The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  Your place in a queue is only a state of mind unless you are willing to defend that place with tooth and nail.

  The penultimate accessory to disguise oneself as a Parisian is a baguette in a paper bag. The disguise can be improved upon only with a cigarette.

  Do not be deceived by the number of letters in a French word; most words are pronounced with only one syllable, if that. Never pronounce the second half of any word.

  Do not be deceived by the number of words in a French utterance. The sentence “Mon à nôtre la fenêtre votre carotine d’agréable depuis en petite dix-neuf avec Caroline et Antoine…” probably translates as “The train is five minutes late.”

  While on foot, do not be deceived by what appear to be pedestrian crosswalks. They were installed some years ago as a joke, and are now used as an opportunity for target practice by drivers. And lawyers.

  As a driver, do not be deceived by an apparent right-of-way over pedestrians. In Paris, those on foot will cross the road anywhere and at any time. The bravest pedestrians are the most elderly and otherwise least mobile.

  Try not to require an ambulance on a Friday afternoon. Flashing lights and a siren give an emergency vehicle no priority at a traffic circle between 16:00 and 19:00. In case of life-threatening injury, consider walking to a hospital.

  Do not be tempted to rent a car in Paris. The last vacant parking spot was reported in 1987, and four men died in the battle for it.

  In Paris, street vendors without licenses are afraid of the police. Beggars are not afraid of God Almighty.

  In Paris, beggars are fluent in every language ever devised. They should be employed by the United Nations as translators.

  ANYONE WHO FINDS himself in France, but doesn’t take the opportunity to visit the northern city of Amiens, should give himself an enthusiastic kick in the backside. Sitting astride the river Somme, dissected by narrow streets and a system of canals, praised for the fertility of its fields by Julius Caesar, the final resting spot of visionary author Jules Verne, and home to a really tip-top cathedral, no one should miss it.

  On Friday, Julie and I found ourselves on an early-morning train north out of Paris. Our compartment was sparsely occupied, mainly by salespeople in cheap business clothes, with the sort of look in their eyes that said: “Gotta make a sale in Amiens…gotta make a sale in Amiens!” We were headed for a 10:00 appointment with the director of the Musée de Picardie, Monsieur Matthieu Pinette, who oversees the operation of a large and really top-shelf collection of art and archaeology. To the surprise of no one, we were not after insight into the world of fine art but rather an elusive duck.

  In 1897, Mr. J. H. Gurney of Keswick Hall, Norwich, England, published a very brief note in the ornithological journal The Auk. Gurney wrote: “In the Museum at Amiens in France, which is located in a temporary and very unworthy building by the river, I was surprised to come across a fine adult male Labrador Duck, Camptolaimus labradorius, in good preservation.” He went on to speculate that it may have been sent to Europe sometime before 1850 by John Akhurts. Hahn, in his 1963 book about stuffed Labrador Ducks and other extinct North American birds, repeated these few details. He seemed quite certain there was a Labrador Duck in Amiens.

  My pursuit of this duck specimen began in 1995. It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, right? You simply write to a museum and ask about their duck. It didn’t help that I was unable to find any contemporary reference to a natural history museum in Amiens. Over the following four years, I wrote letters to anyone I could think of, including the local zoo and a brothel named Le Petit Canard, but got absolutely no response at all. My North American bias put this silence down to French reserve. But when Lisa met Julie, she put her on the search. After digging and scraping, and after a long series of telephone calls, Julie finally got me an answer, though not the answer I had been hoping for.

  Mousieur Pinette responded that the natural history collection in Amiens had not been accessible to the public since 1986, and had no curator. Between 1840 and 1940, a museum in Amiens housed a collection of 2,400 bird specimens, but that collection was largely destroyed when the town was bombed. At least one precious specimen had been spared the devastation—their stuffed Great Auk. There were about 600 bird specimens in the collection today, probably mainly from donations since World War II. As far as anyone knew, it was Great Auk, one; Labrador Duck, nil. My greatest hope was that I was going to discover the missing duck on a corner shelf that had been overlooked.

