The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  WHILE WAITING FOR my Labrador Duck encounter on Monday morning, Jane and I made our Sunday turgid. We started by walking east to Central Park, clearly one of North America’s greatest city parks. I had expected the park to be flat, like much of Manhattan, but it has been sculpted into beautiful undulations. Even early in the morning, Central Park was full of recreational runners as well as the participants in the Colon Cancer Challenge Race. We stumbled across a rainbow-clad group of cyclists staging for a ride. I asked the prettiest one (well, why not?) how far they were going. “New Jersey,” she explained. You have to be impressed.

  The promotional magazine in our hotel room listed some of the fun activities available in Gotham for the out-of-towner, including the opportunity to see a taping of The Late Show with David Letter-man, and it sounded like a fun thing to do. Jane and I walked south from Central Park to the Ed Sullivan Theater, which looks a lot more impressive on television than on the street. We filled out forms and had a briefing with assistant Seth, who gave us a 50–50 chance of being called for the show the following night. Regrettably, the red light on our hotel room telephone stayed as resolutely dim as the one on the hotel telephone in Philadelphia. Jane and I would have to make our own fun.

  We recharged our batteries with coffee and headed for Times Square. What a sensory onslaught! A concrete canyon with bright lights and flashing signs. An army of perceptual psychologists had been working around the clock to figure out how to assault visitors into buying stuff or going places or doing things, none of which they really needed or wanted.

  It was roughly at this point that I lost Jane. I looked in the immediate vicinity and then further afield, peering over and around people as best I could. No Jane. Before leaving Scotland, I had promised Jane’s mother that the one thing I certainly would not do was lose her daughter. A couple of minutes passed. Still no Jane. My mind started to race. Whom did I contact first—the British Consulate or the Canadian Consulate—and how long did I have to wait before I started panicking? Not much longer. I once read that twelve people are murdered in New York City each day. Surely a good portion of those are Scottish cardiologists. Would the NYPD think that I had killed her? Would I spend the rest of my miserable life rotting in an American prison? Oh, dear God.

  “Hi, Glen.” She had wandered off to take a photograph.

  Feeling the need for a sense of perspective, we got in line for the greatest view of NYC—the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. It was early on a chilly Sunday morning in March. Surely if there were any line up at all, it would be a short one. Here is my advice—unless you really, really want to see New York from 1,000 feet up, spend the $13 on a round of coffees for your friends. Folks will be in line for the Empire State Building long after you have finished your drinks. But of course no one was polite enough to tell us that. We started off with an escalator ride from the ground floor to the basement, generously described as “the concourse.” The building’s management had clearly stumbled on a very good deal on ugly yellow paint. Unlike the building’s elegant lobby, rich in marble, the basement had been decorated in Early Demolition. We cowered in a long line beneath ductwork, naked light bulbs, and bare-ended wiring. There were missing acoustic tiles, and, although I’m not certain, I think I saw asbestos insulation. All of this was just while lining up to buy tickets, and it snaked back and forth like a bank queue on heroin. Hawkers tried to sell us NY City Passes, NY Skyrides, and Tony’s New York Stories, in all possible combinations and permutations. My camera, still glowing from our time in Washington, was x-rayed again.

  Having purchased our tickets, we got in another snaking line in a basement hallway with poor lighting. After thirty-five minutes, we took an escalator past the elegantly appointed ground floor to another line in another grotty hallway. This was the queue to have our tickets taken, which led to another line to have our gear x-rayed again. We were finally allowed to board an elevator to the eightieth floor, where we lined up to be photographed in front of a picture of the Empire State Building. This left us in one more line, this time for the elevator to the observation deck. An assortment of audio tours were hawked again. “Last chance!” A hot dog stand or a coffee kiosk would have gone over much better at this point.

