The Curse of the Labrador Duck Read online

  And so Audubon’s daily journal explicitly claims that he and his party did not find Labrador Duck nests in Blanc Sablon, but his narrative that accompanies his painting claims that they did. Which are you supposed to believe? Sadly, I am forced to conclude that neither Audubon nor his son ever saw a Labrador Duck nest, and in writing the account to accompany his painting of the duck, he relied on his memory rather than his field notes. This is a lot more polite than saying he made the whole damned thing up.

  LIKE ME, AUDUBON appears to have had a special affinity for White-crowned Sparrows. While in Labrador, he described them as “tolerably abundant,” with a “sonorous note reaching the ear ever and anon.” However, when it came to killing them, Audubon and his party were heartless recidivists. His Labrador journal tells us that they shot White-crowned Sparrows on June 24, 26, 29, July 2, 6, 15, 16, 17…you get the idea. Trust me—every White-crowned Sparrow looks pretty much like every other White-crowned Sparrow. If Audubon needed to paint a representative of the species, one corpse would have done.

  By the time Audubon left Labrador, his opinion of the region wasn’t much better than Jacques Cartier’s. He wrote: “Seldom in my life have I left a country with as little regret as I do this.” I suppose you can only contribute so much blood to the local insects, and turn so much of your partially digested lunch overboard in rough seas before you come to really hate a place. However, I don’t think blackflies and rolling seas were the worst things about Labrador for Audubon. His journal contains one description after another of the rape of the land by men from far and wide. He describes seabirds being killed in the hundreds and cut up for fishing bait, and 40,000 seabird eggs being collected for market by a party of just four men. He was clearly very concerned about the future of the region: “Labrador must shortly be de-peopled, not only of aboriginal man, but of all else having life, owing to man’s cupidity. When no more fish, no more game, no more birds exist on her hills, along her coasts, and in her rivers, then she will be abandoned and deserted like a worn-out field.”

  As Lisa and I were preparing to leave the Blessed Virgin on Audubon’s hillside in Blanc Sablon, we spotted a male White-crowned Sparrow. It being August, his breeding season was over, and he was foraging frantically, trying to fatten up before starting his migration south. And then my little bird did something unexpected for that time of year. He sang. He gave us just one song, and then fell silent. I felt as though he were saying, “Good-bye, and thanks for coming.”

  At that point, I wish that I could have been in contact with Audubon’s spirit, just to give him an update on Labrador. The harvest of wildlife continues, but with a far greater sense of our responsibility. The human population of Labrador is gradually dwindling, but the remaining people show no evidence of a mass exodus. Just four decades after Audubon’s visit, the Labrador Duck earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first species of bird endemic to North America to be driven to extinction. The last individual collected in Canada was shot in 1871. The very last bird that we know of was taken off Long Island in 1875. However, most of the plant and animal species seen by Audubon in Labrador are still there. I don’t think that God has forgotten about Labrador. He probably just expects us to take better care of it.

  Audubon and his party hadn’t found Labrador Duck nests, but someone, somewhere, must have, because I was off to see some eggs.

  Chapter Two

  Scotland in a Day

  Having had no success with Labrador Duck nests, I decided to try searching for their eggs. There certainly weren’t going to be a lot of them to examine in the world’s museums. Indeed, the actual number might be as not-very-high as nine, or as really-blessedly-low as none whatsoever. The trouble here is that, while you can look at a stuffed bird and say “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” a Labrador Duck, one duck egg looks pretty much like any other duck egg. They are more or less round in cross-section, sort of oval in the other plane, a bit more pointy at one end, and rather more blunt at the other. When you come right down to it, eggs are egg-shaped.

  The reason I say the number of remaining Labrador Duck eggs might be as few as none whatsoever is that all nine purported eggs were collected before the scientific fanaticism for scrupulous record keeping was established. An egg may even have the words Labrador Duck printed on the side, but that is no guarantee that the collector wasn’t referring to a breed of domestic duck known by that name 150 years ago. Luckily, we live in an age full of nifty scientific techniques, including the ability to analyze very small bits of genetic material. Such scientific wizardry will usually give us an answer we can rely on. And so I set out to visit each one of the nine eggs with some claim to being produced by a Labrador Duck, and then to use genetic trickery to find out one way or the other.