  And then a truly wonderful experience began. To envision Pinette, imagine the actor John Malkovich. Now take away all of the implied threat of looming horrible violence and replace it with an incredibly hearty and disarming smile. Joining us was young Stéphane Herbet, who had been working for two years to organize the current incarnation of the natural history collection. We were welcomed as royalty. For Julie and me, this was a new experience in the comings and goings of a world-class art and culture museum. To Pinette and Herbet, it was insight into the world of the history of biology. We chatted loudly and proudly about the museum and my duck.

  In the end, the story is distilled with a lot of unsatisfying residue. Today, the Musée de Picardie is concerned with art and archaeology. The history of the museum is poorly documented and the natural history component is just about the most clouded portion. For the twenty years leading up to 1986, the natural history collection had been on display in the museum on rue de la République, but had been removed to storage to make room for more displays of fine art. Until recently the Amiens zoo had owned the natural history material, which was then brought into the grander collection. Herbet was working to organize the natural history collection and create an inventory. Many items in the collection were not in the best condition, and consideration had been given to scrapping the whole lot. What was going to happen to the collection next was not clear. It had to be put to some use, but it was not Amiens’ most urgent priority. While that decision was being made, preservation was the highest concern. We spoke about how the Great Auk might have survived the 1940 bombing when other specimens did not. We considered the possibility that it had been removed to safety at the start of the war, or that it had been retrieved from the flames by someone who recognized its value. It was all idle speculation, of course. Poor Julie was translating as fast as she could, trying desperately to keep up as the rest of us spoke, and I scribbled longhand notes.

  As far as anyone in Amiens knew, there was no Labrador Duck in the collection, but we were very welcome to have a look if we wanted. I told Pinette that if I found a Labrador Duck, it would be a big story in the Amiens newspaper the following morning. When I told him of the value of a specimen, he asked if I could create one from bits and pieces of other specimens. I think he was joking.

  The collection was housed at a site a few miles from the museum, and in an act of extreme generosity and bravery, Pinette loaned his car to Herbet to take us to that site. We pulled into the parking lot of an unmarked warehouse and entered through an unmarked door. Housed within we found a substantial collection of minerals and fossils, preserved and stuffed vertebrate animals, boxes full of pinned insects, and a mountain of pressed herbarium specimens. At first glance, it was clear why the rubbish heap had been considered as a destination, particularly for the herbarium specimens, which were in need of immediate emergency botanical attention. A more careful second look revealed a collection with many worthwhile treasures but one that could not survive forever in a warehouse.

  The birds and mammals were housed on metal shelving, given some degree of protection by overhanging sheets of clear plastic. I examined all of the waterfowl in the collection very, very carefully, keeping in mind that Gurney might have made a mistake about the sex or age of the stuffed Labrador Duck he claimed to have seen. No Labrador Duck in sight. I then examined all of the other birds in the collection, in case something had been misshelved. Again, nothing, and this left me rather sad. It meant that the world didn’t have fifty-four Labrador Ducks. We we
re down to just fifty-three.

  Nonetheless, I took the opportunity to examine the Great Auk. It is a real beaut, particularly after the unhappy specimen in Strasbourg. It is the single best specimen in the collection, and if only one artifact were to be saved from the wartime bombing, how fortunate that it was the Great Auk.

  So what can I conclude from my visit? Surely the simplest interpretation was that, in the past, Amiens had a museum with a Labrador Duck, as reported by Gurney in 1897, but the duck had been destroyed by bombing in 1940. End of the story? Herbet then showed me something that threw the story back into turmoil. It was a twenty-page document entitled “Catalogue de la Collection des Oiseaux du Musée d’Amiens,” prepared by F. Choquart of the Northern French branch of the Linneaen Society, and published in 1897. It was a very thorough account of the 2,391 stuffed specimens of 518 bird species housed in the collection, from four Griffon Vultures, through eleven Marsh Harriers and twelve Ring Ouzels, to the single Great Auk. If you had to guess, was there any mention of the Labrador Duck described in the same year by Gurney? Not on your life.

