by Glen Chilton
Settling into the workstation, I took out my tools for extracting material from inside the eggshells, donned my silly-looking helmet with magnifying lenses, and slipped on surgical gloves. If possible I wanted to avoid contaminating the duck DNA with my own. Our brisk walk to the museum and the overly warm building combined to make me start to sweat, presenting a problem. I didn’t want to go to all this trouble only to ruin the egg material by dripping sweat on it. I repeatedly dabbed at my forehead with my shirtsleeve. Extracting material from the first four eggs went very well, and I was sure I had enough for Mike Sorenson to do DNA analysis, but the last two eggs were a bit trickier. The blowholes were absolutely teeny, and there wasn’t much material inside to work with. Breathing through my ears so as not to blow away any fragments that I winkled out of the shell, I picked and poked with my surgical instruments. Part of me wanted to just grab a bit of the shell with forceps and yank, following my vandalism with an “oops!” but I resisted the urge. In the end, I had gunk inside six sealed tubes, and Eck had six intact egg shells.
Labrador Duck 12
Having been looted by the Russian army at the end of World War II, the well-traveled hen is safely back in Dresden.
Eck escorted us as I took the eggs back to their home, and traded them for the stuffed hen in her plastic tray. She was a pretty little thing, constructed as a taxidermic mount, but without a base. My best guess is that she was prepared to appear as though swimming, originally displayed with some elaborate system of support. The taxidermist had given her pale yellow glass eyes. Her tail feathers were a little beaten up, not unexpected considering her journey across the Atlantic, and then to Russia and back. Beside her in the cabinet was a test tube of body feathers that had fallen out in her trips to and from Russia. After examining and measuring her, I was able to add one more stray feather to the tube. That was it for the Dresden duck; there were now forty-one ahead of me.
THE NEXT MORNING we were off to a fortress in Königstein, where so many art treasures and valuable natural history artifacts had survived the 1945 bombing of Dresden. With typical efficiency, the number 7 tram took us right to Dresden’s Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. As one of the last bits of city core to be revitalized, we found the station’s front entrance roped off with blue and red barrier tape telling us: “Wirten Was!” Dresdeners clearly take their reconstruction very seriously, as numerous police officers and army personnel were stationed behind the tape, using their walkie-talkies. We found a side entrance, but it, too, was taped off. An ominous-looking green van with the word Bundesgrenzschutz on the side suggested that we were looking at more than just construction delays. We found a lady wearing the sort of uniform that a train conductor might wear in a children’s book, and asked her what was up.
“They have found a bomb,” she said, waving her arms enthusiastically. She seemed quite jovial about this bit of excitement, as one only can when being paid not to do proper work.
“Do you have any idea when the train station might reopen?”
“Five minutes…two hours…Who knows, who knows?” accompanied by lots more enthusiastic arm tossing.
“I trust that this sort of thing doesn’t happen frequently?”
“Who knows, who knows?” I seemed to have found the limits of her English.
Standing around the train station waiting for the end of a bomb scare seemed an inefficient and possibly dangerous use of our day, and so we set off in search of alternative adventure. Errol sought out a soccer jersey featuring the local team, Dynamo Dresden, for his football-mad son, Frankie. We spent a couple of hours at the Zoologischer Garten and got to see naked mole rats. If you have never seen a picture of a Nacktmull, your imagination will not lead you far astray. They are the size of large mice, live in underground colonies, are nearly blind, pink, and almost completely devoid of hair. Imagine a scrotum with a head and legs.
From the zoo, a short tramp took us back to the train station, past rows of unlovely flats apparently scheduled for demolition. All signs of the earlier bomb scare had been neatly, surgically removed from the station. The lady who sold us our train ticket was very helpful—without being asked, she explained where and how to validate our ticket. Errol didn’t want to validate our tickets, explaining that we could always feign ignorance with an incomprehensible accent from the southern United States, but I stuck them into the stamping machine anyway. Some vandals are a little more dedicated to rules than others.