  Keep in mind that when I say I wanted to examine eggs, I mean that I wanted to see the shells of the eggs. An intact egg, left on a kitchen counter top, will eventually rot and explode. This leaves a gucky mess that no one really wants in an otherwise orderly and odor-free collection of natural history artifacts. And so the collector must make one or two small holes in the shell through which the yolk and the white can be blown out.

  If you think back to your last efforts to make an omelet, you might remember that some thin membranes remained behind, attached to the shell, after you dropped the contents into a mixing bowl. These membranes were deposited around the yolk and white by the hen’s reproductive tract before she started to produce the shell. These membranes contain cells produced by the hen, and therefore also contain genetic material. Hopefully the genetic material has remained sufficiently intact to figure out which species of bird produced it.

  MICHAEL WALTERS MUST get a lot of invitations to play Father Christmas at children’s parties. He has a beautiful white beard, a florid complexion, and a Santa-like physique, and when I first met him he was keeping his trousers up with bright red suspenders. The advertising executives at Coca-Cola might have had Walters in mind when they created their image of Santa Claus.

  For the other eleven months of the year, Walters was curator of the largest bird egg collection in the world at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England, a position he has held since 1970. According to Walters, the museum’s collection contains between 1 million and 2 million eggs, but he hasn’t yet got around to counting them. This is a man who clearly loves eggs and his job caring for them.

  Walters and I, some years earlier, began a correspondence concerning the eggs in his care that may, or may not, be the products of Labrador Ducks. He sent me the known history for three of his eggs. To me, the details of two eggs looked very similar, and after double-checking, Walters found that the Tring collection had only two possible Labrador Duck eggs, not three. When you are in charge of a couple of million eggs, this falls within an understandable margin of error.

  The history of the museum’s first Labrador Duck egg is reasonably straightforward. It was one of many specimens in a large collection purchased in 1889 by Lord Rothschild from someone named Count Roedern. Where the count got the egg, how much Lord Rothschild paid him to part with it, and whom Roedern had to bribe to get the title “Count” are details lost to history. The egg is a pale olive-buff color, and has Canard Labrador, inscribed in ink, and Labrador 8 Juin, in pencil. It has been in Tring ever since. The egg is known by the rather uninspiring number 1962.1.559. Walters measured it at 61.8 mm by 44.1 mm, and described it to me as very pale grayish-cream in color, smooth and glossy, and slightly soapy.

  In the 1800s, when British financiers wanted to conduct trade in the Far East, the most appealing sea route was the Northwest Passage across the top of North America. The fact that no such passage had been found didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of those who believed that such a route must exist, and there seemed to be no shortage of brave men willing to spend several years of their lives attempting to find it.

  The most incredibly ill fated of these expeditions was commanded by Sir John Franklin, who tried once in 1818, and again in 1825.
Too tenacious to give up, or perhaps too stupid to know when to quit, he tried again in 1845. This time he was generously equipped with two ships and a complement of 138 seamen. Of those, 33 perished during the first three horrible winters in Canada’s frozen north; Franklin was one of them. For most of that period, the ships were trapped in ice. In the spring of 1848, the remaining 105 men abandoned ship and tried to walk south to safety. None of them made it.

  I suppose that no sane English seaman would be willing to sail into perilous and uncharted waters unless the British Admiralty promised to send out a search party if the expedition became stranded. Hence, over a ten-year span, more than a dozen expeditions were mounted to search for survivors of the last Franklin expedition. One of these, HMS Investigator, under the command of Robert McClure, sailed straight into the Arctic ice packs in the fall of 1850, and soon became hopelessly trapped in the ice. After several years without any contact with the outside world, in 1855, the crew of the Investigator was rescued by HMS Resolute. Investigator, on just its second voyage, was abandoned.

