The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  McLaughlin gave me an impressively long list of famous Elmira alumni, which included, not surprisingly, Mark Twain, described as “a big tourist gig.” I heard about Ernie Davis, who in 1961 was the first black athlete to win the Heisman Trophy. Hal Roach, director of the Laurel and Hardy films, was an Elmiran, as were fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, and John W. Jones, who was involved in the escape of 860 runaway slaves via the Underground Railroad. In 1999 Elmiran Lieutenant Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. Crystal Eastman, who helped establish the American Civil Liberties Union, was also from Elmira. What a place.

  WHEN I WAS a lad, high school students in Canada were set the task of learning all of the American state capitals. More than anything, it was probably a mental exercise. After all, I have successfully navigated the last thirty years of my life without once being called on to shout out in a bar that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier, or that in North Dakota legislators flock to Bismarck. At the time, it seemed to me that a lot of American state capitals didn’t make a lot of sense. They are often teeny places in states with a vast number of citizens. For instance, New York State has about 19 million citizens. Claiming just one-half of one percent of that population as residents, Albany somehow managed to become the state capital.

  There must have been serious competition among candidates when it came time to choose each state capital. With the title comes glory. For instance, Albany can boast a major convention center, one of forty-seven campuses of the State University of New York, a new and exciting solid waste management landfill expansion project, and a truancy abatement project that has increased school attendance by 18 percent while reducing daytime juvenile crime by 13 percent. Even though it is a small community, the capital’s rich social calendar includes festivals of tulips, storytelling, dance, Iroquois art, songs, blues, food, lobster, apples, strawberry shortcake, wine, nations, Celtic, Latin, Italian, jazz, and Shaker crafts. And surely that would be enough festivity for anyone. But then you would find that Albany is also home to the New York State Museum, and the museum harbors two stuffed Labrador Ducks.

  At the museum, Jane went for a stroll while I got on with my ducks. She found that downtown Albany is a pretty sleepy place. Sleepy? Oh, come on, Jane! Albany boasts no fewer than eight farmers markets and a science fiction and fantasy fan club whose members are all gay, lesbian, or bisexual. And yet Jane found that if she had wanted a sandwich, a wedding dress, meditation crystals, or a tattoo, none were available before noon. Her only option was a coffee shop in which she read a novel.

  Late in 1958, Paul Hahn received a polite letter from the New York State Museum in response to his questionnaire about stuffed specimens of extinct birds. Written by E. M. Reilly Jr., the museum’s senior curator of zoology, the letter rambled on and on about the museum’s holdings of Carolina Parakeets, Eskimo Curlews, Passenger Pigeons, and Heath Hens. He explained that this bird had been collected at Cranberry Island in 1886, and that that one had been collected in north Saskatchewan in 1896. Reilly then stuck in a brief note about Labrador Ducks. He explained that the museum had a pair, but nothing was known about them. Pretty typical. Between them, they would increase my total by two.

  The museum’s collection of birds isn’t huge, and the Labrador Ducks are among its very best items. But even the ducks are exceeded in wow value by the Cohoes Mastodont, an immature male whose bones were unearthed in 1866. Radiocarbon dating showed that he had died 11,079 years earlier. In April. It was a Saturday. Not a particularly good Saturday from the perspective of the mastodont.

  Labrador Ducks 48 and 49

  Joe Bopp, collections manager of birds and mammals, had been with the museum for seventeen years. He was sporting short hair and a big black beard, which I suspect he used to cover up a big bubbly smile that he couldn’t have removed with a scouring pad. He sat me down in front of my next two Labrador Ducks, an adult male and a reportedly adult female, both taxidermic mounts. As mentioned, not much is known about their provenance. They were already in the State Museum when someone got around to writing reports in the late 1840s. They are thought to have been shot somewhere around Long Island, sometime around 1840. The hen, a uniform cinnamon brown with a slightly darker back than belly, was mounted very close to her base, as though trying not to be seen. Only two of her tail feathers remained. While other specimens had brown, yellow, or red glass eyes, hers were clear glass, relieved only by the black pupils. The drake was far jauntier, looking as though he were about to be fed. His eyes were gray. In both cases, a preparator had been a little too enthusiastic with the paint pot, coloring their bills with blobs and splotches of black, mustard yellow, and gray-green. Both birds stood on simple white wooden bases; the underside of his held the words “Labrador Duck male De Rhem Coll. Presented 1850,” and hers read “already in museum 1847 鞒 Labrador Duck see State Museum Report 1848.” With these specimens behind me, the end of my quest was in sight.