No city shows its finest side to train travelers, and we watched a landscape of disused and unloved factories and Cold War–era apartment blocks, interspersed with people getting on with their lives. But the landscape changed profoundly as we reached the town of Pirna. From there, the train line followed the river Elbe for the remainder of the journey into Königstein. Passing through Obervogelgesang, Stadt Wehlen, and Kurort Rathen, we saw affluent homes with steep roofs, backed by tree-covered hills. The hills were then replaced by tree-covered cliffs, until the cliffs became too steep to support any trees at all. More level bits support broadleaf woodlands with a fern understory. Barges floated by on the Elbe, as did cruise ships. Sixty minutes after we started, we were at our destination.
IF I HAD tried to create a fairy-tale village from my imagination, I couldn’t have done so nice a job as the 3,200 good people of Königstein. We wandered down narrow streets with narrow sidewalks, flanked by five-story buildings beautiful in their modesty, toward the town center. Parts of some buildings lay unoccupied, but these sat beside portions that housed fancy furniture stores and pharmacies. The Protestant church was undergoing loving reconstruction efforts. The town, sandwiched between the river on one side and grand cliffs on the other, at almost every point offers a view of the fortress looming above like a benevolent dictator.
To see the Fortress Königstein from any part of town, look up; look way, way up. You can’t miss it. There are several ways to approach the fortress. The trip is quite easy if you are driving a car or belong to part of a tour group. We were neither. Alternatively, you can take a kitschy open-sided tour bus to the top. As vandals, we opted for a narrow trail that starts close to a bakery and runs up the hill to approach the fortress from the backside. If you choose this route, you will pass through dark forests that could easily be occupied by elves and fairies. However, if you have a heart condition or bad knees, please take the bus; the hill is steep and slippery and the cobbled surface tricky. On that particular Wednesday, we were the only vandals silly enough to attempt a rear attack on the fortress.
And then, just as we began to see the appeal of the kitschy bus, we came across the giant walls of the fortress Königstein, which translates as the “King’s Stone.” A breathtaking 790 feet above the Elbe, it not only provides a great view of the surrounding region, but makes you wonder how mad someone would have to be to try to invade the castle. In the early 1400s, a four-year siege was required to force a turnover; weapons of the time proved less effective than eventual starvation. In the following five hundred years, no one managed to beat these fortifications. At the end of World War II, it fell to Russian forces on May 9, 1945, without a single shot being fired. I suppose that massive sandstone cliffs and walls lose their protective value in the face of an aerial barrage.
Over the centuries, the fortifications at Königstein variously served as a military base with hundreds of soldiers, an oversized hunting lodge, a hospital, housing for an endless parade of political prisoners, a locale for court festivities, a camp for prisoners of war, and a residence for the fabulously rich. At one time it was home to the world’s largest vat of wine, with a capacity of more than 62,000 gallons and room on top for thirty dancing couples.
The fortress was used to house Dresden’s great works of art during the Seven Years’ War in the mid-1700s, again during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, and then again during the Prussian-Austrian conflict later in the century. Dresden’s museum curators, tiring of the back-and-forth movement of artworks, must have been just about ready to
leave the whole lot in Königstein. Since the fortress worked so well to protect art during each of those conflicts, the treasures were moved back there once again during World War II. Starting in 1940, there were 450 crates of treasures moved from Dresden, down the river and up the hill to the fortress, and stored in artillery-proof vaults. Among the treasures housed in Königstein were the Dresden Labrador Duck, six Labrador Duck eggs, a Great Auk, and a Great Auk egg. On May 9, 1945, the Red Army moved in and took over the fortress, liberating prisoners of war. They also liberated the great treasures stored there, taking them back to Russia as spoils of war. Most of the artwork was returned to Germany in the 1950s, but some remains unaccounted for to this day. It wasn’t until 1982 that Eck was permitted to travel to Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, to retrieve the natural history artifacts.
