by Glen Chilton
On stage, a group of four young people played hits by the Doors, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Led Zeppelin, and Pat Benatar. They all seemed to be too young to drink the product of the sponsor. The bass player might have received his guitar as a present at his recent bar mitzvah. The lead singer’s breasts seemed impossibly close together, and my second beer had me trying to figure out the hydraulics of her situation. The gathered crowd was sparse, made up mostly of friends of the band, also too young to drink legally, drinking surreptitiously at a frantic pace.
THE NEXT MORNING found us traveling south along the Trans-Canada Highway, along the coast and past dwarf coniferous forests toward the community of Black’s Harbour. The ferry just beyond would take us to Grand Manan Island, another Canadian site of Labrador Duck slaughter. Or so it would seem. The Field Museum in Chicago was home to two Labrador Ducks that I would soon be visiting. The good folks at the museum are not at all certain where the ducks were resting when blown to kingdom come, but one of their best guesses is Grand Manan Island.
A little more certain was the killing of a hen Labrador Duck off the coast of Grand Manan by a gentleman named Simon F. Cheney. Indeed, having been shot on its northward migration in April of 1871, it was one of the last Labrador Ducks ever collected. According to Cheney, just before it shuffled off its mortal coil, the hen had been eating small mussels and had been diving with Oldsquaw ducks. Without preparing the hen taxidermically, Cheney passed the skin along to Harold Herrick, who then passed it along to George A. Boardman, who then passed it along to John Wallace of New York so that it could be prepared properly before finally passing it on to Professor S. F. Baird of the Smithsonian in Washington. But just as a rumor can get distorted as it passes from one person to another, a duck passed from one hand to another can go astray, as this one did. Not recognizing the value of the hen, Wallace let the skin get away from him, and it has been missing ever since.
Regrettably, we got to the Grand Manan ferry two minutes late for the 9:30 sailing. Sarah was philosophical about it and politely suggested that I might want to have a go with the eggs, which were, quite frankly, causing her car to be unridable. The tide was out and I took the eggs and Sarah’s pocketknife down the gravel embankment to a spot where a rivulet of fresh water ran down to the ocean. I steeled my nerves and, following in the long tradition of egg collectors, but fearing an explosion, I poked a very small hole through the shell at the blunt end.
I suspect that more Christians would be frightened into good behavior if ministers described hell in terms of the smells that issued from that egg. Saving oneself for marriage would seem like the only possible course of action if the alternative was eternity exposed to that smell. But to draw a parallel of that sort would be to tarnish the good name of hell. The moment that I pricked the eggshell, a geyser of frothy green liquid shot from the hole and arced before hitting the ground more than a yard away. Seconds passed, and the geyser didn’t stop; I started to fear for the local environment. Thirty minutes later, by poking and prodding and rinsing the egg under the rivulet, I had managed to get all of the contents out and leave the shell intact. After another thirty minutes of this disgusting display I had the second shell cleaned out. I didn’t have the heart to repeat the performance and, with the ferry pulling back into its berth, I tossed the third egg on a rock. It exploded.
Grand Manan Island has all the wonder of a tropical island paradise, without all the worry about coconuts dropping on your head. It is about 17 miles long and 7 miles wide, slung low in the middle but rising to a peak with a lighthouse at either end. It features lovely long beaches and quaint fishing villages. After dropping off our gear at a B&B, we drove to the island’s south end. Just before arriving at the lighthouse, we drove into a thick fog. In an attempt to repel unwary sailors, the foghorn sounded for five seconds out of every sixty, but some trick of the fog meant that the horn echoed for a further fifteen fading seconds. Walking along the bluff, we got intermittent glimpses of a crashing surf far below and imagined what the view would be like on a clear day.
Driving north, we stopped at a beach. I wanted photographs of a spot where Cheney’s Labrador Duck might have been shot. It was all idle speculation, of course; one spot was as likely as another. On that day, the surf was filled with sea ducks, foraging over the sandy bottom as Labrador Ducks would have done. Edible mussel shells that had washed up on the beach told me what my ducks had been eating.
