The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  Clearly Steinheimer loves the Berlin museum very much. We started our tour in one room of the ornithology branch of the museum’s scholarly library. Books were shelved floor to ceiling, and the ceiling was very high indeed. Ladders provided access to items out of reach of the spiral staircase and balcony. Given the value of the collection, I was surprised that we were allowed to amble in, and even more surprised that Steinheimer was allowed to handle the books without white cotton gloves. I certainly wasn’t going to leave my fingerprints on them. He showed us examples of the first books ever devoted entirely to birds, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, originals of books I had only heard of and had not seen even as reprints. The hand-colored artwork in some was both subtle and emphatic. Two of the best books were in need of rebinding, which would cost about 1,000. This seemed a small price to pay, considering that together they were worth about 300,000. Steinheimer claimed it would not take long to make a short stack of books whose combined value would exceed 1 million euros.

  Steinheimer then took us through the collection of stuffed birds, which contained many items whose scientific value was inestimable. These had escaped demolition in Allied bombing by the narrowest of margins. We were shown a specimen, no longer more than a foot and a small bundle of feathers, with a shard of glass impaled in its wooden base. The glass had been part of a window before the bombs started landing. He showed us wooden cabinets with shrapnel still embedded. Some specimens were quite dirty, but considering the hell they had been through during the war and since, it is surprising that they remain at all. The one thing that we weren’t able to see was arguably the museum’s greatest treasure. There are only a handful of Archeopteryx fossils in the world, and Berlin has one of the best. This creature is usually seen as an intermediate between bird-like dinosaurs and full-fledged birds. I am sure that everyone has seen photographs of Archeopteryx fossils, and many museums own re-creations, but to see a real one would be near the pinnacle of my scientific experiences. The museum had recently cobbled together the funding necessary to put their fossil on display, but at the time of my visit, it was locked away in a safe, and unfortunately I didn’t have a good enough reason to ask them to take it out.

  The zoology collection is impressive, but the buildings that house it are both astounding and terrible at the same time. If these buildings had been constructed with any less care, Allied bombs would have reduced them to a smoking pile of rubble. Even so, the “temporary” roofs installed immediately after the bombs fell were still in place. Some rooms were unheated. There is no modern security system, and no fire sprinklers. If a fire breaks out during working hours, someone is appointed to walk around the buildings banging on a gong. Indeed, the east wing of the museum has yet to be restored, sixty years on, making it one of the few remaining war ruins in all of Berlin.

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  Unlike many other treasures in European collections, the Berlin drake narrowly avoided being destroyed by wartime bombing.

  After the museum tour, Steinheimer took the Czech researchers on a loop of Berlin, leaving me to complete my usual tricks with the Labrador Duck. A handsome little male, he was a bit dirty but otherwise in good shape. His gray-brown glass eyes had particularly large pupils, making him look more alert than most specimens. Steinheimer had described it as the finest Labrador Duck in the world, but it isn’t quite that high up the list. He sits on a simple but elegant wooden base with a slot to hold a Plexiglas cover. The duck normally lives in a glass-fronted cabinet with a stuffed Great Auk and a couple of exotic-looking black birds with long, curvy bills. The tag around his left leg was not particularly revealing, giving only its catalogue number, 14094, and the printed words Zoolog. Museum Berlin. Even if we don’t know exactly where or when this Labrador Duck was collected, we do know a little about how it came to be in Berlin. Writing in 1954 about extinct and endangered birds in the collection, Erwin Stressmann explained that Martin Heinrich Carl Lichtenstein purchased the specimen for 18 thaler from a Hamburg dealer named G. A. Salmin on August 17, 1838.

  To show what a complete prat I can be, Steinheimer had been able to correct me on an assumption. What I had thought was the site of the Berlin Wall the night before was merely a construction site, fully 500 yards inside the region formerly known as East Berlin. He showed me on a map where I could find the river that had made up part of the boundary between East and West, and I set off for it, en route to the train out of town.