  BOSTON HAD BEEN really messing me around when it came to figuring out just how many stuffed Labrador Ducks remained. Across the Charles River, in Cambridge, the holdings of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology seemed pretty straightforward. According to Hahn’s list, Harvard had three ducks. The first was a female shot in Nova Scotia in 1857. The second was an adult male from the collection of someone named Thayer. The third was an adult male with no details about where he came from or when. Great. But was there another Labrador Duck lurking in Boston? No such duck was listed in Hahn’s book. I had been told by very reputable authorities that no such duck existed. Forget about it. Go for lunch. Drink a beer. Hmmm. But I had come to distrust very reputable authorities in the same way that I distrusted flamenco dancers, and I wasn’t going for a beer until I had nailed this duck down.

  In 1891, William Dutcher wrote an article about Labrador Ducks in the scholarly journal The Auk. In it he quoted Charles B. Cory, who said that the collection of the Boston Society of Natural History included an immature male Labrador Duck. Theodore Lyman had donated it to the society years before. It was thought to have been shot on the coast of New England, but no specific date or locality was available. I have already indicated that the immature male in Frankfurt had made its way from Boston via the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But a careful reading of the literature showed that the Frankfurt duck and the duck donated by Lyman were different specimens.

  I live in fear that my book will land on bookshop shelves and ten minutes later someone will discover a stuffed Labrador Duck that I hadn’t known about. In order to try to avoid the embarrassment that such a discovery would produce, in the days leading up to my American expedition, I scrambled after a fourth Labrador Duck at the Boston Society of Natural History. It didn’t help that there was no such thing as the Boston Society of Natural History.

  Or at least there wasn’t anymore. One hundred seventy-five years earlier, six Bostonians had the foresight to establish just such a society. For more than three decades the group promoted the collection and study of all things related to natural history, working out of temporary quarters until a permanent facility could be constructed in the Back Bay region. After World War II, the city negotiated a ninety-nine-year lease for land in the area now known as Science Park. The nice thing about ninety-nine-year leases is that no matter how badly you screw up on the original deal, you are guaranteed to be dead by the time it has to be renegotiated. Sort of like Hong Kong, I suppose. Along the way, Boston’s natural history group had metamorphosed into the Boston Museum of Science.

  Did the Boston Museum of Science have a Labrador Duck? Time was running out. In the nick of time an email message came in from curator Shana Hawrylchak. The museum did indeed have a stuffed Labrador Duck, she wrote. It was on public display, but if I wanted to examine it, she would be pleased to pull it out of its cabinet. What a sweet human being. She had brought the global tally of Labrador Ducks to fifty-five. One for each playing card in a deck, plus the jokers, plus the card of instructions for co
unting points in bridge.

  Amtrak dropped Jane and me at Boston’s Back Bay train station, and we took a cab to Cambridge, on the north side of the river. It was too late in the day to see much of the city but early enough for some power drinking. The hotel’s shuttle bus took us to Harvard Square, which looked a lot more like a triangle than any other geometric shape. Being St. Patrick’s Day, we expected all of the good bars to be crowded and all of the bad bars to be absolutely packed. We settled into a promising-sounding placed called the John Harvard Brewing Company, designed as an English-style pub. Clearly the architect had never been to England. Or sat in a pub. Few English pubs seat 300 patrons on high stools at long raised benches. Even fewer have stained-glass windows depicting saints. I didn’t recognize all of the saints, but I did make out the late President Richard Nixon, author Ken Kesey, hockey legend Bobby Orr, and feminist Germaine Greer.