All along the East Coast, fisheries are in decline. However, fishing seems to be alive and well in the waters around Grand Manan. We saw fishing weirs and salmon farm enclosures and an assortment of fishing boats. Everywhere the island had a fair perfume, a mixture of kelp, sea air, and fish processing. Not at all unpleasant. Just kind of fishy.
WE WERE UP early the next morning, hoping to fit a lot of living into the day. Our B&B hosts were apparently quite devout, as evidenced by the painting of a young sailor at sea, with a much larger-than-life Christ looking over his shoulder. Once again we seemed to be in the presence of folk who badly wanted Sarah and me to be married. Not wanting to disappoint, I didn’t do anything to convince them otherwise. When our hostess commented on how good it was of me to bring all of the suitcases to the car, I said, “Well, the missus has me well trained.”
In an attempt to see as much of Grand Manan as possible, we aimed for the northern tip of the island. There we came across the Swallowtail Lighthouse, hoping to find it fog free. No such luck, the foghorn sounded for three out of every twenty seconds. Even so, the walk was very pleasant, with steep cliffs and periodic views of a crashing surf and large seals or small sea lions. Back in the center of Grand Manan, we meandered a beach in a drizzle, hoping to find some marvelous treasure. I found a shard of blue crockery and managed to convince myself that it was from a shipwreck of 1620.
By this time the island’s two museums were open, and I was keen to see both. The first was the Whale and Seabird Research Institute Museum. For such a grand name, I expected a little more. There were a few stuffed birds, a skeleton of a minke whale, and an assortment of marine mammal vertebrae. In glass jars, we saw some preserved invertebrates, the eyeballs and kidneys of a seal, and the dung of a right whale. It might easily have been the vomit of a right whale, and I had to wonder who had collected it, why, and how.
The second venue was the appropriately named Grand Manan Museum. Looking quite worn from the outside, it turned out to be rather nice on the inside. It had displays of local geology, mineralogy, and island history, including fishing, churches, and shipwrecks, all closely intertwined. One of the odder items on display was the remains of a naked-lady masthead from a shipwreck. Whoever found the masthead was so incensed by the lack of modesty that he cut it off at the head and burned the torso. There was a very large display of stuffed birds from the collection of Alan L. Moss, 1881–1953, the “birdman of Grand Manan.” An annotated catalogue of the Moss collection included no stuffed Labrador Ducks, which wasn’t surprising as the duck went extinct several years before Moss was born.
In the museum’s library I found Anneke Gichuru and said that I was interested in information about notorious duck killer Simon Cheney. She explained that the Cheneys were a renowned seafaring family that still lived on the island, including Captain Craig Cheney. Gichuru suggested that the best person to contact would be island resident Brian Dalzell, who knew as much about the birds of Grand Manan as anyone. When I reached him on the library’s telephone, he asked, “Are you a birdwatcher?” “Well, sort of,” I replied. “I’m an ornithologist.”
I told Dalzell about the Labrador Duck quest and my search for Simon Cheney. He said that Cheney was something of a mysterious figure, well known to the naturalist community of the day, but largely unknown today. Dalzell was unaware of any photographs or written records. He added a slight twist on the specimen shot in 1871, claiming that Cheney’s stuffed-bird collection had been purchased by the owner of a general store on Grand Manan called Newton, who recognized the value of the Labrador D
uck and sold it. In any case, the specimen is missing.
A crush of cars was trying to leave the island, and we were lucky that Sarah had booked a spot in advance. Our second sailing through the Bay of Fundy was as calm and foggy as our first. We saw many dozens of porpoises and hundreds of shearwaters. When we got back to Black’s Harbour, we stopped near a convenience store to use the phone booth. This would have been a much more useful exercise if there had been a telephone in it. We went into the store where the lady behind the counter explained that youths had ripped the telephone out of the box so many times that the New Brunswick telephone company now refused to fix it. I made what I thought was a very reasonable suggestion. If the box didn’t have a telephone, wouldn’t it be more sensible to take away the box so that people wouldn’t stop mistakenly? No, I was told, because then people wouldn’t come into the store looking for a pay phone there.