  We thrust ourselves back out into the daylight, eighty-six floors up, to confront a view like no other: the ultimate array of endless architectural erections, home to millions of people who lived, played, loved, and died below us. I looked deep inside myself, and then out over the city, for inspiration, wondering what would make people pay $13 and stand in line for so long to see it. If it were an eighty-six-story view down on the grand creation of virgin Brazilian rain forest, I’m not sure that it would have been as popular as the Empire State Building. Could it be that this was one of the world’s best views of what humankind is driven to create by urges that we cannot fully understand?

  Being a little less philosophical, and a little more task-oriented, it occurred to me that a good chunk of all the Labrador Ducks on my quest had been shot within the panorama before me. Indeed, the very reason that Labrador Ducks went extinct may have been staring at me. It seems completely unlikely that my ducks had become extinct because they were harvested at an unsustainable rate. It seems a lot more likely that their numbers had spiraled down because of the increasing number of inhabitants of the eastern American seaboard in the 1800s. All of those people, making all of that sewage, all of it going untreated into the ocean, exactly where the Labrador Duck was spending the winter. For millennia, they had passed the nonbreeding season feeding on mussels in the shallow waters just off the American East Coast, but then the human population exploded. I contend that my ducks were polluted into oblivion.

  Back at street level Jane and I separated. She was interested in opportunities in the immediate vicinity, including art galleries and the like. I had an appointment with an intersection nearer the south end of Manhattan. The sun did its best to shine on me by peeping between skyscrapers along the Avenue of the Americas. En route, I met Shopping Cart Man, who stood in the middle of the avenue shouting, “Either you’re a Republican, and you’re for America, or you’re a Democrat, and you’re against America. You can’t go on dreaming anymore, Democrats!” Other than drivers who swerved to narrowly avoid hitting Shopping Cart Man, I was the only one to pay him any attention at all. Approaching Washington Park, I spotted Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon. She was reading the apartment vacancy ads in a free community newspaper while waiting for a bus. She was speaking Spanish. To herself. At least I think it was Yoko Ono.

  In the 1800s, Mr. John G. Bell operated a taxidermy shop at the intersection of Broadway and Worth. Quite the destination in its day, Bell counted John James Audubon and Teddy Roosevelt among his patrons. Not surprisingly, given the location and Bell’s profession, several Labrador Ducks are known to have passed through his hands, including the beautiful drake at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and several fine examples that I was scheduled to see the next day.

  Broadway and Worth may have been an interesting place in its day, but nowadays it ranks as one of the three ugliest intersections in North America. On the southwest corner stands the Steps Clothing Company (EVERY ITEM $10), and a Japanese-Chinese restaurant. On the northwest corner is a Strawberry Clothing store and a B’way Best Gourmet Farm. It isn’t really a farm. On the northeast corner are a thirteen-floor apartment block and the Independence Community Bank, featuring gargoyles with bat wings. None of these buildings has any apparent redeeming features, but each is a gothic cathedral compared to what stands in the southeast corner. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building occupies an entire city block, and does so without grace. Forty-four stories by my count, it did as little to satisfy my soul as alcohol-free beer. This is one of the ugliest buildings in the world, so I just had to take a photograph.

  This was a mistake. I walked closer and closer to the building across its courtyard, which was deserted on this Sunday afternoon, trying to get a
camera angle looking almost straight up that would show most of the building’s magnificent homeliness. And then, just before clicking the shutter release, I heard shouting. Although at a distance, this was shouting at its best. I looked around and spotted a security guard, wildly gesturing and shouting. Since there was no one else in view, I assumed that he was gesturing and shouting at me. He motioned me over to his kiosk; if I was going to cause trouble, he wanted to be close to a telephone.

