The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  Before Jane and I set off from Glasgow, several friends had asked me how the United States had wound up with so many Labrador Ducks. I explained that it came down to a combination of geography and money. Labrador Ducks were silly enough to spend their winters in the waters around New York City, where they made good targets for shotguns. Secondly, Labrador Ducks became rare at the time when American museums found themselves with more money than their European counterparts, and so the Americans snapped up every rarity that became available. When it comes to stuffed birds, England has the single biggest collection in the world, but in second, third, fourth, and fifth places are collections in America.

  There was just one small problem with this trip to snap up ducks in the eastern United States. It was not exactly clear how many Labrador Ducks were to be found there. The number that Paul Hahn had cooked up forty-five years earlier, something like twenty-four, didn’t exactly tally. I was going to have to play it by ear.

  JANE HAD SHOWN no reluctance to share rooms to cut costs, but when she saw our hotel room in Washington, D.C., she must have doubted my taste. The wall had holes where repairs to the electrical system had been carried out, the bathtub plug wouldn’t keep water in, and the plug hole didn’t drain the tub fast enough to keep a shower from turning into a bath. Long past its prime, the hotel seemed to cater mainly to school groups from Posthole, Nebraska, on a tour of the nation’s capital. The bedside clock said it was 8 p.m. Our brains said it was 1 a.m. Our bodies said they hated us. We gave in and went to sleep.

  Not willing to jump right into an examination of the Smithsonian’s four Labrador Ducks after a long journey from Britain, I had scheduled a day of rest, relaxation, and exploration, and so Jane and I were off to tour some of Washington’s great attractions, starting with the Mall. This grand, tree-lined avenue seems to be the American response to the Imam Square in Isfahan or Tiananmen Square in Beijing—built to impress visitors for centuries to come. The Mall, a mile long, with the U.S. Capitol at one end and the Washington Monument at the other, is lined by components of the Smithsonian Institution. The site of endless protests and celebrations, it is also the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. made his immortal “I have a dream” speech.

  Having had a good go with her guidebook of Washington, Jane declared that Capitol Hill was a must-see. We found ourselves at the booth distributing free tickets for the Capitol Hill tour. I gather that on a warm day in summer, you need to line up for a tour ticket six months before you are born. Arriving early in the morning on a cold and windy day in March, we had only thirty minutes to kill until our tour.

  At 10:15, Jane and I and thirty-eight other lucky ticket holders found ourselves at the marshaling area for the Capitol tour. We marched halfway up a hill, where we were marshaled again. All of our belongings were x-rayed, and then we were marshaled again. We each were given an extensive list of items prohibited in the galleries of the U.S. Capitol, including electric stun guns, martial arts weapons, guns, fireworks, razors, Mace, letter openers, battery-operated electronic devices, hand lotion, perfume, rodents larger than 8 inches, and rabid livestock. Marshaled again, we were led the remainder of the way up the hill, where we entered the Capitol Building by an entirely unassuming west-side entrance. Upon gaining the building, we were marshaled again. Now thirty minutes into our sixty-minute tour, we had yet to see anything of interest or hear anything worthwhile. The Capitol Hill police could probably teach the American armed forces a thing or two about security, but they could learn a lot from Disney about dealing with groups of visitors.

  On the day of our visit, a new statue was being installed. Hence all of the best bits of the tour were not on offer that day. Our tour guide did her best. She gestured in the air and asked us to imagine what the rotunda looked like. Rotund, I would have thought. She was a fount of famous dates and names of architects and vice presidents, which tumbled out at a frightening pace. Between the tour and a pamphlet, I managed to scrape together a few details. The original Capitol was designed by someone named Thornton. It has housed the U.S. Congress ever since moving south from Philadelphia in 1800. In 1814 a bunch of drunken Canadians visiting Washington burned down the whole shebang, leaving just the naked exterior walls. It took four years of reconstruction before the north and south wings were reopened, and a further seven years for completion of the center building to join them.

