by Glen Chilton
I WOKE TO face the morning of an action-packed Friday in Leiden with a headache. It has always seemed unfair to me to wake to a hangover not preceded by heavy drinking. Suspecting dehydration, I downed a lot of juice and milk with my complimentary breakfast in the hotel lounge.
Setting off for the museum, which I knew to be quite close to the train station, I clutched the city map that I had printed from the Internet. Having walked about two blocks, I cursed my forty-five-year-old eyes and my long day of travel, because I couldn’t make out any of the tiny street names on the map. And so I resorted to my time-honored mode of orientation in a strange city—I followed the main flow of traffic on the assumption that everyone must be going to the same place I was.
Vehicular traffic was light, but there was a steady stream of bicycles, all propelled with a great sense of purpose. These were not the high-tech mountain-bike-racing bike hybrids I was accustomed to, but something that I remember from the 1960s, with wide fenders, a broad and sensible seat, and a small satchel mounted under the seat with a single wrench for roadside repair. It’ll get you there and back and, best of all, no one would want to steal it. Among cyclists, schoolchildren outnumbered shopkeepers and office workers by about two to one.
Going in the right direction or not, I had a wonderful ramble. I was the only person at that hour without a coat on, something to do with being a cold-hardened Canadian, I suppose. The tide of commuters took me through tidy mid- and high-density housing, three and four stories high. With sidewalks, bicycle corridors, and automobile lanes, all neatly partitioned off, Leiden seemed a sensible and orderly place. By the time the morning commute had swept me to the train station, I could see the gleaming tower of Naturalis, just a few blocks away, beckoning me. Once again, my version of Zen navigation had served me well.
Naturalis is the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, founded in 1820. The first King Willem assembled it by drawing together several large collections of natural history artifacts into a single museum. Early in the twentieth century the collection was moved to a specifically designed museum building in Leiden. That wasn’t sufficient for the good people of the Netherlands, however, and they constructed a sparkling new facility, opening to the public in 1998. As evidence of just how wonderful this facility is, in 2001 the turnstile admitted its one millionth visitor.
This is no little backwater penny-ante research facility. The collection includes more than 5 million insects, 2 million other spineless animals, and 570,000 braver animals with backbones. For those who like their natural history to be really long dead, there are 1,160,000 fossils, as well as 440,000 stones and minerals. Among recently extinct species in the collection are a quagga (think of a cross between a horse and a zebra), a thylacine (Tasmanian marsupial wolf), a blaauwbok (something that a cat hacked up), both Cape and Barbary lions, a Javan Lapwing, a Great Auk, and two Labrador Ducks. If you desperately want to see a stuffed White-winged Sandpiper, a trip to Leiden is in your future, because Naturalis has the only one.
A portion of this amazing collection resides in the part of the museum open to the public. I was scheduled to see that a bit later in the weekend. From the outside it looked cheery and welcoming. The vast majority of the research collection is housed separately in a great silver monolith towering 200 feet above the city.
The collection building is awe-inspiring. In a city where most buildings are just three or four stories, this tower was impossible to miss. Not a window perforated its exterior surface, which is sculpted like the skin of a snake. Security was tight. My appointment was for 8:30, and in typical fashion I arrived early. I was permitted through a hermetically sealed door and invited to sit in an alcove where I could neither advance nor retreat; in essence, I could cause no trouble whatsoever. René Dekker, Curator of Birds at Naturalis, had warned me that he might be a bit late because of traffic congestion, and so I settled in for a little wait. As other museum employees arrived, each offered me cheerful greetings, and although I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, no one seemed to be insulted by my reply of “Good morning.”
Eventually, Dekker swept in. He seemed exactly the sort of fellow who should be featured in television advertisements for sports cars—enthusiastic, friendly, and accommodating, with a glint in his eyes that said he would never grow old. We flicked through one security door after another; it was apparent that if you were to somehow sneak into the building, you wouldn’t get far. Or out. Dekker settled me in at a work desk and locked the door behind him, and I got down to examining my ducks.
Labrador Ducks 17 and 18
The drake and hen pair in the Dutch National Museum of Natural History in Leiden have resided side by side since 1863.
Both the hen and the drake were in really fine shape. The feet were unpainted, and not nearly so bashed up as most specimens I had seen. The taxidermist had been judicious in painting the bills of both specimens, with very little paint splashed up on feathers above the bills. The right side of the male’s face around the eye and cheek had seen better days; perhaps that was the side where he had been shot. The female had patches of glaucous feathers, particularly on her wings, which I had not encountered on earlier specimens. Both birds stood on small wooden bases, painted white. In both cases, in neat script on a card in black ink above carefully penciled guide lines, were the words Voyage du Prince de Neuwied. Acquis en 1863 Amérique du Nord.
The slightly longer version of the story says German naturalist Prinz (Prince) Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied collected the ducks when he traveled to North America early in the nineteenth century. Museum officials in Leiden acquired the pair in 1863, probably as part of an exchange of specimens with Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum. It’s anyone’s guess whether Prince Neuwied ever visited the regions where Labrador Ducks were found and shot them himself, or traded for them, or found them dead at the side of a busy carriageway. Today, when nosy ornithologists aren’t poking and peering at them, the ducks sit side by side in a special room for the museum’s most valued specimens, with dim lighting and heavy security.
