The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  At most conferences I had been to, the last evening was occupied by a banquet, and attendees dispersed back to their home countries the next day. In contrast, almost all of the people in Leiden were driving or flying away on Sunday evening. I wasn’t scheduled to fly out of Amsterdam until the following morning. As much as I had enjoyed Leiden, I didn’t particularly relish the thought of spending my last evening in it alone. Luckily, Katrina was staying over, as she had some work to do at Naturalis the next day. We agreed to make an evening of it.

  We went in search of beer and food. Since Katrina claimed no special preference, I chose a pancake restaurant. I ordered a pancake with cheese and mushrooms, and Katrina opted for something with spicy beef. There was a mix-up with the order, and Katrina got cheese and ham but decided to eat it anyway. She was talking intently, and I was listening intently, and after a few mouthfuls, it was apparent that there was a second mistake with our order. I had been eating the spicy beef pancake. To help explain myself, after twenty-five years as a vegetarian, I really don’t remember what meat tastes like.

  We walked along Leiden’s canal system, gabbing about loves won and lost. We walked past several grimy-looking bars, but eventually found a good one that was broadcasting gentle jazz workings into the night. The Dutch have no concept of a large glass of beer, and so we had to settle for beverages in little glasses, one after another. We talked about art and birds and other bits of nature. We flitted between topics like global climate change and the latest theories on human sexuality.

  And then it occurred to me that Katrina had been carrying the few belongings she needed for the three-day conference with her. With the end of the conference, she had lost her roommate and was now in need of a hotel room for the night. It seemed to me that her chances of getting a reasonably priced hotel room at 10:00 on a Sunday evening in an unfamiliar city in a foreign country were rapidly diminishing to zero. Putting the offer in as gentlemanly a way as possible, I offered her the second bed in my room. She accepted, and I got another round of beer.

  Rather than paying a few extra euros, and registering her as an official hotel guest in my room, Katrina preferred to sneak past the front desk as I was retrieving my room key. Perhaps she liked a sense of danger. Perhaps she was really short on cash. While she was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, I changed into the green cotton surgical garb that I use as pajamas when the situation requires me to wear clothes to bed. These apparently disturbed Katrina, so I switched into a gray t-shirt.

  At one point in the night, Katrina woke a bit, and in the pitch dark room called out, “Are you still there?” Trying to call myself from a deep sleep, it came across as “Bzz bzz bzzzz bzzzz?” She called out again, a little louder, “Are you still there?” “Yes,” I said, “I’m still here. Go back to sleep.”

  Having not paid for her part of the room, Katrina was not keen to join me in the hotel breakfast foyer for breakfast. I lingered over toast, scrambled eggs, and juice, and in an attempt to keep up appearances as a gentleman, I brought coffee and a croissant back to the room. She snuck by the reception desk as I checked out. We walked into town so that I could catch the train to Amsterdam’s airport and she could get a proper breakfast before the museum opened. At the train station, at the top of the stairs to my platform, I looked back. Katrina was waiting to wave good-bye.

  Two more ducks were behind me, but I felt it was time to quicken my pace. I had two semesters of teaching ahead of me, but then my university had granted me a year-long research sabbatical, and that would be enough to snap up every remaining duck in the world. If everything went according to plan.

  Chapter Eleven

  Enduring Images of Germany

  Altenburg is a tiny community in the northeast corner of Germany, not far south of Leipzig and an equally small distance west of Chemnitz. Chances are you have never heard of Altenburg and will never hear of it ever again. From all of the material sent to me by the Altenburg tourist information bureau, it seems a perfectly charming place. The most exciting thing that ever happened in Altenburg was the kidnapping of a couple of young princes by the evil warrior knight Kunz von Kaufungen in 1455. The princes were retrieved none the worse for wear, and naughty von Kaufungen was publicly beheaded in the town square. The second-most-exciting thing to happen in Altenburg was the development of the card game skat between 1810 and 1815. Although I have never played skat, I am sure that it is big barrels of fun—the sort of thing you might turn to if German television ever gets rid of free porn.