  On the west side of the Sandkrugbrücke spanning a canal off the Spree, I found a small monument erected to the memory of the first person killed trying to pass from East to West. His name was Günter Liftin and he was twenty-four years old when he tried to make the crossing, just a few days after the border was closed. Günter was on the bridge when he was spotted by guards. They fired a few warning shots, ordering him to return. Perhaps in desperation, perhaps in panic, he jumped into the river. The west bank belonged to West Berlin, but the river itself was part of East Berlin, and the security detail shot Günter in the neck, killing him. He was the first of more than 180 deaths of this sort. When I crossed the bridge a couple of fellow pedestrians stared at me, probably because I was burdened by my yellow-and-black backpack, that makes me look like a giant bee. I was free to cross back and forth over the river as many times as I wished; Günter had tried to cross it once and had lost his life. I took the small monument to be not just a remembrance of his brief life, but also of the complete freedom of movement that eventually came to Berlin. The monument instantly became my lasting impression of the city.

  I HAVE NO doubt that Paul Hahn worked doggedly compiling his list of specimens of extinct North American birds in the late 1950s, but he didn’t quite get them all. He missed the Labrador Duck in Braunschweig. Goodness knows I wouldn’t have found it except by a bit of good luck and the help of a colleague. Today there are online chat groups for just about everything from the relative merits of Roman gods to clothing tips for strippers, including a group for curators of museum bird collections in North America. I used the service to circulate a general inquiry about Labrador Ducks, and received a response from Pam Rasmussen, a zoologist at Michigan State University. She said that while making the rounds of German museums a couple of years earlier, she had taken the opportunity to photograph a Labrador Duck at the Staatliches Naturhistorisches Museum in Braunschweig. She was even good enough to send me the photos, which showed a rather ratty-looking immature male.

  Braunschweig isn’t a big city, at just 250,000 people, but the Hauptbahnhof and zoology museum were at opposite corners of town. Since I had to visit the train station three times and the museum only once, it would have made sense to reserve a hotel room near the former. Instead I had opted for a hotel in the city’s far northwest, part of a very large and very economical chain.

  Before getting a meal, wanting to be sure that I could arrive at the museum the next day with the least amount of fuss and muss, I decided to go for a wander that evening to find it. But in my quest, I made two fundamental mistakes. The first was to forget my compass. Clouds covered the skies, so I couldn’t fix north. The second mistake was to trust a map taken from a tourist guidebook in my hotel. Maps put out by tourist information offices are not designed to get a tourist from one spot in a city to another. They are designed to give the naive traveler the impression that it is as easy as anything to get from one spot to another. I confused north with east, and found myself very, very lost. Using all of my navigation skills, following numbered tram lines and the moss on trees, I managed to find the university, and from there found the museum, and from there found a very nice little restaurant with sidewalk seating. I ordered a Bier and a pizza. The beer wasn’t good, but the pizza was exceptional. The young university crowd streamed by, some on their way home and some on their way out for the evening.

  The next morning saw me at the natural history museum at a fashionable 9:30. In terms of its research collection, the museum is a midsized collection with 27,000 stuffed birds, r
epresenting almost half of all the bird species in the world. The institution had been founded exactly four hundred years before I got there, the private collection of Herzog Carl I von Braunschweig und Lüneburg. Herzogs—German dukes—seemed very keen on starting natural history museums. This Herzog’s official portrait shows him in military garb, but it appears that he fought most of his campaigns indoors or after dark, somewhere close to a restaurant serving big portions.

  I had practiced my little speech in German that ran along the lines of “Hello, my name is…Please, I would like to see…” I had even rehearsed a little backup in case my contact, Michaela Forthuber, had forgotten about me and gone on vacation. After all, I had made the appointment several months earlier, and had not got a reply to my reminder a week before my journey. Even so, when I got to the reception desk, I did not get past “Guten Morgen. Mein Name ist Glen Chilton…” before I was whisked away like visiting royalty and brought to Forthuber.

  I gather that Forthuber is the museum’s taxidermist, and by default is the curator of some of the collection. She is young and pixie cute, with big eyes and hair cut short enough to indicate that she found life too much fun to waste a lot of time fussing with a styling comb. The high color in her cheeks was probably the result of the warm weather. I tried without success to convince myself that she was blushing because I was so charming. Cute young women don’t generally have a lot of time for frumpy old gits like me, particularly since I was wearing the dress shirt that makes me look fat.