  Still in the 1800s, but now on the east side of the Atlantic, we find Canon H. B. Tristram amassing a huge collection of birds’ eggs. Tristram acquired most of these eggs from persons of more robust constitution than his own, including his cousin Henry Piers, assistant surgeon on the soon-to-be-abandoned Investigator. The Natural History Museum in Tring is home to the second possible Labrador Duck egg, collected by Piers during a fruitless search for the lost Franklin expedition.

  In a letter written (in the most atrocious handwriting) in 1901 (or 1907) from Torquay, Tristram related:

  I never had much confidence in the authenticity of the Labrador Duck egg. My cousin, Piers, was an officer in Captain Collinson’s (afterward Admiral Sir Richard) ship Investigator for the search after Sir J. Franklin. They were, as you may remember three years away. Piers brought me a number of arctic skins and eggs. Ivory Gull (but not its eggs) the Arctic Black Guillemot [scribble, scribble, scribble], Snow Goose, American Eider. He told me that this egg, got as they were going out their first spring, was the egg of a small black and white eider, but he got no skin of the bird. He declared when I showed him the drawing of the Labrador Duck that that was the drake of the layer of the egg…I never put the egg in the series when I had a collection for I mistrusted it. All I can say is that it came from the Arctic exploration, collected by an officer who was not a naturalist but a good skinner + taxidermist.

  I am here seeking a warm climate to get rid of bronchitis—I might as well have gone to Labrador.

  [scribble, scribble]

  H. B. Tristram

  So, if we are to believe Canon Tristram’s memory, we can assume that the egg was collected by his cousin Henry Piers in the western Arctic in the spring of 1851 and was held safely through several arduous years before being turned over to Tristram. As measured by Walters, egg number 1901.11.15.266 is 61.5 by 43.8 mm, olive green, smooth and glossy, and slightly soapy.

  Lisa and I were in England for the summer. I was studying the songs of Pied Wagtails, and she was investigating important matters of human health in the laboratories of a large pharmaceutical company. When it was time for me to examine the museum’s purported Labrador Duck eggs, nearly two years after my visit to the Audubons’ hillside in Labrador, Walters took me to a section of the museum with row upon row of tall steel cabinets. He opened one cabinet and peeked inside for a few moments. He then closed the cabinet and opened the one next to it. He then closed that one and opened another cabinet in a different row. This song and dance continued through a couple more cabinets, and I was beginning to wonder how long it was likely to go on, when a second curator pointed out to me that none of the cabinets had labels on them; this is apparently Walters’ ingenious method of foiling any would-be thief who had designs on a particularly valuable egg. All of this makes me think that Walters’ mind must be a tangled maze, something like Santa’s job of remembering which little girls and boys had been good, and which were in line for lumps of coal in their stockings. Walters eventually found the correct spot, and set me up with the two putative Labrador Duck eggs in his care. I had a good look and assessed the potential for extracting material without damaging the shell.

  Finding a person who could and would do the DNA analysis proved to be trickier than it should have. I had to make a return visit to the museum the following year to actually extract material from the eggs for DNA analysis. Walters had retired as curator of eggs, although he continued to work on at the museum in the capacity of research assistant. Assuming Walters’ role as curator was Douglas Russell. Russell seemed disoriented when I arrived at the museum’s reception desk, and I put this down to his trying to do too many things at once. Later he admitted that he had misremembered the date of my visit, and hadn’t expected me for another month. To be fair, Russell really had a lot on his plate. In addition to all of the eggs at Tring, he had taken on responsibility for all of the collected birds’ nests as well as the collection of pickled birds.

  I started with the off-white egg from the Rothschild collection, the easier of the two. This egg has just a single hole near its equator, elliptical in shape, and large enough for me to work with. Using fine dental probes, I snagged some dried goop without upsetting the egg. The shell rattled a bit when shaken, and with great care I extracted an elliptical bit of white material that was bigger than the hole, although I had no idea what it actually was.

