The Curse of the Labrador Duck Read online

  The Curse of the Labrador Duck

  My Obsessive Quest to the Edge of Extinction

  Glen Chilton

  This book is dedicated to Kathleen Chilton—a woman who loves life, has no regrets, and knows how to laugh.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One John James Audubon in the Land That God Forgot

  Chapter Two Scotland in a Day

  Chapter Three Old Friends and Older Ducks

  Chapter Four Walter Gets Blackmailed

  Chapter Five A Swelling in My Socks

  Chapter Six The Invasion of Germany by Vandals

  Chapter Seven Into the Mouth of the Tourism Dragon

  Chapter Eight A Traveler’s Guide to the Smells of East Coast Canada

  Chapter Nine Garage Sales and Other Lies

  Chapter Ten Star-Crossed Ducks

  Chapter Eleven Enduring Images of Germany

  Chapter Twelve A Black-and-White Duck in a Colorless Land

  Chapter Thirteen Echoes of Once-Great Voices

  Chapter Fourteen Death in a Viennese Sewer

  Chapter Fifteen Backpacking Through Gotham City

  Chapter Sixteen The Beano Goes to Russia

  Chapter Seventeen The Curse of the Labrador Duck

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I was a nervous and obsessive child. They say that some children suck their thumbs while still in the womb; I spent those nine months chewing my fingernails. Ten minutes after I learned to tell time, I became a habitual clock watcher. I owned the biggest dictionary in the fifth grade. As a nervous and obsessive child, part of my job was to collect things. I collected NHL hockey cards and British postage stamps and Batman comic books and balsa wood gliders and buttons with funny sayings and, well, you get the idea.

  At that time, Brooke Bond Foods Limited, makers of Red Rose tea and Blue Ribbon coffee, took to including small trading cards in their packages. The cards were designed for children, and the sales strategy might have been to get us hooked on caffeine early on. Each year’s cards had a different theme. The 1969 theme was “The Space Age,” and 1971 was “Exploring the Oceans.” Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau were very big at the time. Given my family’s British heritage, it isn’t surprising that we went through a swimming pool of tea each month, and so each year I managed to get most of the cards in each set of forty-eight. Any that were missing at year’s end could be purchased for two cents apiece and pasted into a twenty-four-cent collector’s album.

  The 1970 theme was “North American Wildlife in Danger.” This was a pretty heavy topic for young children, particularly when they were already so jittery from all that coffee and tea. The late, great Roger Tory Peterson wrote the text for the cards and album that year, and he didn’t ease up on the doom-and-gloom message: “There is a finality to extinction; it is the end of the line for creatures that have taken millions of years to evolve.” Give me a break! I’m only ten years old, for crying out loud! Can I get a little more sugar in this tea?

  Peterson wrote that “Cards 1 to 4 show birds now extinct; we shall never see them alive again.” Cards 2 and 3 were the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon, which most game show contestants could pick as the correct answer to a question about extinction. Card 4 was the Carolina Parakeet. You never hear much about that species, probably because humans feel collectively guilty about exterminating something so darned cute.

  Occupying the prestigious position of trading card number 1 that year was the extinct Labrador Duck, with a portrait painted by Charles L. Ripper. The picture shows a handsome black-and-white male duck with brown eyes and a yellow bill, standing on one leg on a rock covered in lichen and bird droppings. His head is mainly white, but for a black stripe down the middle of his crown. Black feathers on his body are interrupted by white patches on his chest and wings. Ripper didn’t include a depiction of a female Labrador Duck on the tea card, partly because the hen’s mottled gray and brown plumage makes it look like any other female duck, and partly because he had only enough room to feature one bird. Ripper rendered the drake with its head drawn back on its shoulders, completely relaxed, and completely oblivious to the fact that he and all of his friends are about to be smacked in the face by the “finality of extinction.”