  Forthuber took me to the bird collection room, and flipped up a little work table attached to the wall. Before settling down to work, I ducked under the table to check that it was properly secured. It wasn’t, and so I fixed it. I don’t know where the Braunschweig prison is, or what the penalty is for damaging a priceless artifact, but I wasn’t keen to find out.

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  Well, if not priceless, then certainly valuable. Valuable, but not pretty. If you saw this Labrador Duck at a jumble sale, and didn’t recognize it for what it was, you wouldn’t pay a dollar for it. It was prepared as a study skin, rather than as a taxidermic mount, and the preparator had not been entirely committed to artistic integrity. Small wonder that the museum’s official booklet has a nice photograph of its Great Auk but no mention of its Labrador Duck. It is very probably a male, although a particularly young one. He had a few brown spots turning black, and a few brown spots turning yellow, but was otherwise, well, brown. He isn’t a very symmetric specimen, and there is no way to make him lie flat. In order to protect him, he had been placed, rather wisely, by himself in a glass-topped wooden case of the sort normally used for pinned insect specimens. He had even been attached to the case’s base with large pins to keep him from rolling around. The tags around the leg of this duck suggested that it had come from the collection of Heinrick (or Heinrich) Ferdinand Möschler, who was born in 1800, died in 1885, and spent part of the intervening period amassing a natural history collection.

  As I got toward the end of my work, that silly little voice in my head said that I had missed something. All of the measurements were made…all of the drawings had been drawn…Forthuber is pixie cute…It took me a while, but it finally dawned on me that the clue I was missing was olfactory. I sank my nose into the belly of the duck and took a good sniff. Most museum specimens smell like mothballs. This one smelled like wood smoke. Definitely not cigarette smoke, or even fireplace smoke, but deep-woods campfire smoke. There were several other stuffed birds on an adjacent bench, and I took a good sniff at those. They correctly smelled of mothballs. I pointed out the duck’s smell to Forthuber, who took a tentative sniff. “That isn’t preservative?” she asked. No, it’s wood smoke. Wait a minute…what does arsenic smell like? Almonds? No, that’s cyanide. I was getting confused. Is it possible that I had just poisoned myself by sniffing a duck? Oh well.

  THE DAY WAS young and mercifully cool, so I headed for the city center, depositing myself in the Burgplatz, the historical and geographic center of town. As noon approached, I expected to be overrun by the booming of bells from a clock tower, but instead heard a gentle tinkling. Heading off to find the source, I found a wedding ceremony that had come to an end at the Rathaus, which I expected to mean “Rat House,” but which my phrase book translated as “Town Hall.” The happy new couple emerged by running through a paper cut-out of a heart, accompanied by the clapping of hands and a shower of rose petals.

  The Marienkirche in Berlin may have been covered in tits, but the Dom St. Blasii in Braunschweig was a perch for kestrels, noisy little hawks that strike fear into the hearts of small songbirds. St. Blasii is the patron saint of throats. The story goes that Blasii revived a young lad after he had died when a chicken bone got stuck in his throat. Given that saints are not found on every street corner, this seemed to me another argument in favor of a vegetarian lifestyle. St. Blasii was beheaded in 316, but went on to become one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.

  I found the Burgplatz nearly free of tourists, and only six were hiding in the Dom. They all left as soon as I arrived. This left the lady behind the reception desk and me to keep each other company. She was very concerned about something, but I couldn’t quite make out what. She wasn’t exactly angry with me, but she wasn’t entirely impressed either. There was a lot of gesturing, and she used a loud voice that didn’t seem entirely in keeping with a house of worship. Was it my briefcase and duck-detection kit that she didn’t like? Did she want me to leave them with her behind her desk? Well thank you very much. Danke. It was very kind of her to watch over them for me. She still didn’t seem too happy as I walked further into the church.