  The green-gray egg Tristram Piers had collected in the Canadian Arctic was more of a challenge. It has two polar holes, both exceedingly small. Using magnifying lenses strapped to a headpiece, I could see that, in getting the yolk and white out, the collector had left some hairline cracks around one of the holes. Any pressure in that area would leave a great cavern, and make me very unpopular. This left me the other, very small, hole to work with. Luckily, when shaken, fluffy bits of material that looked like blown attic insulation fell out. The more I shook the egg, the more material I got. Again, without knowing exactly what the material was, I felt that it was sure to have some duck DNA in it. About ten minutes of shaking provided sufficient material, and I packed up my gear.

  My little tubes of eggshell scrapings were dashed off to Michael Sorenson at Boston University. Sorenson had been working on the DNA of birds for sufficiently long that he could provide a clear-cut answer to the question of which eggs, if any, had been produced by Labrador Ducks. Just as important, if the eggs had not been produced by Labrador Ducks, Sorenson could say exactly which duck species had laid them, greatly reducing the chance that anyone would claim he had made a technical error. The study involved the use of some pretty impressive technology—all the more impressive because I didn’t fully understand it.

  The laboratory protocol works best when the sample is fresh. It is a lot more challenging when it has been drying inside an eggshell for more than a century, but my mother always said that if a task wasn’t a challenge, it wouldn’t be fun. Sorenson added enzymes to the sample to break up cell membranes, and then he removed contaminants like protein from the precious genetic material. Whether it is a study of duck eggs or a crime scene investigation, there generally isn’t a lot of DNA to work with, so Sorenson used a technique called polymerase chain reaction to create millions of copies of segments of DNA. Then Sorenson determined the particular sequence of DNA subunits for each egg sample, allowing for a comparison with genetic material taken from the feather plucked from a stuffed Labrador Duck. It was the first time that anyone had used DNA extraction and amplification on old shells of birds to determine their identity.

  Sorenson sent me the results, and it wasn’t good news. DNA analysis of the material extracted from the egg purchased by Lord Rothschild from Count Roedern showed it to be the product of a Mallard, or one of the many ducks closely related to Mallards, including domestic ducks. Lord Rothschild didn’t get his money’s worth on that go-around.

  Analysis of the material taken from the egg brought back from the Canadian high Arctic by int
repid assistant surgeon Henry Piers showed it to be the product of a Common Eider. Certainly a black-and-white seaduck, but not a Labrador Duck. Two eggs down, seven to go.

  IN 1977, MICHAEL Walters received a letter from Mr. Sean O’Connell of Falkirk, Scotland. Writing on March 5, O’Connell explained that he had a collection of bird eggs, including one with the words “Labrador Duck,” “Calton,” and the initials “H.S.” written on it. The egg was 27/16 inches by 13/4 inches and grayish white in color. The eggs had come to O’Connell fifteen years earlier as part of a big collection from a ninety-year-old gentleman whose own father had been a collector. Many of these eggs had been collected in the mid-nineteenth century. O’Connell asked if any conclusion about the validity of the egg could be drawn based on a comparison of the size of the eggs to the size of a stuffed Labrador Duck, or if the ink on the eggshell could be dated to the mid-nineteenth century. Could Calton be the name of a lake, river, or village in Canada? asked O’Connell.

  Walters responded to O’Connell’s letter on March 10, explaining that the egg could very well be the product of a Labrador Duck, but that techniques did not exist to support or deny this. Walters went on to describe an additional six Labrador Duck eggs in Dresden, speculating that they had probably been destroyed in World War II. He continued in the most gentlemanly way to suggest that “anything as rare as that ought really to be in an institution rather than in private hands,” and explained that the egg would be gratefully accepted by either the Natural History Museum or the Royal Scottish Museum.

  After waiting very patiently for seven years for a response, Walters wrote to O’Connell again, asking if he had made any progress in establishing the identity of the egg. He went on to suggest that the egg could be sent for examination to the Natural History Museum by post, if packed in a biscuit tin with plenty of cotton wool. Not altogether surprising after seven years of silence, this letter got no response, and Walters made no further attempt to contact O’Connell. With nothing but the three photocopied letters in hand, like a dog with a bone, I set out to find O’Connell and his egg.