  Up close, his dull face was in a state of extreme agitation; clearly he wanted me to speak first. “Good afternoon,” I said using a British-tinged Canadian accent. “Can I help you?” It sounded like a pretty disarming thing to say. He explained that the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building was a Federal Building, and that taking photographs of a Federal Building was against the law, and therefore I was in Big, BIG Trouble. “So what do you think you’re doin’?” he asked. Well, at that point I was thinking fast. Recognizing a dim-witted bully when I saw one, I also recognized that in an era of American paranoia, I might be in some actual trouble. At the very least, I might have my camera confiscated, and with a couple of dozen photographs of Philadelphia ducks on the film inside, I didn’t want to lose it.

  And so I decided to tell this fellow my story in mind-numbing detail. He heard about Labrador Ducks, about John G. Bell, about nineteenth-century taxidermy, American natural history museums, about the talks that I give to interested groups, and about how these talks were illustrated by photographs I took along the way. He also heard that I hadn’t actually taken a photograph of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building; he had interrupted me just before I had tripped the shutter.

  “I saw you takin’ pictures. I saw you. You are in Big, Big Trouble. Big, BIG Trouble.” So I played the trump card he hadn’t expected. I pulled out my Canadian passport, and said, “Here. Look at this.” I suspected that if he had taken my passport, or written down any details about who I was or what I was doing, he would be forced to spend the rest of his Sunday afternoon filling out an incident report. It worked. “I don’ wanna see that! I don’ wanna see that!” he said. After telling me twice more what Big, BIG Trouble I was in, he sent me on my way. Later investigation on the Internet made it abundantly clear that taking a photograph of an American federal building is/is not against the law. Take your pick.

  IF THERE WAS to be one really big day in my Labrador Duck quest, this would be it. After dashing hither and yon for years, measuring one specimen in Belgium, a pair in Austria, and a pair in the Netherlands, I was now poised to tick off a stunning eight Labrador Ducks in one building. This would be three birthdays and two Christmases rolled into one.

  Surely there is no one in New York who doesn’t know where the American Museum of Natural History is situated, even if they have never been inside. With a postal address like Central Park West at Seventy-ninth Street, the city block on the Upper West Side occupied by the museum must be among the most valuable chunks of real estate in the world. Unlike the foreboding Academy in Philadelphia, the monolithic AMNH is set back from the street and built of a light stone that fairly screams, “Come in! Fun stuff is happening inside these walls!”

  Shannon Kennedy, a scientific assistant in the Department of Ornithology, led us to the deepest inner sanctum of the museum’s research collection, where its most precious specimens are kept. Shortly afterward we were joined by Collections Manager Paul Sweet. He assured me that all of the institution’s Labrador Ducks would be made available to me, even the four on public display. He seemed like the sort of fellow you would want backing you up if you were trying to capture a rattlesnake. Sweet was endlessly polite to Jane and me, making him a good guy in my books. As I settled in to work on the Labrador Duck study skins, Jane disappeared back into the maw of New York City.

  Labrador Ducks 40, 41, 42, and 43

  I poked and prodded and snapped photos. If the AMNH had just these four ducks, it would easily be the best collection in the world. They were simple, mute representatives of their kind. A study skin, specimen 45802 shows the combination of gray breast and belly and white throat and upper neck that mark the immature male. He is unique in having tags attached to both feet, and a third tag attached to his bill by a bit of string. It is a beautiful representation of the preparator’s art. Almost as beautiful is specimen 45803, an adult male study skin. I found him a little greasy around his eyes and on his right wing, but otherwise perfect, with immaculate white feathers. The second adult male study skin, specimen 734023, was stuffed a little full for my liking, particularly on the forehead, making it seem that he was suffering from some disfiguring brain condition. The specimen was heavier that I would have expected, and I wondered what he might have been stuffed with, if not the usual cotton batting. The final study skin, number 45802, has been described in most publications as a female, although the white feathers of the throat and the uniform gray belly tell me that it is very likely an immature male. The region around his cloaca is a bit mucky, and his bill has a couple of small holes, attributable to the shotgun pellets that brought him to an end. Otherwise, like the three specimens before him, he is spectacular. I was grateful that no one had given into temptation and obscured details of the bills and feet by painting them.