  The possibilities were now almost endless. Perhaps Gurney spied a stuffed Smew in a dimly lit museum room, thought it was a Labrador Duck, and mistakenly revealed this to the world. Perhaps Gurney really did spot a Labrador Duck and pointed it out to a member of the museum staff, who then sold it. Maybe Choquart missed the Labrador Duck in his inventory or chose not to include it for reasons known only to him. Take your pick, or make up a story of your own.

  After lunch, a look at the cathedral, and a tour of the museum, it was time to catch the train back to Paris. We had found no new ducks, but had made a couple of new friends. I looked out of my hotel window at the Eiffel Tower in the distance before heading off into the night. On that last evening I found myself at a Paris café with sidewalk seating, drinking a beer whose name was thoroughly unpronounceable with my few scraps of French. It offered a hint of cloves and perhaps of nutmeg. I watched the passing of the early evening throng. Unlike London, in which the population generally seems confused, the people of Paris seem confident but star-crossed. Smiles often contained a hint of the ironic, and unleashed laughter seemed infrequent. Each person had the air of being largely in control, but seemed to know that fate has conspired to keep things from ever being absolutely perfect. In Greater Paris, some 470 persons had been born that day to replace a near equal number that had passed away. Somewhere in the great metropolis that night was a tormented soul who had tried unsuccessfully to end life under the wheels of the number 3 métro.

  But then I cheered myself by thinking back to a particular mausoleum in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. It had been commissioned by the grieving Mr. Kennedy in 1856, who had just lost his twenty-six-year-old wife, Alice Emily Margarete, and his six-year-old daughter, Alice Maude. Instead of reflecting on the futility of lives whose threads were cut too soon, Kennedy decided to celebrate the positive impact of their brief dance with life. Engraved in the side of the mausoleum, in English, was a poem reflecting how I felt about my all too brief adventures in France:

  There are days that might outmeasure years,

  Days that obliterate the past,

  And make the future,

  Of the colour which they cast.

  Chapter Six

  The Invasion of Germany by Vandals

  I was tired. I was grumpy. I had been working too hard and should have been resting. Almost as soon as my flight from Paris touched down in London, I found myself on a Lufthansa flight bound for deepest, darkest Germany, strapped in beside my English chum Errol Fuller, who was downing Bombay gin and tonics at an alarming rate.

  I had two reasons for traveling to Dresden. The first concerned eggs. After the disappointing results of the genetic analysis of the eggs in Scotland and England, the only remaining possibility in terms of Labrador Duck eggs was to chase down six specimens that had been in Dresden before the war. The Staatliches Museum für Tierkunde was also blessed with a Labrador Duck hen that had survived the wartime devastation of Dresden. She was to be my twelfth. Paul Hahn didn’t mention this duck when he put together his summary in the 1960s, and for a terribly good reason. At that time, the duck and other precious natural history artifacts were hidden in St. Petersburg, having been stolen by the Russian army at the end of World War II.

  Given my successful massacre of the French language, I felt ready to try another tongue with which I had absolutely no facility: German would do nicely. Although willing to enter Germany without a proper minder, I wasn’t willing to go without a traveling companion. I decided to have a go with someone equally incompetent with the language. Hence the presence of my chum Errol Fuller. Not only was he unable to speak any German at all, but I had a vague notion that he wasn’t all that keen on Germans.

  Errol, a self-described vandal, is never far from a little trouble. He likes to piss on rules, and would probably rather wear a brassiere than a seat belt. A look in his eyes speaks vaguely of danger. He seems quite taken with causing a bit of trouble here, there, and everywhere. If trouble requires a large gin and tonic, so be it. On our flight out of Heathrow, Errol’s G&Ts looked so damnably good that I started gulping them down as fast as the flight attendants would bring them.