  After seventeen years of issuing cards about trees and flowers and ships and famous people, Brooke Bond Foods finally twigged that adults didn’t collect little cardboard rectangles, and that children weren’t supposed to drink coffee and tea. They replaced the collectors’ cards with miniature porcelain figurines of animals. But that tiny little cardboard rectangle with the picture of the doomed Labrador Duck that went extinct eighty-three years before I was born made a big impression on me.

  Just as chicken follows chickadee, and swallow follows sparrow, an adult life committed to the study of birds followed my childish obsessions. At the University of Manitoba I started by studying undergraduate zoology, and finished with a master’s degree for my research on the foraging behavior of seabirds. The University of Calgary granted me a Ph.D. for my work on the way female sparrows respond to the songs of males. Mixed in with my studies were thousands of hours in the laboratory and in the lecture hall, teaching keen young minds about anatomy and physiology, botany and histology, ecology and conservation. My passion for biology made me a popular lecturer; a student once described me as having “dangerous levels of enthusiasm.” My fastidious attention to detail brought people to my research presentations at ornithological conferences.

  And then, one day, I found myself all grown up, with credentials, a proper job, and an impressive title, but not one bit less obsessive than I had been as a child. The only difference is that adults have better outlets for their obsessions. And so, twenty-five years after collecting the tea card with a picture of the extinct Labrador Duck, I began research for a comprehensive account of that species for the Birds of North America series.

  BUT THE LINK between my childhood experiences and my ornithological research decades later was not as direct as all that. Somewhere in my basement I still have the tea cards, and I did write the species account of the Labrador Duck, but the two are unrelated. I can blame Brooke Bond Foods Limited for a forty-year addiction to caffeine, but I had long since forgotten about the card collection by the time I came to write about the Labrador Duck.

  The truth is, I wrote the Labrador Duck species account for reasons altogether more practical. As one of the authors on the species account of the White-crowned Sparrow, the editors offered to give me the whole series for free if I wrote a second account. I certainly couldn’t afford to buy the whole series, so the word free sounded pretty appealing. Since the White-crowned Sparrow account was just about the longest account in the series, I felt that things would more or less balance out if I chose a species about which virtually nothing was known. What better choice than a bird that went extinct almost before anyone noticed that it was alive? How long could it take to write the shortest account in the series?

  When you start off as a nervous and obsessive child, you are likely to grow up to be a nervous and obsessive adult. I might have simply scribbled down all of the obvious facts about the Labrador Duck and dashed them off to the series’ editors. Instead I set myself the tasks of ferreting out every detail ever known and accounting for every stuffed specimen, every bone, and every egg of every Labrador Duck in the world. After that, I figured that I would discover a previously unknown color wedged in the spectrum somewhere between yellow and orange, and go on to reunite baseball’s American League and Natio
nal League. Maybe after that I could tackle an international treaty banning cheese in a tube.

  As I worked on the account, the stories surrounding Labrador Ducks became more and more bizarre, and I became more and more concerned about getting it all correct. Even after the species account was published in 1995, I continued to go after the incomplete stories. My wife, Lisa, began to describe my behavior as being that of a dog with a bone; it didn’t seem like a compliment. I told my friends strange tales of stuffed Labrador Ducks. “You should write a book,” they said, perhaps to shut me up. But surely someone as dangerously obsessed as I am can only write a book about an impossible task. And so I embarked on an adventure to examine and measure every stuffed Labrador Duck specimen, no matter where it was, without exception. I was determined to see where the ducks nested (Labrador would be a good start) and where they wintered (the shallow waters around New York City). Not allowing myself to stop for a breath, I would examine every Labrador Duck egg in every museum, and visit every spot on the planet where the ducks were known to have been shot. This book is about Labrador Ducks, but it is also a story of wartime atrocities, smuggling, bastard children, the richest man in the British Empire, and America’s richest murderer.