  This was clearly a student hangout, and the saints were probably Harvard University alumni, or Harvard wannabes. While getting in the first round, I met a Harvard MBA student who admitted that he was likely to become filthy stinking rich. He also admitted that the place was usually this crowded, except on Fridays, when it was much worse. Pity the poor serving staff; my ears were ringing from the background noise. Jane and I started to wade through the long list of specialty beers. We had Frostbite Lager and Irish Red Ale and Demon Double Pale Ale and Brimstone Red. Jane took swigs from my glass without asking. She sneaked French fries off the plate of a neighboring patron each time he turned his head.

  We spied on a nervous couple at the next table who were carefully avoiding looking at each other, like a mated pair of kittiwakes nesting on a narrow cliff ledge. When we lost interest in them, we watched a tangle of four young ladies. The lady in a mushroom-colored coat, checking out the action at other tables, slowly disentangled herself from her trio of companions. Short brown jacket tried coming on to white sweater. White sweater seemed oblivious to the advance, and so brown jacket moved a lot closer. Long black leather jacket would be dead ten years before realizing that some of her college friends were lesbians.

  When we lost interest in that group, we chatted with Dustin Hoffman and Fred Flintstone, who were seated across the table from us. They were finishing off some sort of business diploma at Harvard. “When your boss tells you you’re going on an expenses-paid trip to Cambridge, you don’t say no,” Dustin explained. They correctly guessed Jane’s accent as “somewhere in Europe.” Dustin couldn’t place my accent, but his rather tipsier friend Fred got my accent as “north of the border.” When we lost interest in them, we drank more beer.

  IT WAS TO be a big day. While Jane had a little lie-in, I prepared to swoop down on Harvard and the Museum of Science to snap up four ducks. If everything went according to plan, I would increase my total of Labrador Ducks seen to fifty-three, and decrease my total of unseen ducks to two. If everything went according to plan…With duck-detection kit in hand, I set off in search of wisdom and truth.

  Random wandering brought me to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Plunked down right in the middle of the august campus, it is open to the public from 9 to 5 daily. Admission is very reasonable and anyone with Harvard I.D. is admitted free, although it seems to me that if you can afford to attend Harvard University, you can probably afford the price of admission to the museum. The research collection of animal bits and pieces goes by the rather grand name of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Louis Agassiz, a brilliant zoologist and the museum’s first director, founded the institution in 1859.

  Alison Pirie, Collections Assistant in the museum’s Department of Ornithology, met me in the museum’s lobby and took me to the zoology research collection. In the elevator to the third floor, I told Pirie how keen I was to see the collection’s three ducks. “Two ducks,” she corrected. I thought about this for a minute, and said, “I’m pretty sure you have three ducks.” “Well, yes,” was her reply. “If you count the one on display.” Oh, God, please. Not again. Please, please, please tell me that I will get to examine the duck on display. Coolly, I said, “It won’t be a problem to examine the third duck, will it, Alison?”

  I was told that the fellow with the key, Ed Hack, was just back from holiday in Hawaii, and was too busy that morning to pull the Labrador Duck from its display. “How about if I come back to the museum after lunch?” Pirie put in a call. Yes, it seemed that arrangement would be satisfactory to Hack. Sight unseen, I started to dislike Hack.

  So I settled in to work on the two ducks immediately available to me. Unlike most museum workspaces, this room was flooded with light pouring in through large arched windows. A space had been cleared for me at a bench.

  Labrador Ducks 50 and 51

  These Labrador Ducks are both study skins. They were listed as a hen and an adult drake. The female certainly seemed to be all of that, and I felt a little bad that she seemed dull to me. Nothing too very special about her; she was collected, by persons unknown, while migrating through Nova Scotia sometime around 1857. At the time of her demise she was kind of dull brown and slatey gray. Her legs, toes, and toenails are all very dark brown. One of the three tags around her legs indicated that she was “—very rare—” but that didn’t keep her from being rather dull. She had been given a little too much stuffing, but these things happen. The only peculiar thing about her was a piece of wire poking out of her forehead, just above her bill.

