might ask yourself why anyone would stay.

  But then you would recognize the primitive beauty of the region. Without any mountains or trees to muck
up the view, you can see everything from anywhere, and there really is a lot to see. Any point where the land meets the sea makes for a pretty vista, but this is a place where stark becomes bleak in the most beautiful way—a tangle of rock and brush and wind and ocean. Labrador provides enough room for each person to be an individual, while forcing each individual to be part of the greater community. Labrador has an area 19,000 square miles greater than Great Britain, but compared to the 60 million people living in the United Kingdom, there are fewer than 28,000 in Labrador. If you are willing to brave the bugs and wander along a beach, you will probably have it to yourself, but when you walk into the bar, you will find that everyone there is a friend. There is no need to enclose your yard with a fence; if your dog runs away, one of your neighbors will bring it back. When you are tired of your own company, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding someone with an accordion to play “Lights over Labrador.” In May, every house has an unobstructed view of the icebergs in the gulf, and everyone can complain with a single voice about the unreliable ferry service between Labrador and Newfoundland.

  STATISTICS CANADA HAS quite a lot to say about life in Blanc Sablon. Canada’s central statistical agency notes the population of the area as 1,235 persons. Of these, 865 speak English and 345 speak French, but only 35 speak both French and English. You would think that this would make ordering a beer in Blanc Sablon really confusing. Of the 35 bilingual persons in the community, 20 are men and 10 are women. The other 5 must be some form of life that StatsCan considers neither male nor female. Of the 1,235 folks living in and around Blanc Sablon, 10 are members of the aboriginal population, 10 are immigrants, and 1,235 are Canadian-born nonaboriginals. At this point, I am going to guess some sort of rounding error. In the five years between two recent censuses, the population of Labrador has fallen from 29,554 to 27,864. This is fewer people than attend the average Major League Baseball game.

  My wife and I got to meet a few of the more or less 1,235 residents of Blanc Sablon. We asked almost everyone we met if they had ever heard of the Labrador Duck. Most folks seemed to think that we were pulling their leg. Some tried to pretend they had heard of it when clearly they hadn’t, and one fellow thought it was the name of the local junior high school hockey team. We were absolutely delighted when a waitress at The Anchor restaurant in Port au Choix was able to tell us, “They’re not around anymore. They’re gone. They used to breed on the peninsula.” Now, doesn’t that seem to be the sort of thing that every schoolchild in Newfoundland and Labrador should be taught?

  Two local gentlemen who got more than the usual grilling from us were Murray Letto and Robert Plouffe, wildlife conservation officers operating out of the offices of the Conservation de la Faune, Loisir, Chasses et Pêche Québec, Environnement et Faune, Québec. At first they were a little confused about what we actually wanted. After we explained that we were looking for information on the Labrador Duck, Plouffe explained that a local hunter had shot one the previous summer and, as evidence in possible court proceedings, they had its body in their freezer. I looked for signs that I was being teased but saw none. Allowing my heart to skip just a few beats, I settled back down and told myself that the Labrador Duck has been well and truly gone for about 125 years. Sadly, I wasn’t about to become world famous for discovering a breeding population of a species thought to be long extinct. I wasn’t going to get my picture on the cover of Weekly World News next to a photo of an insect-eating baby with a face like a bat. With the help of Godfrey’s Birds of Canada on their shelf, we were able to figure out that the bird in the freezer was not a Labrador Duck but a Harlequin Duck, quite rare in that part of the country though not yet extinct. Certainly not fair game for hunters. If I had paid more attention in French classes in school, this sort of problem probably wouldn’t pop up.

  “How do you do research on an extinct duck?” they asked.

  “You go to places where they were thought to breed, and ask a lot of foolish questions,” I explained. Since we don’t know of any other breeding sites, the local geography could tell us a lot about their breeding biology. Letto and Plouffe were able to provide us with no end of worthwhile information related to Labrador Ducks and the community of Blanc Sablon. For instance, sablon more or less translates from French into English as “fine sand,” and so the area is named after the fine white sand along the shoreline. They also told us that the bay around Blanc Sablon is quite shallow in places, which would have suited Labrador Ducks as they dived to find small shellfish. However, the bottom of these shoals is neither sandy nor muddy, but rocky. This is strange, because reports of the Labrador Duck on its wintering grounds had it feeding over sand shoals rather than rocky bottoms, hence one of its earlier names, Sand Shoal Duck.