  When I finished, Sweet was still waiting to hear from a representative of the exhibitions staff who could open up the Labrador Duck display, so I headed off to the library. I wasn’t worried. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t worried. Sweet knew what he was doing, right?

  Wading through the museum’s 1889–1890 annual report, I found reference to a promise of construction of the Labrador Duck diorama by Jenness Richardson of the Taxidermic Department. In the 1890–1891 report, Richardson proudly reported that the Labrador Duck display had been completed. When he bragged once again about completion of the Labrador Duck display in the 1891–1892 report, I began to suspect that the taxidermic department didn’t have enough to brag about. The 1890–1891 report also contained an interesting description of work that had been going on in the mammal exhibition. It seems that a great Indian rhinoceros named Bombay had died, and the Taxidermic Department had set about to stuff him. The first step was to remove his skin, which weighed 750 pounds. The skin was then placed in an antiseptic solution for four years to preserve it. Two men then worked for two months to scrape away at the inside of the skin to reduce it to a thickness of a fifth of an inch. This was then mounted on a wooden framework. So, no matter how bad your job gets, remember that your boss hasn’t asked you to spend two months scraping the inside of a rhinoceros hide.

  Labrador Ducks 44, 45, 46, and 47

  At 3 p.m., Sweet came into the library and announced in a loud voice, “We’re in!” We dashed to the Chapman Memorial Hall of North American Birds, where a member of the exhibition department had removed the sheet of glass from the front of the Labrador Duck display. The display is an attractive one, meant to represent a winter scene at the margin of Long Island, with one duck swimming and the remainder sitting or standing on the shoreline. The group contained an adult male, two immature males, and one female. Except where a sheet of glass was used to represent water, the base of the display is covered in artificial snow. As I prepared to stick my face and arms in to measure the ducks where they sat, Sweet wondered if it were possible to pull them out of the display where they had resided for the past 115 years. He grabbed the adult male mounted in a swimming position, and POP! Out it came. He handed it to me while he went in search of a cart that could hold all of the ducks. The fellow from the display department went in search of a card to place in the display, explaining that the specimens had been temporarily removed for research purposes. So there I stood, in the public galleries, with a stuffed Labrador Duck in my left hand and a little innocent mischief in my heart.

  In 2002, Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, was general manager of the Canadian men’s team at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Before the games began, Gretzky convinced the arena’s ice makers to embed a Canadian on
e-dollar coin under the spot that marked center ice. The Canadian women went on to win gold. After the men managed the same feat a few days later, Gretzky went to center ice and dug up the coin. The coin now resides in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

  So, standing in front of the world’s greatest public exhibition of Labrador Ducks, I wondered if I could pull off a similar stunt. I reached into my pocket in search of a Canadian one-dollar coin. I didn’t have one, but I did find a Canadian dime. It would have to do. Looking around to make sure that no one was watching, I inserted the dime under the artificial snow and smoothed it over, leaving no trace of my naughtiness—except now that I have confessed my actions in a book.

  When Sweet returned with the cart, we took the ducks back to the rare birds room, where I made an examination in world-record time. If I had been working at my leisure, the whole thing could easily have taken four hours. I managed to work through them in ninety minutes, so everyone could leave work on time. My task was a bit easier, because the bills and feet of all the ducks in the display had been painted in exactly the same way. It wasn’t pretty. The distal half of the bills of each had been painted jet black. A thin line of baby blue paint had been painted along the midline of each bill. The remainder of each had been painted bright orange, except for two of the specimens with lime green paint in their nostrils. I snapped a photo of the group on the cart and, removed from the context of their artistically prepared display, they looked to be sharing a narcotic frenzy.

  After years and years of digging through old literature, discarding rumors, and following hunches, I am now in a position to provide you with a brief history of every Labrador Duck that has ever been through the doors of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.