“Does the store have a pay phone?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t that irritate people?”
“Yes, sometimes, but they usually buy something anyway.”
And so Sarah and I were on our way across New Brunswick to her home in Knowlesville. Like me, Sarah prefers back roads, and there weren’t any highways that could have got us there any faster anyway. We passed beautiful lakes with a surprisingly small number of cottages. After getting through cottage country, we passed through sparsely populated countryside. Most towns had a church, a cemetery, and a few houses. Each town seemed to be populated by folks trying their best to scratch out a living, sometimes by means that you just knew couldn’t possibly work. In the middle of nowhere, one person had set up an ice-cream stand, and a few miles down the track, another had set up a car customizing shop.
As we approached Knowlesville, I suspected that Sarah was taking a random series of turns. This wasn’t overly disturbing, as we passed a lovely selection of covered bridges and many signs that directed the traveler toward even more of them. We passed through a community boasting the province’s greatest number of churches per capita. Citizens of the community had apparently used a plebiscite to vote down the opening of a liquor store.
We did eventually get to Sarah’s home, at the Falls Brook Centre in the New Brunswick wilderness. Falls Brook is a nonprofit organization devoted to sustainable development. The facility seemed to be populated mainly by young women working for room and board. Sarah’s home was composed of a tiny kitchen-cum-dining-roomcum-living-room, a small bedroom, and a third room with a shower and sink. The outhouse was a short stroll down a grassy trail.
In the months leading up to my trip, Sarah and I had been teasing each other about going skinny-dipping. After all, we were hearty Canadians in the hinterlands of New Brunswick, and Sarah claimed to know a great swimming hole along a creek. And so after dinner, we took to the roads again. Back roads turned into very back roads, and I was convinced once again that Sarah was making up the route as she went along. Perhaps there was no swimming hole, and she was hoping that we would stumble across something appropriate.
But, good to her word, Sarah found the spot, and after a final unlikely turn and a short trip down an unlikely dirt track, we found ourselves next to a Quonset hut used in making maple syrup. It was a really dark night, and we used flashlights to follow a path to the promised creek. In the flashlight’s beam we spotted crayfish, and when Sarah picked one up, it nipped her. Off with the clothes, I followed Sarah in the hopes that the crayfish would get her before getting me.
At this point, I have to defend myself by saying that I have participated in two New Year’s Day polar bear swims in the north Pacific Ocean, and one in the northern reaches of the Atlantic. I know what cold water is. However, it was clear to me that the water in this creek had just melted from a previously undiscovered glacier about 50 yards upstream. By the time I was in up to my knees, my brain had lost all control over the muscles in my legs, which were shaking uncontrollably. With every step I took, I knew that Sarah was a few steps further, a few steps deeper, showing herself to be a few steps braver. She kept coaxing me on, but when the water got to within a couple of inches of my delicate bits, I had a decision to make. I could bail and risk being teased, or go further on and risk alienating my testicles, perhaps permanently. I bailed.
It was a really dark night, both moonless and cloudy. The fireflies didn’t seem to mind, winking a cool blue light. I suppose if you are a male trying to get a little action by signaling to females with a flashlight on your backside, the darker the evening the better. Using great patience and a gentle hand, we caught a couple. At some point in the past, I had probably learned that fireflies aren’t really flies, but beetles, but it came as a surprise to me on that night. Standing naked beside a woman who wasn’t my wife, I was reminded of a predatory bug that mimics the flash of male fireflies. When the lady firefly arrives, the predator devours her.
Chapter Nine
Garage Sales and Other Lies
My grand quest was, of course, designed to allow me to have a little poke at every Labrador Duck in the world. A search for some of the ducks, or even most of the ducks, wouldn’t be nearly so challenging as having a go at absolutely every single specimen, no exceptions, period.