It may have been jet lag, and it may have been a lack of sleep, but a very curious feeling came over me as I examined this pair. As a couple, they seemed unlucky. They were due to spend some approximation of eternity side by side, but never really together. A good guess is that they will outlast me by about 450 years, but only as star-crossed lovers. Heaven knows, they may have been shot decades apart, or they may have been collected as a mated pair—Prince Neuwied didn’t say. Perhaps they hatched a brood of cute little Labrador Ducklings in the nether regions of northern Canada and guided them to the wintering grounds before getting blasted by a collector. Clearly, I was getting a little lightheaded. After nearly two hours of measurements and careful consideration, I telephoned Dekker so that he could let me out of the locked room and escort me from the building.
LEIDEN HAS BEEN strongly influenced by its university, but unlike Champaign-Urbana or Ann Arbor, this influence has been going on for more than seven centuries. The center of the community is full of the sorts of restaurants, cafés, and bars that students and tourists alike enjoy. One large square featured a number of fast-food joints as well as three restaurants distinguished by the names ’t Panne koekenhuysje, Pannekoeke Backer van Dam, and Pannekoekenhuis, all presumably featuring pancakes. I wandered past a windmill, along canals, and over small arched bridges. Surprisingly, there seemed to be no park benches along the canals, so I couldn’t kick back for a few minutes to watch the citizens of Leiden flow by me.
I found the Evolutionary Biology Building, right where Slabbekoorn said it would be. He met me in the reception area, and I was slightly disappointed with myself to feel jealous that Slabbekoorn was more handsome than any scientist has the right to be. We chatted about life and birds and research in his office, and he then took me on a tour of the building, introducing me to professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. This single building had more people working in the field of cultural evolution t
han in all of Canada.
After lunch, a healthy group assembled in a lecture hall for my seminar, and I dug in. I had prepared a slide presentation rather than using PowerPoint. Good thing, too, as the computer projection unit had been stolen, ripped clean out of the ceiling. The topic was an overview of my work on songs of sparrows and New World warblers, and I was a little worried about getting across subtle concepts to a group whose first language was not English. I needn’t have worried, though, as my version of English was better understood in Leiden than it had been in Dublin. Along with methodology, results, and interpretation, I tried to throw in some anecdotes about the wilds of Canada (grizzly bear stories always go over well in Europe), and laughs came at the appropriate times. My seminar was followed by another ninety minutes of talks and tours with gracious folks in the department.
I retraced my steps through the city, over canal bridges and along centuries-old streets, back to Naturalis for the start of the conference, to find the opening reception in full swing. I quickly found Clem Fisher from Liverpool, and a group from the Natural History Museum in Tring, most of whom I had met on previous Labrador Duck quests. We spent the next hour drinking Dutch beer. I found myself beside Katrina Cook, who had just begun an appointment as a curator at Tring. She had the dark, sultry good looks and sexy swagger of an Eastern European who might have seduced British spies in the Cold War era. With bellies full of beer, we listened to an opening address by Michael Walters (Santa Claus) who told us about his life as curator of the world’s largest collection of bird eggs at Tring. We then sallied forth into the night in search of more beer and perhaps some food.
A very large group set off, but as we snaked through the early Friday evening, the group budded and then divided again. I was keen on pancakes, but the remainder of the group wanted Mediterranean food. I found myself in a Greek restaurant with a group of twelve, including Bob McGowan from Edinburgh, Fisher from Liverpool, and Katrina, Russell, Walters, and Prys-Jones from Tring. My two highest priorities were an exchange of lofty thoughts and getting something into my stomach that would sop up the beer, and so I ordered the first vegetarian dish on the menu. And more beer.
We drank and laughed and drank some more. Food was mixed in there somewhere. The restaurant was typically European, fitting more patrons in a small space than my high school geometry classes said should have been possible. I was the filling in a sandwich between Katrina and Fisher. Katrina proved herself very good at flirting. Rather than ask me to pass her the salt, she put her right arm around my shoulders and reached with her left. Her leg grazed mine more often than expected by chance. She spoke to me in a breathy voice that grazed my cheek. Later that evening, while walking back to her hotel, she fell into a canal while peeing behind a bush. Sneaky things, those Dutch canals.
RIGHT UP TO the last moment, I had expected Errol to show up to take his share of the blame for our talk. There was no sign of him. I tried not to see it as an omen that the building I was to present in, the Pesthuis, had been constructed in the 1650s to house victims of bubonic plague. Surrounding the facility was a moat, although it was officially described as a canal. We learned that there had been a second moat separating the men on one half of the compound from women on the other half. Call me a hopeless romantic, or call me an incurable sex maniac, but if I knew that I had only twenty-four hours to live, and was separated from a willing partner by a moat, I think that I could find the energy for a quick swim. After the plague epidemic passed, the facility was used as a prison for military convicts, and then as a mental hospital.