  With the Capitol tour behind us, we were spoiled for choice. Much of the Mall is occupied by the Smithsonian Institution. A legacy of the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland, the Smithsonian is not just a museum, but a tribute to marital infidelity. It is also an amazing amalgam of eighteen museums and galleries, nine research centers, and the National Zoo, making it the largest museum and research complex in the world. The combined collection includes 143.5 million items, one for every 1.94 people in the U.S. The whole shootin’ match was overseen by the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lawrence M. Small. By all accounts he had been doing a smashing job, but then he had a little slip-up. According to an article in the Washington Post, Small had registered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It seems that his private collection of Brazilian tribal art contained feathers of protected bird species. Oops.

  With all this choice, it was a challenge to know where to start. “Ay, it’s all six a half a dozen to me,” Jane claimed; “I’m not particularly fussed.” And so I put in my bid for the National Air and Space Museum. Like every other little science geek growing up in the 1960s, I was fascinated by everything to do with space, and, dear God in Heaven above, this museum has it all. As a child, I would have sold my soul for a chance to visit it. Even at this point in my life, I would have happily sold Jane’s soul for the chance. Luckily for Jane, I wasn’t asked to. Like the Capitol Building, the museum was free, and our possessions got another jolly good dose of X-ray radiation. When I held my camera to my ear, I could hear it humming.

  The items on display really were top-shelf. We saw the Wright brothers’ Flyer used at Kitty Hawk to make the first sustained powered flight in 1903. Then it was the Spirit of St. Louis, which took Charles Lindbergh 3,610 miles on the first solo flight across the Atlantic in thirty-three hours and thirty minutes in 1927. Near the entrance to the museum we saw Friendship 7, which circled Earth three times in 1962, and the Gemini 4 spacecraft that allowed Edward Higgins White II to make a twenty-minute space walk in 1965 while his companion, James McDivitt, looked on jealously from inside the craft. We were even permitted to rub a small slice of moon rock retrieved by the crew of Apollo 17. Given that the six combined missions that put men on the moon had brought back 838 pounds of rock, when this sliver is worn away by the hands of thousands of visitors, there will be plenty of opportunity to replace it.

  On display were a backup Mars Rover, a backup Hubble telescope, and a backup Skylab. The originals were, of course, on Mars, in orbit, and in a billion tiny fragments after a fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in July 1979. But for me, the absolute pinnacle of the museum’s displays was the command module of Apollo 11, the mission that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon, along with the third guy, who had to stay in orbit in the command module, and whose name no one ever remembers. Along with a good chunk of humankind, I was glued to the television on July 20, 1969, when Armstrong messed up his immortal one-line speech. He meant to say, “That’s one small step for a man, (and) one giant leap for mankind,” but he forgot the eighth word, and the omission meant that the sentence didn’t make much sense. To give the man his due, the third member of the expedition was Michael Collins.

  It was time for our next chunk of the Smithsonian. My camera avoided a fourth X-ray, but got a ruddy good cavity search when we arrived to see some natural history. According to the promotional literature, the museum’s floor space is greater than eighteen National Football League fields. By my calculations, that makes it a little smaller than twelve Canadian Football League fields, or a shade over one-fifth the area of Vat
ican City.

  This Natural History Museum is a tribute to what can be accomplished with the will to be great and very deep pockets. Jane and I saw only a small portion of the exhibits, but we were gob-smacked with what we saw. For instance, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was told that the museum’s meteorite exhibition was the best in the world. Big meteorites, little meteorites, a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite…we even saw a vial of diamond dust isolated from a meteorite. The Smithsonian has managed to gather 20,000 of these space travelers.

  A guard in the next room admitted that the Hope diamond was probably the most popular exhibit in the museum. “Yeah, and it’s probably worth more than everything else in the building put together,” he said. When it was first cut, the Hope diamond weighed a whopping great 112 carats, but it has been hacked at over the years, until today it weighs in at a comparatively slim 45.53 carats. It is 25.6 mm long, 21.8 mm wide, 12 mm deep, and surrounded by tourists. It has a faceted girdle and extra facets on the pavilion. I once dated a woman who could be described in exactly the same way. My date was either pink or taupe, depending on the lighting; the Hope diamond is either blue, deep-blue, dark gray-blue, or violet, depending on who is looking at it. Unlike my date, the gem is semiconductive. Exactly like my date, the Hope diamond phosphoresces red under ultraviolet light. The Hope diamond was donated to the Smithsonian in 1958. My date is, presumably, still skulking through the underbrush.