The quest led me down some dark and strange alleyways. After hearing one of my talks, a woman named Sandra Kaufman told me that she had seen a stuffed Labrador Duck in the post office of the tiny community of Ilulissat, Greenland. She said that the store was in the northeast corner of the town’s main intersection. The duck itself was on a high ledge on the east wall of the store toward the back. Before shelling out a good chunk of my year’s income on a journey to somewhere a little beyond the back of beyond, I sent off a couple of letters. Less than a week later, I heard from Ulf Klüppel of the Ilulissat Tourist Services, who told me that the bird Sandra had seen was an eider, not a Labrador Duck. Ulf’s message saved me a long and costly journey, followed by crushing disappointment.
Not all leads were quite so easy to follow. In 1992, Stanford University Press published a tidy little book about extinct and endangered birds, written by Paul Ehrlich, David Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye. The Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, and Labrador Duck each have their lives summarized in six brief paragraphs, one each about their food, their nesting habits, their range, and so on. The same treatment continues for not-quite-extinct-yet species, such as Bell’s Least Vireo, the California Condor, and the Whooping Crane.
For the Labrador Duck, under the heading “Notes,” the authors state: “Until recently, it had been assumed that there were 31 specimens in North American collections…” which is reasonably close to the truth, “…but recently another one turned up at a garage sale!” Having been to a few garage sales, I have rarely found anything worth opening my wallet for. It really annoyed me that someone else might have found something as valuable as a Labrador Duck, and probably picked it up for about a buck and a half. Keep in mind that no new stuffed ducks had been discovered since the late 1940s. If such a specimen existed, then I had to see it. No exceptions.
I went to my copy of The Big Book of North American Ornithologists and found the postal address of the book’s senior author, Paul Ehrlich. I wrote asking him to fill me in on this “new” specimen. He ignored me completely.
So I wrote to the book’s second author, David Dobkin, again asking after the garage sale duck. He joined his colleague in enthusiastically pretending that I didn’t exist. I couldn’t find an address for the third author, and working on the theory that if a fly buzzes you often enough, you have to slap it, wrote to Ehrlich again. He slapped me. He returned my letter with the following note scribbled at the bottom: “sorry—no longer have a clue try David Dobkin.” I did, and was ignored as thoroughly as the first time.
Then, three months later, I got an email request from the editor of the academic journal The Condor, asking me to review a research manuscript. Academics are asked to review manuscripts all the time as a professional courtesy, and refusing to hel
p is considered to be bad form. Hence I immediately responded that I would be pleased to help out and then sat staring at my computer screen. My brain said that I should be able to recognize something about the message from the journal…something vaguely familiar…My brain said, “I need a better hint.” Perhaps it is something about the origin of the message…“Nope, try again.” Maybe I should have another look at the name of the editor of the journal, the fellow who sent me the message…
There it was! The editor was David Dobkin, the extinct bird book’s second author who had been ignoring me so effectively. I figured that I had him now. How could I be so polite in agreeing to do work for the journal and have him ignore my simple request for help? I quickly dashed off a second email message, reminding him about my query about the garage sale duck, and immediately got a huge and enthusiastic response. He suggested that I might want to try the third author, Darryl Wheye, who was living in California. I got a telephone number from the Internet, made a couple of false starts, but finally caught her, out of breath having just finished a bicycle ride. She got right on the case.
Wheye found that the comment about a garage sale duck had been provided by James Tate Jr. of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I contacted Tate, and although he couldn’t remember the story exactly, he thought that it was based on a conversation that he had had many years before with John P. Hubbard, Bob Tordoff, Robert Storer, or Norm Ford while they were all at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As Tate remembered it, he and Hubbard had been at the university’s Museum of Zoology discussing some recent interesting developments in ornithology. Hubbard told Tate about a fellow graduate student who had found and bought a stuffed Labrador Duck at a garage sale in Ann Arbor and turned it over to the museum. “Apparently my memory is faulty,” wrote Tate.