In a move almost guaranteed to inflame, my talk was scheduled as the first one of the conference. I was nervous. After all, I was about to give the group a long list of the things that they were doing wrong. Well, not exactly, I suppose. I was going to give them a long list of things that could be done differently to make the life of the museum user a bit easier. Each conference attendee had received the abstract of each talk in advance, and perhaps I was being a little paranoid, but I got a sense that the audience might have been a bit tense, like spectators at a public execution.
I launched into the twenty-five-minute talk, entitled Views from the Other Side of the Bird: Users’ Perspectives on Bird Collections. It came off well enough. I didn’t stumble too often, although I was more reliant on my prepared notes than usual. A few chuckles came at appropriate times. When my allotted time was up, a little yellow light illuminated on a panel on the podium. It was beside an equally small sign saying Stopen. It seemed a lot more friendly than the German equivalent, Halten, and so I politely stopped speaking, and invited questions and comments. There was a stony silence. Dekker stepped in and lobbed me an easy question about the use of museum collections by captive bird breeders, which allowed me to emphasize a couple of my earlier points. This opened the floodgates, and questions and comments came flying. One fellow took particular exception to my suggestion that policies about collection use should be explicit and published, claiming that museums should have the flexibility to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. I countered that explicit policies helped to ensure that decisions were neither arbitrary nor petty. Luckily, I had already done all the work I needed to at his institution, because I think it unlikely that I will ever see the inside of it again. Afterward, a junior member of the same museum took me aside and in a small voice claimed that my talk had “said what needed to be said.”
The remainder of the day was filled with talks and a formal tour of the museum, including the research collection. The tour of the gleaming new facility was preceded by a talk by the building’s architect, who was clearly proud of the climate-controlled closed system that he had designed. The interior of the building never wavers from 67 degrees Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity is always exactly 54 percent. It was equally clear that many of the curators from other institutions were envious, if only of the endless row of cabinets that were not yet filled to overflowing. I gather that space is at a premium in most facilities.
We were shown one room after another full of stuffed birds, some as study skins and some as taxidermic mounts. I pulled out a tray with an impressive series of birds from New Guinea called pitohuis. I called over one of my Spanish colleagues and asked if he could do me a favor. “Sure,” he said. I asked, “Would you mind licking one of these birds for me?” “Sure…what?…why?” I explained that it had been discovered recently that, as a means to defend themselves against predators, pitohuis had evolved poisonous feathers. It is said that if you lick a pitohui, your tongue goes numb. Or you might die. I wanted to know if it were true. He gave me a disgusted look and walked away. Perhaps my humor isn’t sufficiently subtle.
We were then given the opportunity to tour the myriad exhibits on public display. Everywhere there was something interesting to see: stuffed birds and mammals, skeletons of whales and dinosaurs, insects, shells and fossils; all were displayed to advantage. Cooperative signs offered explanation to visitors in Dutch, English, and French. In a cabinet constructed of bulletproof glass was the skullcap, molar, and leg bone of a near-human creature that lived about 1 million years ago, collected on the island of Java in 1891. I confess that I didn’t have the energy to do justice to the assembled menagerie. It is the sort of facility that has to be approached fresh, with the energy and enthusiasm of a child.
Afterwards, catching a second breath, the conference mob again hit the streets of Leiden. We passed only two bars before settling on one situated beside a canal, advertising Heineken in large, friendly letters. I downed one Heineken before settling in for a good long sup on wheat beer. I didn’t get the chance to pay until the fourth round, by which time the bull was really flying. There was a lot of talk about colleagues who weren’t in attendance. Someone suggested that it was really mean of Errol to leave me high and dry, but someone else suggested that his absence greatly decreased the probability of a punch-up. When challenged, Fisher swore that she was not the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the sort of energy that su
ggested that she was. As tipsy as any of us, she said, “Would the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury use the expression ‘Up yours’?”
WALKING FROM THE hotel to Naturalis for the final day of presentations, I had a bit of fun with street signs and billboards. I speculated that a building, labeled Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, was a place where I could be treated for plague, should the need arise. “Te koop” seemed to indicate that an empty home was for sale, or perhaps awaiting demolition. The sign at a construction site proclaiming “Onderzoeksgebouw LUMC” completely befuddled me. On a quiet residential street, I cobbled together contextual clues, and gathered that “aanbiedplaats minicontainers niet parkeren UO 7.00–16.00
UUR” meant that between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., I was not to park my minivan in front of an aanbiedplaats.
And so the day was occupied by talks about type specimens, about the collections of specific museums, and about the use of museum specimens as sources of DNA. Some of it seemed a bit much like stamp collecting, but with birds instead of stamps. I was pleased that several people made reference to the presentation I had made the day before, and that none of those people used vulgar language. After the last talk, we all gathered for a group photograph. There was a brief discussion about publishing the proceedings of the conference, and about the next European Conference on Bird Collections, to be held two years hence in Spain. With that, the Leiden conference came to an end.
