The Curse of the Labrador Duck Read online

  Steve and Gina breed autos in their yard. Gina drives a tank-size 1984 Mercury, while Steve drives a living room on wheels, more commonly known as a 1988 Lincoln Town Car. These vehicles are only stand-ins while Steve works on a 1960 Gentleman’s Hot Rod T-Bird for himself and a 1954 Series 62 Fleetwood Cadillac for Gina. They are also restoring a giant silver bus big enough to accommodate a high school marching band on a three-week tour of the American Midwest. An assortment of other immobile cars that don’t seem to fit a theme may have just pulled into the yard for a rest, liked the view, and decided to retire there. Luckily, the yard is big enough that the neighbors haven’t yet pilloried them. They have hidden most of the good stuff in a newly constructed garage just a little smaller than Boeing’s aircraft assembly building.

  The home’s interior decor has been changed a bit since it was built. Most of its nooks and crannies are occupied by an amazing collection of automobile memorabilia, and the floor has been reinforced in places to support stacks of car magazines. Even so, visitors to the house are likely to be on their third of fourth visit before they notice the car theme. This is because most walls of the house are occupied by gigantic paintings of nude women. If I wanted to display one of these paintings in my house, I would have to raise the ceiling a yard, and hire a good divorce lawyer. The women in these paintings are altogether, completely, emphatically, undeniably undressed. They are in the downstairs living room, the upstairs lounge, the dining room, and (God help me) the guest bedroom. Most were painted by a single artist, who really, really loves to paint breasts. I found it more than a little disconcerting that some of the paintings were of Gina. Her university degree is in zoology, but she now makes her living as a nude model for artists and art students. The three of us spent a day cruising the back roads of southern Ontario, getting caught up on our lost years, before Gina and I left Steve behind and set out for Toronto in Gina’s Mercury.

  THE AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION’S guide to Ontario explains that “most visitors are likely to be pleasantly surprised by Toronto’s weather.” Reading between the lines, this means that foreign visitors, completely ignorant about all things Canadian, and expecting to find the city dotted by igloos on an otherwise barren and frozen landscape, will be pleasantly surprised to find that the dogsleds operated by the Toronto Transit Commission generally give igloos a wide berth. Gina and I were heading for the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada’s largest museum of human culture and natural history, with more than 6 million artifacts, and my first stuffed Labrador Duck. A pretty good chunk of the story concerning this particular specimen revolves around the late Paul Hahn.

  Hahn might be just about the perfect example of a biologist-wannabe. He didn’t have a degree in the field, but, like so many other natural history enthusiasts, he probably dreamed of spending his life chasing sparrows through alpine meadows, pretending to be a critical analytical thinker hot on the trail of some pressing and important question that only other ornithologists would care about. Hahn made his living by selling and restoring pianos. He satisfied his biology cravings by becoming involved in the activities of the Royal Ontario Museum, and he contributed as a patron of the work done by the institution.

  In the late 1950s, Hahn took on the interesting but almost certainly futile task of documenting the location and history of every stuffed specimen of the extinct Passenger Pigeon in the world. This task was futile because, unlike the handful of Labrador Duck corpses still around, thousands of stuffed Passenger Pigeons remain, and many of these are found in the most unlikely places, including the trophy cases of small-town high schools.

  Hahn sent questionnaires to every museum in the world that might have stuffed Passenger Pigeons in its collection. While he was at it, he asked them about their stuffed specimens of other extinct North American species, including Great Auks, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Carolina Parakeets, and Eskimo Curlews. Almost as an afterthought, Hahn also asked museum curators about stuffed Labrador Ducks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he exchanged thousands of pieces of correspondence with museum curators, and in 1963, the results of his noble quest were published as a book entitled Where Is That Vanished Bird? An Index to the Known Specimens of Extinct and Near Extinct North American Species. The book is, in essence, hundreds of pages of annotated lists. No one would describe it as a riveting page-turner, but more than forty years later it is still the most complete list of its kind. Although Hahn lived to the ripe old age of eighty-seven, he didn’t last quite long enough to see the book published. Instead it serves as a tribute to his energy and dedication to the task. It provided me with a list of fifty-four Labrador Ducks.

  Hahn, like me, couldn’t bear to throw anything away, and the paperwork that accumulated in preparing his book now resides in the Library and Archives of the Royal Ontario Museum (the ROM). The museum’s head librarian and archivist was happy for me to dig through it all. Although it makes for an interesting read, the material is not well organized. Correspondence from museums in India is included in the file pertaining to Italy, and the folder for Hawaii contains material from Peruvian museums.

  Today, with 134,000 bird skins in its collection, the ROM ranks somewhere around thirteenth in the world, but it is first in the world in terms of bird skeletons, with 42,500. It must have irritated Hahn that the ROM, with its large and growing collection of natural history artifacts, had neither a Great Auk nor a Labrador Duck, because he set his talents to helping the museum to get one of each. A hundred and fifty years earlier, if a museum wanted a Great Auk, it would simply let it be known that it was willing to pay top dollar for a specimen. If the price was sufficiently outrageous, some debt-ridden collector would risk a trip to a remote island off the coast of Iceland to club one. Since Great Auks and Labrador Ducks are now completely and irrevocably extinct, the task becomes a bit trickier. Many museums have resorted to the next-best thing by having a taxidermist cobble together a fake from feathers of other species. For Hahn this wasn’t an acceptable solution. Clearly, the only route was to buy or trade for specimens in the hands of another institution. Apparently he didn’t think to steal one.