  Altenburg’s Naturkundliches Museum Mauritianum has a modest collection of dead birds. When Paul Hahn wrote to the museum in the late 1950s, asking about stuffed specimens of extinct North American birds, H. Grosse, the museum’s director, wrote back to say that he was in charge of one Eskimo Curlew, one Ivory-billed Woodpecker, two Passenger Pigeons, one Whooping Crane, one Carolina Parakeet, and, best of the lot, one Labrador Duck. Grosse didn’t provide a long treatise on where, when, or by whom the duck was collected, or how the museum came to have it. Instead, he wrote “one.” This makes it the single most enigmatic Labrador Duck specimen in the world, with no information about its sex or age, or whether it ever really existed.

  The current science director of the Altenburg museum, Dr. Norbert Höser, told me that he has examined the collection and found no Labrador Duck specimens. And so, despite the opportunity to visit a community famous for the manufacture of playing cards for more than four hundred years, with a museum of playing cards to prove it, I did not travel to Altenburg, Germany. (If you do, and see a stuffed Labrador Duck, it will be worth your while to read this book’s epilogue.) I did, however, have seven other German cities to visit.

  THERE WAS A time when airline travel was something a bit elegant. I’ve seen the photographs. Men wore business suits and smart hats, and women wore elegant dresses. In the era when only those with quite a bit of spare cash could afford to fly, I am sure that in-flight emergencies were greeted with expressions like “What’s that? An imminent crash, you say? Oh dear. Bad show! One had better buckle up, I suppose.” Today, any old rabble can fly. Me, for instance, and I find myself asking if I want to fly with any airline that would have me as a passenger.

  But there I was, buckled into a seat on an ultra-low-cost flight from Glasgow to Frankfurt. These unbelievably inexpensive airlines are able to cut costs by using some of the less popular airports, including facilities normally used by crop dusters and zeppelins. In order to save myself a few pounds, flying into “Frankfurt” didn’t mean arriving at the great hub of international transportation, and home to a wide selection of cafés and bars and Germany’s only airport sex shop and X-rated movie theater. Instead, I arrived at an airport adjacent to the minuscule community of Hahn, in an entirely different state. The airline must save even more by flying at unpopular hours, and so my cheap flight to “Frankfurt” deposited me several hours from Frankfurt, a few minutes before midnight. After explaining to a very polite but incredulous customs agent that I was in his country to see dead ducks, I went in search of my hotel with a website claiming that it was just 800 meters from the terminal. This statistic is known in the business world as “creative advertising.”

  The next morning, my luggage and I wandered “800 meters” back to the airport to wait for the bus into Frankfurt. I passed what appeared to be an American military base. A big billboard for an American sports bar described itself as “Your favorite place on the base.” With no frame of reference, I couldn’t disagree. A couple of flights disgorged their passengers just before the coach departed, and there wasn’t room for everyone. As we pulled away from the terminal, I saw a dozen travel-weary and dispirited passengers left behind on the sidewalk.

  The bus carried us past grain fields, soon replaced by deciduous forests perforated by massive wind turbine farms, a few orchards, and a very few vineyards. We dropped folks off at the real Frankfurt airport and then proceeded to the Hauptbahnhof, from which I needed to catch several trains over the next few da
ys. To get a sense of orientation, I wandered through the train station and picked up a sandwich for 2.60. I mention this only because I like to use the “” button on the keyboard. I used the WC (0.70), and stored my luggage in a coin-operated locker (3.00).

  It was too early in the day to go to my hotel, and too early in the week to see the Frankfurt duck, so I set off in search of adventure. At first it rained lightly, which was surely no impediment for a jaunty traveler. Then it rained more heavily, which was nothing to an intrepid adventurer, unless he had left his umbrella at home and his rain hat in his luggage in a train station locker. I walked east through the heart of Frankfurt’s financial district. I saw a lot of gleaming great office towers, top-end hi-fi stores, and men and women in tidy haircuts and expensive gray suits. I also saw the most amazing array of sex movie houses, continuous live sex shows, and shops for women’s underwear of the sort that aren’t really meant to be worn under anything at all. The passing traffic seemed to be mainly composed of Mercedeses, BMWs, and Audis, with a few Ferraris thrown in to liven up the mix. There was also almost endless opportunity to drink beer at sidewalk cafés, had the weather been better, and if the neighborhood hadn’t been full of so many scary, nonbanking characters. I take it that this part of Frankfurt is the German center for banking, prostitution, and nonprescription drug abuse.