  I checked out a revolving rack of interpretive brochures. I found guides to the church printed in twenty languages, including French, Turkish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, and Arabic, but nothing in English. The lady behind the reception desk was still eyeing me suspiciously, so I grabbed the first brochure that came to hand. It was written in Norwegian. I sat in silence in a pew, pretended that I could read Norwegian, and enjoyed the cathedral’s architecture. It was large and airy, bright and cheery, partially because the windows did not overemphasize stained glass. A little further along I found a crypt and deposited a 1 coin so that I could visit 24 tombs, including those of Elenore Charlotte (1686–1748), Friedrich Wilhelm (1663–1732), and the other Friedrich Wilhelm (1771–1815). Set a little deeper in the crypt were three more sarcophagi. If I can trust my translation of Norwegian, one of the tombs contains the rather cramped bodies of three persons from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A second box contains the earthly remains of Heinrich der Löwe, and the third has his wife or girlfriend, Mathilde, an English princess. Der Löwe seemed to have had a finger in every pie in the twelfth century. In 1166 he had a bronze lion erected in the Burgplatz as a symbol of his authority. He commissioned the construction of a castle and ordered the building of St. Blasii’s cathedral. Back on level ground, the lady at the reception desk had remembered a smattering of English. In just two words, she encapsulated all that she had wanted to get across when I arrived. She said, “Please leave!”

  IF YOU EVER find yourself riding a Greyhound bus through southern Saskatchewan, and the driver stops at every community big enough for a gas station or a Chinese-Canadian restaurant or a church or a pocket-gopher colony, then you are on the “milk run.” You will finally dismiss the possibility of getting to your destination before you die of old age, and start wondering if you will get there before the sun goes nova. The expression milk run may be quite common in other languages, I suppose, although in Germany it would be described as the “Milch Weg.” The next day I found myself on the Milch Weg out of Braunschweig, headed for Halberstadt.

  Forgive yourself if you have never heard of Halberstadt. It just isn’t that big, and it isn’t mentioned in any guidebook I’ve come across. To find it at all, I had to shell out big bucks for a 1:750,000 Michelin map of Germany, and consult it with a magnifying lens. Before arriving in Halberstadt, the
train stopped at Stapelberg, Ilsenburg, Minsleben, Heudeber-Danstedt, and Wernigerode. Some stops seemed to be providing service only for cell phone towers and wheat fields. At some stations, the train stopped for less than twenty seconds, and the wheat wasn’t quick enough to board. As the time for my arrival in Halberstadt approached, I could see several lovely church spires, and I hoped that they marked the city center.

  At a tender young age, Ferdinand Heine Sr. (1809–1894) began collecting stuffed birds, and once he got down to it, went at the collecting game at a fever pitch. He must have had more profitable behaviors as well, because he became a wealthy landowner. His natural history collection was turned over to the city of Halberstadt thirteen years after he died and formed the basis for a museum. Of the 18,000-odd stuffed birds in the collection today, fully 11,589 came from Heine. His son, Ferdinand Heine Jr. (1840–1920), got in on the act in a lesser way. He was, presumably, a perfectly nice guy, but when the city named the institution the Museum Heineanum, it was for the father, not the son. Besides a precious Labrador Duck, the museum has six other species of extinct bird: a Passenger Pigeon, a Carolina Parakeet, an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, an Emperor Woodpecker, a Norfolk Island Kaka, and a Lappenhopf, whatever that is.

  I had been warned that the Halberstadt Labrador Duck might not be quite what I was hoping for. In 1959, Paul Hahn had received a letter from Kuno Handtke of the Halberstadt museum, indicating that some of the skin on the neck of the specimen had come from a Mallard. These things happen, and as long as we know that the specimen is something of a patchwork quilt, no harm is done. However, shortly before my visit, Dr. Bernd Nicolai, current Director of the Museum Heineanum, warned me that the situation wasn’t even quite as good as that. Apparently only the head and neck of the specimen are from a Labrador Duck, and the remaining material from specimens of some other species. Well, if the goal is to see absolutely every Labrador Duck in the world, Halberstadt must still be worth a visit, I should think.