The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  The vast majority of birds at Tring were prepared as study skins, but the Labrador Ducks are taxidermic mounts, as evidenced by their posture and the small holes in the webbing of their feet, which show that nails had held them to whatever display base they used to stand on. Their bases have long since been discarded, and so the birds now lie awkwardly on their sides in a tray in the storage cabinet, as though caught in the grip of rigor mortis.

  As with so many Labrador Duck specimens, very little is known about the origin of these birds. The tag tied to the leg of the hen, catalogue number 1863.12.15.27, claims that it was presented to the museum by someone named Verreaux in 1863 and was collected in Labrador. The drake, catalogue number Vel. cat. 42.59a, was presented to the museum by the Hudsons’ Bay Company, after being collected in North America somewhere around 1835. With the help of the Hudsons’ Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, Canada, I tried to find out more about the origin of the male by reading the company’s correspondence from that era, but all I got was a horrible headache from scanning microfilm copies of 165-year-old letters scribbled by a clerk with awful handwriting.

  By all rights, the Natural History Museum collection should have five Labrador Ducks, not two. Another drake and hen had found their way into Rothschild’s collection, but they are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History collection in New York (specimens 734023 and 734024) because of Rothschild’s romantic indiscretion with the unnamed peeress. Another drake described in a later chapter was offered to the British Museum of Natural History in the late 1940s for £500, but they passed on the offer.

  After finishing my work with time to spare before my train, I decided to have a look through Rothschild’s birthday present. The museum appears much as it did in the late 1800s. In other cities this sort of presentation has been done very poorly, such that the displays look dated rather than quaint, and the specimens look sad and neglected. At Tring, however, the effect is brilliant. The Victorian cabinets are painted black so as not to detract from the specimens, but with splashes of gold paint as though to remind you that no expense was spared when putting the whole thing together. Elegant wooden doors open to reveal magnificent and exotic insects, and there are gentle reminders to take care in closing the doors because the specimens are fragile. There are stuffed lions and tigers and rhinoceroses and eagles and herons and birds-of-paradise and sturgeon and sharks and…well, just about everything! On and on through gallery after gallery. The mind boggles to think that virtually everything in the museum is from Rothschild’s own collection. When the mind is simply too full to look at another hummingbird, the museum has a gift shop full of reasonably priced souvenirs, and a coffee shop to recharge the batteries. On its wall I spied a picture of Rothschild in a carriage drawn by a zebra, the perfect image for so eccentric a character.

  Cabinets full of dead animals in public museums are not for everyone. But, with proper interpretation by skilled tour guides, this sort of exhibit can go a long way toward helping us appreciate the unity and diversity of the natural world. Some see the cabinets full of eggs and stuffed birds in scientific collections as a waste, but judicious collecting has very little impact on bird populations and has helped ornithology to advance as a scientific endeavor. Whatever may have driven the Labrador Duck to extinction, it certainly wasn’t collection for museums, and without those few stuffed specimens, we would have no tangible reminder of the finality of their elimination.

  THE COACH TRIP to Cambridge was just about enough to make me rethink my fascination with the British public transport system. Even though my trip was just 80 miles each way as the duck flies, the return journey took seventeen hours, including a forty-five-minute stop to examine Cambridge University’s Labrador Duck. Advertisements promoted National Express as “Britain’s Coach Network,” offering seventeen buses a day between London and Cambridge at a fare of just £8.50. What a deal!

  Lisa took a day away from her summer research at a pharmaceutical facility in Kent to see her first Labrador Duck, my sixth. Lisa and I got the last two seats on the coach to Cambridge. We were told we were really lucky to get seats, because most departures before early afternoon were fully occupied by travelers who had paid an extra £3 to ensure their seat. Hmmm—it seems to me that if everyone has to pay an extra fee, then the price isn’t really £8.50. Naturally, we couldn’t get seats together. Lisa was seated beside a fragrant lady, and I was wedged between two gentlemen from France and a fragrant bathroom, whose door was held shut by my foot jammed against it. Everyone on the bus was either hot, grumpy, and sleepy or hot, grumpy, and asleep.

  London is one of the most exciting and vibrant cities in the world. That is a given. However, from the Victoria coach station, it took the express bus forty-five minutes to clear urban sprawl and get up any speed. After two minutes of greenery, the coach slowed down as it entered another endless stretch of shops and homes. On the second-hottest day of the year, such slow progress rubs some of the sheen off London and its boroughs.

  After arriving at the Cambridge coach terminal, we ate our picnic lunch in the shade of an adjacent park. My seventy-two-year-old map of the town told us that the green space was called Christ’s Piece. Christ’s piece of what? We watched visitors getting henna tattoos, and then joined the tourist throngs watching four stern but polite police officers question a young man about a video camera for which he didn’t have a receipt. A short walk down Drummer to Emanuel to St. Andrew’s to Downing took us to the New Museum Site. The museum site didn’t look particularly new, but we were told it was new about one hundred years ago, and they just hadn’t gotten around to renaming it.