An endless array of ramps and tunnels ended at locked gates. Errol and I started to formulate hypotheses about Dresden’s missing works of art. In 1945, if we had been on the German side, responsible for the safety of great works of art, we wouldn’t have been in a particular hurry to throw open overlooked chambers and shout, “Hey! Russian invaders! You forgot to take the paintings in here!” Could some art treasures still be hidden under the Fortress Königstein? We felt that if we had been provided with lock-picking tools, surveying equipment, and enough time, we might find some of the art treasures that were never accounted for after the war.
OF COURSE I have been setting you up for a punch line, and here it is. As soon as I returned from Germany, I sent the egg material to Michael Sorenson. He completed the genetic analysis and quickly got back to me with the results. Regrettably, I have to report that the six eggs in Eck’s care in Dresden are also not Labrador Duck eggs. Instead, these eggs were produced by a Red-breasted Merganser. This is a perfectly nice fish-eating river duck, but nothing out of the ordinary. And so, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, there are no Labrador Duck eggs anywhere in the world.
One of the peculiar things about scientific investigation is that one result isn’t better than another. An outcome is an outcome. As a scientist, I wasn’t really supposed to care about what Sorenson’s analysis had demonstrated about the nine putative Labrador Duck eggs. And yet part of me felt that humankind had lost something. I had proven earlier that the world knows nothing about the nests of Labrador Ducks, and now I had shown that we know nothing about their eggs. The loss might be small and intangible, but the Labrador Duck enigma had become a little more profound.
At Dresden Airport, Errol and I cleared security and checked out the duty-free shops. I picked up a newspaper to see what it had to say about the disturbance at the train station the day before. The front-page headline read: “Bomben-Fehlalarm bremst 45 Züge aus: Dresdner Hauptbahnhof wieder evakuiert I Auch diesmal keine Video-Bilder,” but that information just left me a prat pretending to be able to read German. Another newspaper showed a picture of the roped-off train station beside a picture of a coffee maker. Perhaps the army had arrived to detonate a suspicious-looking package, only to find that they had blown up a perfectly innocent kitchen appliance.
Chapter Seven
Into the Mouth of the Tourism Dragon
As tourism superpowers, cities and countries come and go. At one time, anyone who was anyone must have gone to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes. The flow of politically incorrect tourists to Spain to watch bullfights is drying up. Not so long ago, any young person with a backpack and a few dollars in their pocket just had to go to Australia. This was helped by the popularity of the first Crocodile Dundee film; the second Crocodile Dundee film ended the honeymoon with Australia just as quickly. With the popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, New Zealand became the destination of choice. However, when it comes to real staying power as a tourist destination, Ireland must rank at the top of the charts.
Travel guides offer long lists of reasons why Ireland is so popular. They claim that the island is tranquil and the pace of life relaxed. The scenery is varied and beautiful, the food delicious, and the people are easy to meet and courteous by act of parliament. Ireland is the single best place to go for no-fail fishing, challenging golf, unspoiled beaches, unparalleled sites of historical interest, and the world’s finest crocodile wrestling. In a world jam-packed with everyday annoyance and irritation, Ireland must surely be one version of Heaven on Earth. Just two days after finishing my adventures in Dresden, I was drawn to Dublin by a Labrador Duck, lucky number 13. Lisa was drawn to Dublin by a Physiological Society conference at Trinity College, and I thought it a good chance to tag along as a spouse to take advantage of cheap university accommodation and continental breakfasts.
A pretty good chunk of visitors to Ireland will get their first impression of the country at the Dublin airport. This is a profound shame. At an international airport, the first encounter is always, of course, with crabby people at passport control, and those in Dublin are significantly crabbier than most, as though suffering from a massive collective hangover. Lisa and I got in a line with a big sign indicating that it was for non-EU travelers only. When we got to the front of the line, a person of superlative crabbiness told us, in a manner of speech reserved for dealing with those with serious attention disorders, that the line was reserved for EU travelers only. We were instructed to get in a much longer, much slower line.