  The male was a bit more interesting to look at. Although listed as an adult, he clearly wasn’t. His neck ring was dark brown instead of black, and his cheeks were gray instead of white. At the time of his demise, he must have been one molt away from adulthood. His bill, unpainted, sported colors of all the most valuable woods. The records I had been provided with said that nothing was known about his history. The tags around his legs were a little more illuminating. Apparently, he had been in the collection of George Warren of Troy, New York, and was then bought by Dr. Thomas Heimstrut, also of Troy, and subsequently found his way into the collection of William Brewster before settling in at Harvard.

  Harvard University doesn’t sleep, and construction of a new building was under way next door. Workers must have been driving pilings, because about once per minute the whole museum shook. With each crash, the duck I was working on made a small leap off the desk. Being a jumpy sort of person, with each crash I made a somewhat bigger leap out of my seat. It was a bit like the scene in Jurassic Park with the steps of an approaching Tyrannosaurus making ripples in a glass of water, only worse. And with ducks.

  After lunch I set off for the underground portion of Boston’s public transit system, affectionately known as the T. I had been told that the Green Line would, if taken in the right direction, deposit me at Science Park, home of the Boston Museum of Science. Some of the route was a bit scary. Dimly lit offshoots of the main tunnels seemed to be the sorts of places where you might find a lost tribe of trolls. Construction on the line meant that I needed to take a shuttle bus to the museum.

  The people of Boston are lucky enough to have two Labrador Ducks on display. They can see an adult drake up the road at Harvard, and a younger drake at the Museum of Science. I was met at the museum by Shana Hawrylchak, Collections Intern, and Curatorial Assistant Andy Grilz. Grilz is as big as Hawrylchak is slight. In the short time I was there, Grilz gave me the impression that he took joy in everything and pleasure in the company of everyone.

  Labrador Duck 52

  Hawrylchak and Grilz pulled the young bird out of the display cabinet that it shares with an Eskimo Curlew, a Passenger Pigeon, a Heath Hen, and an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The duck is the star of that show. They set me up in a windowless workroom. Before departing, Grilz pointed out that the room had a closed-circuit televison camera. Not that he expected me to do anything wrong, but that I might want to avoid scratching myself in private places if I didn’t want to end up on the blooper reel shown at the museum’s Christmas party.

  As was claimed when the duck was first
noticed, well over a century earlier, hiding in the depths of the museum’s collection, this male had come to the end his life while still in immature plumage. He was still brown in places that were destined to be black, and gray where he might have eventually become white. Someone had tried very hard to make this a pleasant specimen, although I suspect that the taxidermist had been handed a big job. The legs and toes had been treated with some thick touch-up compound, probably to cover damage. The proximal portion of his bill was painted a color that I had never seen before. Not just on ducks; I had never seen this color before on anything. It was light orange-yellow-pink. His glass eyes are hazel. Many of the specimens I had seen had badly worn tails but nearly immaculate wing feathers. In this case, the tail and wing feathers were both frayed and a few were broken. Even so, his posture was jaunty and his heavy plaster base had been painted to look like a seaside rock, gray and green as though coated with algae. What more could a dead duck ask for?

  AND SO IT was back to the shuttle bus, and onward to the subway’s Green Line with a transfer to the Red Line, and then off at Harvard Station for my last American duck. When I called for Ed Hack at the museum’s reception desk, I expected to be met by some miserable old sod who couldn’t be bothered to help me that morning. Instead, he struck me as the smaller, quieter member of the magician duo Penn and Teller. Penn, I think. Or maybe Teller. He had the smile of someone who had dropped off all his troubles in Hawaii and didn’t mind being back at work at all. Hack had, in the interval, retrieved Harvard’s third Labrador Duck from the display cabinet that he normally shares with an assortment of extinct and endangered birds, including a Passenger Pigeon, a Whooping Crane, a Great Auk, a California Condor, and one of only nineteen extant stuffed Guadalupe Island Caracaras. The cabinet may have been long on spectacular contents, but was rather short on style. Personally, I would have thought that Harvard would want to invest in some slightly nicer displays.