  Knowing that I couldn’t possibly get any wetter, I continued my walk east and then cut south to the river, crossing to the far side at the Alte Brücke bridge. The Main is a truly lovely river, although almost completely devoid of commercial or pleasure craft. One entirely beautiful exception was a luxury cruise ship, registered at Strasbourg, tied up near the Untermainbrücke. Despite being absolutely spotless, it was being scrubbed vigorously by some members of the crew, while others laid a sumptuous meal for guests. This is the sort of ship that I will only ever see from the outside.

  As a banking giant, Frankfurt has its share of very tall buildings. Most are simple, black, imposing, and uninspiring, which may be exactly the sort of image that banks wish to project. Offices of the DZ Bank reside in an uninspired silver-and-glass tower that is saved by a whimsical statue of a giant necktie at the base. Some of Frankfurt’s skyscrapers are designed in a style that I think of as seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. For instance, the Messeturm is an 840-foot-tall building that starts off at ground level as a box. As it rises, its cross-section turns from a square to a star with too many points. Further up, the building loses all of its points and becomes a column. Topping the column is a pyramid. This has led Frankfurt residents to call the building Bleistift, but I swear it looks a lot more like a crayon than a pencil. Even the Marriott chain got into the act with an impressively tall building in which I will be invited to stay immediately after I get a ride on the Strasbourg luxury cruise ship. But aside from these exceptionally tall and grand towers, Frankfurt seems to have resisted the temptation to build upward, thereby ruining the view for everyone else.

  After a shower and a quick nap at my hotel, I was off in search of more of Frankfurt. I was getting quite brave when it came to restaurant meals in foreign cities. Walking down Münchenerstrasse, I found a restaurant without white linen tablecloths, featuring both Indian and Italian dishes. Finding a column in the menu labeled Vegetarische Gerichte, I picked something with the word milder in the description. It was based on curried tofu and rice, and went very well with tonic water, which, strangely, translates into German as tonic water.

  Bless their little hearts; the editors of the Lonely Planet guide to travel in Germany provide descriptions of “Dangers and Annoyances” for each city. The guide is quite clear that the region around the Hauptbahnhof is the navel of Frankfurt’s underbelly. It goes on to explain attempts to tidy up the streets a bit. This involves Druckräume, buildings where an addict can inject drugs, away from prying eyes, and receive clean needles. I was even told where to find such a building, should I need one. Even so, the guide explained, I could expect to see junkies injecting and defecating on the streets near the main train station, and I wasn’t let down.

  THE NEXT MORNING I strolled to the Forschungsinstitut und Naturkundemuseum Senckenberg, in search of my first stuffed Labrador Duck of the trip. The museum is housed in a magnificent old building surrounded by Frankfurt University. I started my visit by sitting in the park that constitutes the median of Senckenberganlage, so that I could have a good look at the museum. Portions of the building are constructed of the most beautiful salmon-colored stones with tan veins. At the peak of the building, above the main entrance, is a statue of a naked old man with wings, holding a scythe in his right hand and an hourglass in his left. Flanking him are a couple of cherubs, with a couple of nymphets a bit further along. Beyond the nymphets, on the right, a man is riding a half fish, half horse. On the left is an ample woman riding a half fish, half cow. (Some sort of early trial in genetic engineering gone wrong, I suppose.) As I snapped a couple of photographs of the museum, great hordes of schoolchildren arrived. They were enthusiastic but well behaved, and their handlers subdivided them into small groups to keep them from reaching critical mass.

  I tucked myself into their throng and entered the museum. The lady at the till was rather too busy taking in the admission fee of hundreds of students, and so I found a likely-looking helper near the turnstiles. “Guten Morgen,” I began. “Mein Name ist Professor Glen Chilton.” “Ja,” he replied. “Sprechen Sie English?” I tried. And then in an accent straight out of Las Vegas, he said, “Sure, whadda ya looking for?” My new friend paged my contact, Gerald Mayr, a renowned researcher of avian fossils and the museum’s curator of ornithology. When Mayr entered the throng a few minutes later, Mr. Nevada gestured at him, so that I couldn’t miss him. Like many other people in the business, Mayr is wildly enthusiastic about his work, and he was keen to make my experience entirely pleasant. He whisked me away from the crowd through secret doors to the behind-the-scenes world of the museum’s research collections.