  Ray Symonds, collections manager of Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology, was the first museum curator I had met who looked like what a museum curator should look like. Charming and quiet, perhaps a bit pale, bespectacled, and with a tidy beard, Symonds seemed to be the type who loved animals but was a bit too timid to actually go outside to chase them down. He oversees an impressive collection of 32,500 bird specimens and 10,000 clutches of eggs. I asked Symonds why the museum had gone to so much trouble to make the details of its collections available online but had failed to include information about its specimens of extinct and endangered species. It seems the museum was particularly worried about people with an unhealthy fascination with parrots, such that they might try to stroll off with a stuffed specimen, or travel to the spot where an endangered parrot was collected and try to bag one for themselves.

  Prepared as a study skin, the adult drake in Cambridge is by far the ugliest specimen in the world.

  Labrador Duck 6

  The Cambridge specimen was acquired by a Mr. A. Strickland in 1850, although it is not clear where he got it. Mrs. H. E. Strickland gave the specimen to the museum in 1867. It was my first Labrador Duck prepared as a study skin rather than as a taxidermic mount. An adult drake, it is housed in a plastic bag, presumably to keep all of its bits together. He looks as though he had been hit amidships by a terrible shotgun blast, and that emergency veterinary support was not near at hand to fix him up. His head is floppy and held onto his body only by the stuffing in his neck. The midline incision where his guts were removed has not been stitched up. The protruding stuffing appears to be a combination of plant fibers and animal hair, but I wasn’t willing to grab a handful to stick under a microscope; scientific curiosity has its limits. As with most study skins, he doesn’t have glass eyes, and bits of stuffing poke out through the orbits. The specimen is a perfectly adequate presentation for the measurements that I wanted to make, it just isn’t very artistic. Lisa thought it looked sad.

  Curiously, the museum also has the breastbone and wishbone from the body of one of the Labrador Ducks in Liverpool. That duck was shot by J. W. Wedderburn in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in April 1852. It seems that Alfred Newton, Cambridge professor of zoology and comparative anatomy from 1866 to 1907, was convinced that the best way to figure out how birds are related to each other was to examine their breastbones, and so the muse
um wound up with a hell of a lot of them. These are the only skeletal remains of the Labrador Duck anywhere in the world.

  Having finished my examination of the duck, Lisa was feeling woozy. This was probably the result of the heat of the early afternoon and the smell of mothballs used to keep the stuffed specimens free of pests. The British Occupational Health and Safety Board would do well to check the ventilation system in Symonds’ work area. We wandered the streets close to the museum, hoping that some food would allow Lisa to feel better. We found a nice café down an alley beside a church, but Lisa couldn’t face anything but water.

  Looking for shade, we went back to Christ’s Piece beside the bus station. We watched a group of young lady tourists from Japan get confused about the intentions of a panhandler, and marveled at the elegant razor wire that kept people in the park from getting into surrounding college residences. Lisa felt much better after she had thrown up in a public toilet near the coach station.

  Given our short stay and Lisa’s queasy tummy, we didn’t get to see much of Cambridge. So what can I tell you about the city? It has a system of about twenty really good university colleges that I wasn’t smart enough to get into as an undergraduate student and am not smart enough to teach in as a professor. As a seat of higher learning, Cambridge dates to the twelfth century. Friction between the university and the town led to a riot in 1381, such that several colleges were sacked. The streets between the bus station and the New Museum Site are lined with magnificent buildings and inviting pubs. You can see lots of engaging architecture and lush gardens from the window of the National Coach bus. Beyond that, I am no help to you at all. You’ll have to go there yourself. I am sure that the folks at the tourist information center are all very pleasant and helpful.

  IMAGINE YOURSELF IN a pub with a few too many drinks under your belt, or wherever you happen to keep your drinks. Your friends might decide to celebrate your inebriation by putting you on a train bound for someplace exotic; Liverpool, for instance. If you were to wake up with a blinding hangover at the Liverpool train station, you would be faced with four problems. The first is your obvious drinking problem. The second is that you have been hanging out with the wrong sort of friends. The third is that your friends, just to make the gag a little funnier, would probably have taken your wallet, leaving you penniless. They may also have taken your trousers. The fourth problem is that you would be hard pressed to figure out where in the hell you were. Liverpool’s Lime Street station is just like any of Britain’s other train stations of similar size. It is an anonymous, boring, noisy enclosed space. Perhaps that is why all of the people working in the Lime Street station are just a little grumpy. The bathrooms are well hidden, the ticket agents are too few, the coffee is overpriced, and the massive clock on the wall runs exactly one minute fast.

  You can solve your fourth problem by looking at the signs proclaiming “Lime Street,” as soon as you are able to pry your eyelids apart. The first and third problems I can’t help you with. Perhaps some well-placed collect telephone calls would be a good start. As for making new friends, you may be in luck, because just beyond the train station’s front doors is a magnificent city whose reputation does not adequately reflect its charms, and it is full of people worthy of your friendship. Please trust me, you really must go to Liverpool right away, and you don’t even need to wait for your reprobate friends to help you. Best of all, you will be in a city with no fewer than three stuffed Labrador Ducks.