  Just because I am nervous and obsessive doesn’t mean that I am nuts. When I say that I set out to visit every place on Earth with some tie to Labrador Ducks, I was willing to make a few reasonable exceptions. For instance, in 1986, Redonda released a five-dollar postage stamp with an image of a Labrador Duck on it. I had no intention of going to Redonda, particularly since it is an island in the eastern Caribbean with a total area of just under half a square mile. Redonda is not world-renowned for its five-star hotels and locally brewed beer; it is completely uninhabited.

  I was also in no hurry to travel to the community of Brooksville, Florida. I have absolutely no doubt that Mayor David Pugh, Vice-Mayor Frankie Burnett, and the other 7,262 residents of Brooksville are warm and decent human beings. Even so, I did not feel compelled to make the journey there just because a town planner named a street Labrador Duck Road. If you feel the need, take Sunshine Grove Road north, turn left on Hexam Road, and you will find Labrador Duck Road on your right, just after Jenny Wren Road. If you find yourself at Mountain Mockingbird Road, you have gone too far.

  Despite my failure to travel to Redonda and Brooksville, my quest required me to travel 72,018 miles on airplanes, 5,461 miles on trains, 1,565 miles in private automobiles and a further 1,843 miles in rental cars, and 158 miles in taxis. Add to that 43 miles on ferries, and 1,169 miles on buses, and it adds up to a whacking great 82,257 miles, or 3.3 times around the planet at the equator. As far as I could tell at the start of my adventure, there were 54 Labrador Ducks for me to see. Presumably they would all fit on a midsize kitchen table. I suppose you could jump to the end of the book to see how close I got to seeing absolutely every one, but please don’t. That would ruin the punch line.

  Chapter One

  John James Audubon in the Land That God Forgot

  Here is some advice in case you ever decide to chuck your job in order to study birds. If you are going to be an ornithologist, choose a spot that is both exotic and remote. That way, even though you will be penniless, you can at least tell yourself that you are enjoying penury with a good view. As an ornithologist working in the wilder parts of the world, you will also have a reasonably good chance of dying in the jaws of a big scary animal, instead of in debtors’ prison.

  I forgot these rather simple words of wisdom about ten years ago when I set out to study the songs of Puget Sound White-crowned Sparrows. This particular subspecies, found only along the west coast of North America, really loves the urban environment. For a Puget Sound White-crowned Sparrow, the only thing better for nesting than the parking lot of a mall is the parking lot of a mall with a Kmart. It will be interesting to see if the current decline of the Kmart chain of stores results in the decline of these birds along the west coast.

  On the positive side, my research in Washington State and southern British Columbia never took me more than a few hundred yards from a coffee shop. On the negative side, I faced a never-ending string of questions about the microphone and parabolic reflector I carried around. Apparently a lot of people have never seen one of these large plastic contraptions, and felt that it must be some sort of gun and blast-shield combo. In my travels in and around Vancouver and Seattle, I got to explain myself to a number of very concerned police officers, and in Sooke, B.C., used my library card as identification to keep me out of jail.

  At about six o’clock one Sunday morning, while recording sparrows in a small community along the coast of northern Washington, a fellow came rushing out of his house, making a beeline for me. He looked rather impatient, and perhaps just a little ticked off.

  “Thank God you’re finally here!” he said.

  How often does life give you a straight line like that one? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I got here as fast as I could.”

  Now, the problem with a really good line like that is that you need some sort of follow-up. I didn’t have one, and so had to admit that I had no idea what he was going on about, and that my microphone and I were just trying to record the songs of birds in and around his neighborhood. With a really disappointed look about him, he explained that he was a shortwave radio buff. He thought that I was with whatever branch of the American government deals with complaints by people whose shortwave radios had been messed up by newly erected cellular telephone towers. He pointed out the offending tower on a hillside across from his house. You really have to admire his faith that the government would send out a special agent to look into radio-wave complaints that early on a Sunday morning.