  Jane and I went looking for the Smithsonian’s display of stuffed birds, but before finding it, we came to the Hall of Mammals. With an impressive 274 mammals, the display occupies 25,000 square feet, or a bit less than half an NFL football field, or the area covered by 131,000 CD jewel cases. Special emphasis had been given to mammals of the African savannah. Every few minutes, the lights in the hall dimmed, and flashes from hidden lights mimicked lightning. Moments later, hidden speakers issued a deep, chest-drubbing rumble of thunder. Small children ran to grab the trouser legs of their parents. They seemed to be listening to some primitive voice that said “run for cover.” I found myself reaching to turn up my collar against the imminent rainfall that never came.

  After that, the display of birds came as a huge disappointment. With no signs, we had to ask for directions. We were directed to the basement and two dead-end hallways hidden behind an escalator. Overhead light bulbs were burned out, but in the gloom I spotted impressive cobwebs. The whole exhibit consisted of a few archaic cabinets stuffed with locally collected birds, badly in need of a thorough cleaning. Only one other party had found the birds. A father and his two daughters were told by a passing security guard that the Passenger Pigeon on display had been the last one alive. He explained that the bird, a female, had died in captivity at thirteen years of age, after years of failed attempts to find her a mate. Hang on…that doesn’t sound right to me.

  After the guard left, I gave the family the correct details. The last ever Passenger Pigeon, nicknamed Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens at the grand old age of twenty-nine. Efforts to find her a mate had indeed proved futile. As an extraordinarily gregarious bird, attempts to breed a single pair in captivity probably would have been futile anyway. When she passed away, Martha’s corpse was donated to the Smithsonian. Despite what the guard claimed, Martha was safely locked away in the research collection, waiting for the day when the museum has room for a proper bird display.

  THE NEXT MORNING saw me facing my next great duck adventure. Being a gentleman, and wanting to give Jane every opportunity to wake up slowly, I went for a stroll. Even at 7 a.m., I found an awful lot of armed officers in the area around the White House. An antiwar protestor seemed to have settled in for a long wait in a green-and-white tent across the street. He was probably visible from Bush’s bedroom window, and it is a tribute to the American state that he was allowed to continue his nonviolent protest in spite of the embarrassment he must have caused the senior administration. Despite all of the security, a gray squirrel ran back and forth with impunity through the fence and across the White House lawn.

  It was soon time for our appointment with Labrador Ducks at the Smithsonian. Arriving at the staff entrance, I signed and printed my name, and was directed to the Visitors’ Office, where I signed and printed my name again. Collections Manager James Dean came down to meet us. Dean is a lot of human being but, despite his imposing presence, he let me direct the conversation. Perhaps he is a tad shy and more comfortable with birds than with the peculiar people who study them. He explained that he had been at the Smithsonian for twenty-six years, in a position that was just too good to leave.

  Labrador Ducks 31, 32, 33, and 34

  The Smithsonian proudly counts four Labrador Ducks among its enormous collection of stuffed birds. Two are study skins, and two are taxidermic mounts. The museum’s adult male study skin looks a bit like a torpedo, very efficient for storage purposes, but rather shy on artistic flair. He was accompanied by a zip-lock bag containing roughly twenty of his feathers that had fallen out over the years. Two more fell out while I was examining him. In spots, the feathers that should have been white were a bit grimy-yellow. His legs and toes were honey-brown, and the webs between his toes were dark brown and gray, with small pinholes. The museum’s female study skin is a little worse for wear, having been transformed from a taxidermic mount to its present condition. Her speckled gray and brown feathers would have made her the pinnacle of camouflage while sitting on a nest. Her right foot is broken and is missing its hind toe, her tail feathers are worn, her neck is bashed up, and she has only one glass eye. Word on the street is that both of these specimens were shot at Martha’s Vineyard by Daniel Webster, Massachusetts senator and presidential wannabe. Webster gave the birds to Audubon, who then gave them to Professor Baird, who saw the specimens safely into the Smithsonian.