  When you arrive in the great city, turn your back on the train station, and your first sight will be St. George’s Hall. St. George’s is really astonishingly big. Its scale probably exceeds that of the parliament buildings of most Commonwealth countries. The promenade is guarded by four stone lions. A much-larger-than-life statue of Queen Victoria riding sidesaddle matches a statue of Albert, described on the base as “a wise and good prince,” who was at least wise enough not to ride sidesaddle.

  If St. George’s Hall looks as though it needs a good scrub on the outside, don’t despair. Inside you will be greeted by a vaulted ceiling with images of Neptune and Roman soldiers, of angels and cherubs. There are lustrous marble columns, statues of dead mayors and parliamentarians, ten incredible chandeliers, a pipe organ, and a stained-glass window of St. George being mean to an oversized lizard. Behind the building are gardens, walkways, benches, more dead mayors, a dead prime minister, and a tribute to the King’s Liverpool Regiment. The whole effect leaves you thinking that, as saints go, George must have been a really, really good one; if not exactly best friends with God, then certainly on a first-name basis. Oddly enough, St. George was an Arab who died in Palestine around AD 303. He was adopted as England’s patron saint by the crusaders of Richard the Lionheart eight hundred years later.

  Next to St. George’s Hall is a column dedicated to Wellington, the County Sessions House, Walker Art Gallery, International Library, Central Library, and Liverpool Museum. This would be a good time to take a breather and sit on the steps of the museum. Within a few minutes, you will get an eerie sensation as your bum starts to vibrate. This is nothing more erotic than the rumble of the underground train passing beneath the building; briefly titillating and well worth the wait.

  Lisa was in Liverpool to attend a Physiological Society conference. The theme was something to do with the amount of calcium inside the body’s cells. At social gatherings, I was swamped with talk about uploaded G-protein dojiggers and the cascade system of frizzle-bibble membrane incorporation. After a while, it all sounded like “bzzzz, phzzzz, bzzzz” to me, and the strangest part is that physiologists continue to speak that way even when they are drinking. They claim that this kind of research is terribly important and will probably save me from dying of a horrible wasting disease. In contrast, I was in town to see the Labrador Ducks held by the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside.

  By now you are familiar with my routine for museum visits. I contacted the person in charge several months in advance, backed this up a month or so before the big day, finishing with one final message with about a week to go. On the whole this process seemed to work pretty well. In the case of Liverpool, the person in charge was Dr. Clemency Fisher, Curator of Birds and Mammals, and we traded all of the necessary email messages. Lisa and I booked a room at the University of Liverpool, and the train tickets were paid for. What could possibly go wrong?

  Just a few days before Lisa and I departed for Liverpool, Fisher sent me a message: “Glen, really sorry about this, but the collections are closed to visitors at the moment (decision taken by the Head of the Liverpool Museum). Hope you get this in time!” I was gutted. The plan was to see all of the Labrador Ducks in the world, not all except these three. For an overseas researcher on a limited budget, this was pretty much a one-shot thing; it was now or never for me and these ducks. I wrote back to Fisher, pleading, groveling, and begging for the head to reconsider her decision.

  Fisher clearly felt embarrassed that a poor administrative decision made by a poor administrator meant that a legitimate researcher was going to be denied access to a collection intended for research. I suspect that embarrassing Fisher is a big mistake. She mobilized her colleagues to work on the problem. The museum’s head of science came up with a useful suggestion—since there was a ban on visitors to the collection, but not on loans of specimens to other institutions, it should be possible to loan the Labrador Ducks to another museum without breaking the new regulations. Indeed, the receiving institution could even be inside the same building, as long as I didn’t actually visit the collection. And that is how I came to examine the Liverpool Museum’s Labrador Ducks in the Natural History Centre, up a floor and down a hall from the museum’s actual collection rooms. For all of Fisher’s efforts, and those of her colleagues, particularly against the ravages of an overblown administrator, I am truly grateful. By comparison, St. George’s battle against the giant gecko was probably a cakewalk.

  The Labrador Ducks exited the research collection of the Liverpool Museum at
9:30 in the morning, and reentered the collection a little before 13:00. They were officially on loan to the Liverpool Museum’s Natural History Centre. The reason given on the exit receipt was “Research Loan.” Given the value of these specimens, it is probably the last time they will ever make a trip outside of the collection. I felt that I was creating an awful lot of bother.

  Fisher was a star about it all. She is an imposing figure of a woman who immediately makes you feel that you are the most amazing person in her life. Her father was also a noted ornithologist, and I have been told by an unreliable authority that her grandfather was Geoffrey Francis Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury for all of the big events early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, including her wedding. Perhaps Fisher got her welcoming warmth from that side of her family. On the day of my visit to the museum, she had just had her hair dyed purple to match her scarf. I really appreciate that sort of free spirit; perhaps that approach to life came from her mother’s side of the tree.