  A good chunk of my research on songbirds considers cultural evolution—the changes that have occurred in their songs since someone else first recorded them. I generally travel to spots that my more senior colleagues visited some decades before. As a result, I always have a nagging feeling that I am somehow late but doing my best to get there as fast as I can. That feeling swept over me on the tenth of August, 2000, when across the continent from my work on the West Coast, the ferry MV Apollo took me from the community of St. Barbe on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, 22 miles across the Strait of Belle Isle toward Blanc Sablon, on the border between Quebec and Labrador. One hundred and sixty-seven years and thirteen days late, my wife, Lisa, and I were traveling as fast as our ferry could manage, hot on the heels of the artist and nature enthusiast John James Audubon. We were looking for a particular hillside in the tiny coastal community of Blanc Sablon, the only reasonably certain breeding site of the extinct Labrador Duck.

  Although the breeding grounds of the Labrador Duck remain a mystery, it was known to have migrated through the Canadian maritime provinces and New England en route to its wintering grounds along the Atlantic coast.

  IN MORE THAN a few ways, Canada’s newest province shows disturbing signs of indecisiveness. For instance, the geographical limits of the region have shifted repeatedly in the past few hundred years. At one time, the name Labrador was used to describe honking great bits of the North, including tracts of land that now belong to Greenland and the United States. After a bit of swelling and hemorrhaging, the boundaries seem to have settled down a bit. In the 1940s, as it became increasingly apparent that Newfoundland should move on from its status as a British colony, those in favor of joining Canada as a province narrowly outvoted the group claiming that American statehood was the only way to go. As further evidence of the province’s split personality, when it came time to decide which time zone the province should be in, no one could decide whether they should share a clock with Greenland or the rest of Atlantic Canada. In the end, they split the difference, leaving Newfoundland thirty minutes out of sync with the rest of the world. (Others have said that the province is something like thirty years out of sync.) Until recently, the province was known simply as Newfoundland, after the more or less triangular island that is home to the better chunk of th
e populace. This was rather strange, as the province has a second half, also roughly triangular. The more sparsely populated “Labrador” bit is attached to the province of Quebec on the mainland. In a show of uncustomary unanimity, the region now goes by the rather unwieldy name of The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

  When the explorer Jacques Cartier first got a good look at the coast of Labrador in 1534, he described the place in less than glowing terms. In fact, he was downright insulting. Having stopped at spots all along the Strait of Belle Isle, separating insular Newfoundland from mainland Labrador, he claimed that the area was nothing more than “stones and rocks, frightful and rough…for in all the coasts of the north I did not see a cartload of earth.” If that wasn’t mean-spirited enough, he went on to describe the area as “the land that God gave to Cain.” Other authorities claim that Cartier described the region as “the land that God forgot.” After being bitten by a few thousand blackflies, he may have felt the need to insult the region with both descriptions. I have it on good authority that the Christian Bible doesn’t contain any reference to God’s forgetting a plot of land, but Cartier clearly felt the region was lacking in certain creature comforts, and only a biblical reference would serve to describe his irritation, even if he had to make one up. Insect repellant might have gone a long way toward cheering Cartier up, because whatever else He may have forgotten, God certainly remembered to provide the area with lots of biting flies.

  Fast-forward 299 years. Audubon, now forty-eight years of age, was no stranger to a little indecision and deception himself. He was not above misleading people about his country of birth, his lineage, and even his real name. I suspect that he felt the need to get away from his creditors for a while, having long since given up all hope of a real income in order to study and paint birds. Writing about Audubon’s journeys of this sort, biographer Ben Forkner wrote: “He had failed in every business venture he had undertaken. He was leaving behind not only his wife and sons until he could support them, but also a twisted trail of doubts and debts.” Of course, when I say that it was Audubon’s goal to “study and paint” birds in Labrador, I mean that he planned to shoot a lot of birds, bring their corpses back to camp, stick wires up their bums to hold them in place, twist them into postures they never could have attained in life, and then paint them. You don’t have to look at many Audubon paintings to get a sense of what I mean.