  The Dresden airport is ludicrously spacious, roughly the size of Wimbledon—the city, not the tennis club. Two lovely and efficient ladies at the airport’s information booth were waiting to provide us with any sort of assistance, and quickly booked us into a modestly priced hotel at the north end of the city, close to the museum, and arranged for a complimentary shuttle bus to pick us up. At the hotel’s front desk, the incredibly helpful Rita provided us with a city map, along with a schematic and schedule for the city’s tram lines and the requisite tickets for same. She then used the Internet to look up and call the natural history museum to find out exactly where we needed to go the next morning. Whatever Rita might be getting paid, she deserves a raise.

  Eager to seek out new adventures, we hopped on the tram, which sped us into the heart of Dresden, where we immediately found a café, nearly empty, that served us some impressive beer almost before we asked for it. Hearing us speak English, our server whipped away the German menus and replaced them with an English translation. Always on the lookout for souvenirs, I asked our waitress if it was possible to purchase my beautiful gold-trimmed beer glass. She immediately came back with a clean one, wrapped it carefully in a newspaper, and told me the cost, which I missed entirely. Afraid to make a mistake, I produced a ten-euro note, hoping that it would be enough. She handed me eight euros in change.

  Neither of us seemed to be troubled by a light rainfall, and so we let our dinner settle with a good long tramp across the river Elbe and through the town. Errol and I had been speaking all day about our professional experiences and journeys, but the night seemed better suited to talk of marriage and other relationships, of finances and children, of successes and failures, of goals and dreams. We found another nearly empty bar for yet another outstanding beer.

  We gazed up at magnificent architecture that had survived wartime bombing, and a few ugly housing complexes presumably dating from the era before German reunification, when Dresden had found itself on the wrong side of the ideological fence. A couple of buildings, almost completely destroyed, had been left in place, perhaps as a remembrance of the devastation of war. Dresden seemed a perforated city, as though buildings had been destroyed, but after the rubble had been cleared away, nothing had filled in the gaps. Residents of Dresden claim to live in the most beautiful city in Germany, a bold claim in light of the nearly complete annihilation of the city resulting from the Allied firebombing of February 1945, followed by the construction of bleak factories and housing complexes of the German Democratic Republic era.

  But I am on the side of Dresdeners, with a high opinion of their home. They live in a community most wonderful, as though it simply refused to let trifling matters like firebombing, flooding, and a communist regime get in the way of its ma
gnificence. Its streets reflect a respect for the past, but also a firm belief in the tremendous potential of the future. Dresden is home to smart, well-stocked shops and trendy restaurants with keen servers. We had no trouble finding folks who spoke fluent English. The city is ripe for an invasion of tourists, awaiting just a few well-timed articles in the travel supplements of major newspapers in London and New York.

  BUT I WASN’T in Dresden just to see the sights. Six eggs and a stuffed hen were waiting for me at the Staatliches Museum für Tierkunde in the care of the curator of the ornithological collection, Siegfried Eck. Like so many of Europe’s older natural history museums, this one has an interesting story. The collection dates back to the 1560s, and the museum became an independent institution in 1728. A fire in 1849 wiped away a good portion of its holdings, but it was rebuilt in the decades that followed. The museum was modernized and the collection expanded to take in great treasures, including more than 6 million specimens, with particular emphasis on vertebrate animals. Operating out of the central core, amid other components of Dresden’s great cultural life, it must have been quite the operation.

  But then administrators marginalized the collection. They closed the galleries to the public and moved the collection to a new building in the northern reaches of Dresden, close to the airport. Perhaps the natural history museum suffered as a result of Dresden’s superabundance of thirty museums. Perhaps city planners thought a museum full of stuffed animals to be archaic. Like a chipped piece of pottery, still too good to throw away, but not good enough to put on display, it had been relegated to the garage.

  Given that he had been publishing scientific articles since I was in junior high school, I expected Eck would be a frail old relic. Instead, a spry fellow, looking not much older than Errol and me, dashed down the stairs to admit us. He spoke less English than anyone else in Dresden, but was entirely hospitable, even if we were able to exchange only rudimentary pleasantries. He had prepared a workspace for me and took us to retrieve the eggs from a great locked cabinet behind two great locked doors. It was peculiar to see that after all the money that had gone into construction of a grand building to house the collection, the eggs were housed in a grocery store egg carton.