Everything wonderful that Dresden airport is, Dublin airport isn’t. The arrivals section was ridiculously dark, hellishly crowded, and generally uninviting. Conveyor belt 4 was blanketed in darkness except for a single naked 8,000-watt fluorescent tube that required us all to shield our eyes while watching for our luggage. The luggage-handling system would have been adequate for the bags of all four passengers disembarking from a Cessna 175 single-propeller airplane, but was laughably inadequate for the hundreds of passengers getting off our jet. Regrettably, conveyor belt 4 was also receiving the luggage from three other flights that had just arrived. Lisa stood well away from the crush, while I did my best to help a gaggle of elderly ladies who were having absolutely no luck swinging their luggage off the conveyor. I joined in their jokes about making do with the first piece of luggage that looked promising, until I realized that they weren’t joking. My luggage is nothing posh, but I outdid one person using a pillowcase and a piece of rope, and another using a clear plastic duvet bag. One traveler’s luggage consisted of a folding lawn chair held closed by packing tape. The tape broke, and the chair jammed the conveyor belt, holding back a tide of luggage belonging to eight hundred other passengers.
Dublin is home to about a million people, and is Ireland’s capital city. According to guidebook author Catharina Day, its beggars, housing ghettos, and problems with theft and drugs, are offset by Dublin’s “wealth of Georgian architecture, a lively, youthful atmosphere and a charm that is particular to the city itself…Dublin,” she claims, “has a worldwide reputation for culture, wit, friendliness and beauty,” but then goes on to admit that “there is no doubt that Dublin can be a bit of a disappointment…Fast-food signs and partially demolished buildings mingle with expensive and tacky shops, and the housing estates can be depressing.” The airport bus took us past a good chunk of the disappointing and depressing side, and we were looking forward to enjoying the lively and beautiful bit.
Luckily for us, Trinity College is an oasis of calm in a sea of turmoil. It was founded in 1592 but remained closed to Catholics, women, and other heathens for nearly four hundred years. Happily, the college is now open to all. Entering through an eighteenth-century facade, we left behind Dublin’s hustle and bustle and entered a world of grass and cobblestones, separated from the real world outside by impenetrable tall buildings.
AT 10:00 THE next morning, Lisa was one of hundreds of physiologists at the opening sessions of her conference. At 10:00, I was one of nine people waiting outside a wonderful old stone building on Merrion Street for the opening of the Museum of Natural History, one branch of the National Museum of Ireland, also known as Ard-Mhúsa
em na hÉireann. Lisa, the smart one in our marriage, had a presentation to make, entitled “Elevated [K+] Enhances Cultured Adult Rat Cardiac Myofibroblast Contraction.” I was going to play with a stuffed duck.
In the late 1950s, Paul Hahn’s request to the National Museum of Ireland for information about stuffed specimens of extinct birds drew a response from Geraldine Roche of the museum’s Natural History Division. She indicated that the museum had one Passenger Pigeon, two Eskimo Curlews, two Carolina Parakeets, some Great Auk bones, and, most importantly, a Labrador Duck. She told Hahn that the duck had been brought from New York in August 1838 by Lt. Swainson, R.N., who was in command of the steamship Royal William. This ship had been in the service of the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company. The records do not say where Swainson got the duck, but they do say that he passed it on to Reverend Palmer Williams. When the good Reverend Williams passed away, the duck came into the possession of his niece, Mrs. H. M. J. Barrington, of Eden-park, Dundrum, Dublin. Before his retirement from the post of Senior Technical Assistant at the National Museum, Patrick O’Sullivan had written to tell me that the museum had purchased the duck from Mrs. Barrington on August 11, 1892, for the sum of £30, which was, no doubt, a lot of money at the time.