  There are two good stories associated with these specimens. The first is that Audubon used them as models for his life-size painting of Pied Ducks. Given the shape the specimens are in, you have to give Audubon extra points for interpretation. I wondered if the pinholes in the male’s webs were the result of Audubon’s pinning the feet into just the right pose. The second story involves ornithologists Phil Humphrey and the late Robert Butsch. In the 1950s, these gentlemen borrowed the adult male from the Smithsonian so that they could x-ray it and take it apart to see what they could learn about its muscles and bones. Butsch then reassembled the duck as a study skin, and prepared to ship it back to Herb Friedmann at the Smithsonian. Being something of a joker, Humphrey came up with the idea of gathering up some old bits of duck skin and feathers they had lying around, and shipping those to Friedmann along with profuse apologies, explaining that they hadn’t been able to reassemble the duck properly after their examination. Better judgment prevailed, and the real Labrador Duck was sent back.

  The museum’s other two Labrador Ducks are both drakes. The first is an adult, donated by the American Museum of Natural History in 1872. Nothing is known about where he was shot or by whom. For reasons unknown, his tail is particularly worn and frayed. He is a bit greasy around his brown glass eyes and the base of his bill. His feet and toes had been painted battleship gray, and his left foot is a bit mangled. He stands on a block of white foam, and no matter how I turned him, his big brown eyes always seemed to be staring at me. The Smithsonian’s final specimen, a young male, was apparently shot on Long Island, New York, in the fall of 1875, possibly by New York City taxidermist John G. Bell. If the information is correct, it provides the poor young drake the dubious distinction of being the last reliable sighting of a Labrador Duck. Like his adult companion, he sits on a block of white foam and is held to the base by delicate white ribbons. Like his companion, the proximal part of his bill had been done over in thick orange paint. When not being poked at, he has a small plastic bag over his head because his feathers are falling out. An ignoble end of the road for a species.

  My peeking and poking took three and a half hours. With no opportunity to sit for any of it, I
was a little bagged by the end. Dean and I returned the four specimens to their locked cabinet. The Smithsonian counts something like 600,000 bird specimens in its collection, and I asked Dean if he had a favorite. He didn’t have an immediate answer, but then opened a drawer to show me a Hudsonian Godwit, a long-billed, long-legged wading bird. Charles Darwin had collected it on East Falkland island. The look of reverence on Dean’s face told me that he had a particular fondness for this specimen.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Jane and I relaxed as our Amtrak train zipped north, taking us past branches of Chesapeake Bay. According to John Audubon, this region was as far south as Labrador Ducks ever got. The bay was flat, gray, and protected by a line of deciduous trees on the shore. Ducks floated near the bank, but the train was moving too fast to see what sort they were. Almost certainly not Labrador Ducks. In the past I have moaned about the inability of Amtrak to get me where I needed to be when promised. Well, so far on this trip, they were doing a perfectly good job, and Jane and I found ourselves in Philadelphia smack on time. Still early morning, we dragged our luggage from the train station to Philly’s Parkway Museum District, site of the Academy of Natural Sciences, home to five Labrador Ducks.

  Before going on to be nasty about Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, I feel I should give it a really big buildup. The academy is the oldest natural history institution in the Western Hemisphere, established in 1812 for the “encouragement and cultivation of the sciences and the advancement of useful learning.” I would be keen to know what constitutes “useless learning.” With much fanfare, the institution threw open its doors to the public in 1828. After outgrowing its housing a couple of times, it settled in to its current location on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1876. At one time on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the academy is now in the heart of everything important, roughly halfway between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and City Hall. Its scientific collection contains 25 million items, including the first dinosaur skeleton discovered in North America and the only meteorite ever collected from New Jersey. The Philadelphia Academy: big research projects; big education programs—on the whole, a pretty fine place, wouldn’t you think?