  Now it was time to look for the actual spot where young John Woodhouse Audubon apparently made his discovery of Labrador Duck nests. Where does one start, with absolutely no specific description? It really shouldn’t be that difficult. After all, I have been a field ornithologist longer than Audubon’s son had been alive at that point. I just had to figure out where I would I go at four o’clock in the morning if I were trying to get the lay of the land, trying to pick out spots to blast away at birds, with a minimum of tromping over difficult terrain. Even if I picked the wrong hillside, who is going to be able to tell me I’m wrong?

  The community of Blanc Sablon is long and skinny, with houses spread out along the coast so that everyone gets a great view of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The land comes to something of a 90-degree angle about halfway through the community. A hill above this point is the highest around and affords the best view of both the gulf and the surrounding countryside. The hill is also covered by the sort of low tangled fir-bushes described by Audubon. Of course, the whole damned region is covered by low tangled fir-bushes, but Audubon didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story, and neither will I.

  In 1833, it probably would have been a considerable slog up this hill for John Junior and his friends, particularly through the thigh-deep bushes. Since then the good and pious citizens of Blanc Sablon have made the trip a lot easier by constructing and maintaining a staircase. At the top of the hill is a shrine to the Blessed Virgin, and AVE, a prayer to Mary, spelled out in letters big enough to be seen from the Vatican. Toward the bottom of the hill, below the shrine, must be the world’s largest and most nautical rosary, with the five groups of ten beads represented by fishing floats in different colors, connected by the type of thick nylon rope used to tie ships to a dock. If this rosary isn’t in Guinness World Records as the world’s largest, it should be.

  In his narrative accompanying the painting of the Labrador (Pied) Duck, Audubon claims to have been told in 1833 by the English clerk of the settlement that the nests on the hillside in Blanc Sablon had been constructed by Pied Ducks. I had not been able to find the name of the clerk but did discover that he probably didn’t hold onto his job for too much longer. Up to that time, the region was occupied only seasonally, because the cod fishery was profitable only seasonally. According to a plaque along the road between Blanc Sablon and Brador—surrounded by swarms of ravenous blackflies—in 1834, “Charles Dickers bought the rights to the Longue-Point-de-Blanc-Sablon fishing port which helped to establish the first year-round settlement.” If I had just purchased a fishing port, I would probably have installed my own management team, tossing the clerk used by the previous owners. Blanc Sablon took more than a century and a half to grow from five families in 1834 to the 1,235 (or so) men, women, children and others who live there today.

  So the story of John Woodhouse Audubon finding Labrador Duck nests in Blanc Sablon sounds just great, but on very close examination, bits of the story start to fall apart. The story about the Labrador Duck nests that accompanies the painting was written many years after the voyage. We can contrast that story with Audubon’s 1833 personal journal of his time in Labrador, which was generally very explicit. For instance, he recorded a partial lunar eclipse at 19:30 on July 1, an observation sub
stantiated by the good folks at the NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center, with their massive great computers and too much spare time. If Audubon noted his observations on something as nonbirdy as a lunar eclipse in his journal, surely he would have mentioned something really important like a Labrador Duck nest.

  Audubon’s Labrador journal goes on to describe, in great detail, the nests and eggs of all manner of birds, including eider ducks, gulls, and terns, and yet he is strangely silent on the topic of the nests of Labrador Ducks. Indeed, on July 28, the day that his son was supposed to have found Labrador Duck nests, Audubon wrote in his journal: “The Pied Duck breeds here on top of the low bushes, but the season is so far advanced we have not found its nest.”

  In discussing Audubon’s journals, Ben Forkner describes the author’s prose as “a compressed mixture of diverse elements roughly made up of part recollection, part direct report, part hearsay, part invention, part theater, and part the imperial imagination’s demand for the completed pattern.” There are times when Audubon mixed parts of two lackluster stories into one really compelling one. Even though the fundamentals of Audubon’s stories are probably correct, we can’t take the details of his prose as reliable historical documents, particularly when two accounts of the same event contradict one another.