  The Frankfurt museum collection was founded in the early nineteenth century by the Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, but it was based on the even older collection of B. Meyer. It contains about 90,000 bird specimens of 6,000 or 7,000 species. In addition, the collection has 4,000 skeletons, 3,375 birds in alcohol, 5,050 sets of eggs, and many fossils. Indeed, much of the scholarly work by museum personnel is done on bird fossils, or “paleornithology,” if you are trying to impress your friends with your big vocabulary.

  Labrador Duck 19

  This Labrador Duck didn’t come to rest in Frankfurt in the nineteenth century along with most of the rest of the collection. It was acquired in an exchange with the American Museum of Natural History in New York in December 1931. As rare and beautiful as Labrador Ducks are, Frankfurt got kind of cheated on the swap by New York’s Dr. L. Sandford. Frankfurt received the Labrador Duck in exchange for a type of finch that lived on the Japanese Bonin Islands before becoming extinct. Stuffed Bonin Island Grosbeaks are even rarer than Labrador Ducks, but, having two, the folks at Frankfurt were willing to swap their female for a duck.

  Mayr set me up in the Bibliothek, and brought me a tray with three birds, all extinct. The first was a Pink-headed Duck, the second was a Norfolk Island version of a pigeon from New Zealand, and the third was my Labrador Duck. Mayr’s predecessor, Professor Dr. D. Stefan Peters, had sent me photographs of the specimen some years before, and so this one was a bit of an anticlimax. It is an immature bird, and although it is a study skin today, the wires running through its legs suggest that it might have once been a taxidermic preparation. There cannot be much doubt that it was a male, as areas destined to be white were lightening up, and areas destined to be black had been getting darker before the terminal shotgun blast.

  After taking my measurements, and putting the Labrador Duck safely back in his cabinet, Mayr showed me some of the museum’s other treasures, including a stack of Carolina Parakeets and a selection of extinct Hawaiian birds; the bright feathers of these species h
ad been used to construct ceremonial robes for Hawaiian kings, which probably hadn’t helped their long-term survival prospects.

  In a story that I was to hear again and again in Europe, Mayr explained that, during the war, Frankfurt’s natural history collection had been split up and moved to several sites outside the city, which explained how so many specimens had avoided being blown to kingdom come during Allied bombing. We also chatted about the city of Frankfurt in general terms. He said that many first-time visitors were quite shocked by the overt use of hard drugs, and put it down, in part, to Frankfurt’s liberal treatment of drug users. I said that I had been rather surprised by the overt prostitution and live sex shows. “Yes,” he said, “but that’s not Frankfurt. That’s Germany!”

  And so having completed my official work, Mayr took me back through the collection and released me into the public displays. Not for the last time, I got to see a great museum without paying for it. And this was truly a great museum, assembled with love and care, of the sort that I wish my university students had access to. There was a curious mixture of displays, both traditional and contemporary. The dioramas that featured large mammals were so well constructed and subtly lit that I was moved to whisper so as not to disturb the scenes. A little further along, stuffed birds, mammals, and fish were on display in supermodern glass cabinets with good lighting, so that if I were to set out to learn how to draw animals, this would probably be a very good place to start. For me, a highlight was the display of specimens of Riesenalk, the Great Auk. Museum visitors were able to see a stuffed bird, a skeleton, and an egg, although the last may have been a model. Also on display was a Dodo skeleton, and the skeletons of three species of extinct New Zealand moas. Display cards that accompanied many of the bird specimens indicated their conservation status. On the card in front of endangered specimens like the Kakapo was a big red circle. Three-quarters of the circle was filled in red for less-endangered species like the Sun Conure, and a red semicircle, like the one for the Purple-naped Lory, indicated that the species wasn’t quite so entirely doomed yet. Accompanying extinct species like the Carolina Parakeet was a small map of the world with a big red X through it, indicating their current global distribution.