  Hahn’s correspondence includes letters to museum curators that strongly hint that the ROM would be very keen to purchase a Labrador Duck or Great Auk if the institution wished to give theirs up. For instance, letters to Hahn from Professor F. Ronald Hayes of Dalhousie University in Halifax imply that Hahn had suggested a swap of Dalhousie’s Labrador Duck for a pair of the ROM’s Passenger Pigeons. The ROM has about 150 Passenger Pigeons, and this would have been a ridiculously one-sided trade of diamonds for glass; the folks at Dalhousie were not sufficiently gullible to fall for this trade. Hayes explained that, according to Dalhousie folklore, they had been offered $5,000 for their Labrador Duck and had turned the offer down. A handwritten note in the margin of one letter suggests that Hahn was going to try to get the vice president of Dalhousie to reconsider their position, given that the ROM has one thousand visitors for every visitor to the Museum at Dalhousie. The appeal was not successful, but the ROM did eventually get both a Great Auk and a Labrador Duck.

  Somewhere around 1840, a Labrador Duck was shot by Jacob P. Giraud Jr. and mounted by a well-known New York City taxidermist, John G. Bell. Giraud collected most of his specimens in and around Long Island, and I might surmise that this Labrador Duck was shot there. In 1867 Giraud gave his collection of 800 mounted North American birds, including his Labrador Duck and Great Auk, to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where the duck sat until 1921, when it was remounted by taxidermist George Nelson, put into a glass and brass case, and placed in the capable hands of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The duck arrived in the Big Apple in October 1921 and was promptly locked away. The ROM purchased it and the Great Auk from Vassar, receiving them in July 1965, thus moving the Labrador Duck from a locked safe in New York to a locked safe in Toronto.

  The sale was arranged by Dr. Ralph S. Palmer, formerly a professor at Vassar, but at that time New York State Zoolo
gist. The question of selling the duck and auk was apparently a delicate matter, for Vassar had refused several previous offers. The ROM’s James Baillie arranged a fund-raising campaign, and more than 200 individuals and organizations contributed. The birds came through at quite a bargain—$3,500 for the duck and $7,000 for the auk.

  Gina and I were met at the ROM by Brad Millen, the museum’s database technician for the bird collection, who signed us in and had us fitted with Really-Bloody-Important-Visitor-So-Pay-Attention-Dammit badges. Pleased at the prospect of sharing some of the museum’s great treasures with people who would really appreciate them, Millen showed us a number of stuffed specimens of extinct birds, along with other beautiful creatures that have avoided extinction so far. While Millen and Gina continued their tour, I got down to my examination of the ROM’s duck.

  Labrador Duck 1

  My very first Labrador Duck is also the finest specimen in the world. In part, this is a tribute to the gifted taxidermist George Nelson. Millen showed me X-ray images of the duck, which revealed an amazing array of pins and supporting wires that resulted in a very lifelike pose. Between visits by ornithologists, the duck resides in its protective case in a fireproof safe, along with other particularly precious specimens like the Vassar Great Auk, two Heath Hens, an Eskimo Curlew, and two of the museum’s many Passenger Pigeons. It took me forty-five minutes to measure the bill and the wings, to make notes on the colors of the bills, eyes, and feet, and to take some photographs.

  If you can’t afford to buy a Labrador Duck, here’s how to make one. First, obtain a reasonably cooperative medium-sized duck; a Mallard or a scaup should do nicely. Spray-paint it black. Then tip its head and breast into a bucket of white paint. (I realize that, as birds, Labrador Ducks don’t have “breasts,” but it is a technical expression. Just trust me on that one.) Then paint the wings white, except for the ends of the flight feathers. The tips of flight feathers and automobile tires are black for the same reason—pigment makes them better able to resist wear. Then paint a black ring around the base of the neck, and a thin black stripe lengthwise along the top of his head. Voila! You have an adult male Labrador Duck. Females kinda got shortchanged in the beautiful plumage department, being mottled gray and brown all over. This is great for hiding from predators but not the sort of pattern that gets your picture on a stamp in Redonda. Depending on their age, the feathers of an immature male were somewhere between the color of a female and an adult male.

  You can allow your more creative side to emerge when it comes time to paint the bill, because we really don’t know what color they were. Feathers generally retain their color after the death of the bird, but body parts like beaks and legs tend to fade over the years. It doesn’t help that some taxidermists painted the beaks and feet; they may have given those body parts the colors they had in life, or they may just have had some paint left over from bathroom renovations. The tip of the bill was probably black, and the base might have been brownish, but there might have also been some red and blue mixed in. We also don’t know the color of Labrador Duck eyes, because reports of the day were contradictory. The male in Toronto has dark brown glass eyes; perhaps John G. Bell was a sufficiently good taxidermist to peep at the eyes of the corpse before he put in glass eyes of a similar color. So, now that I had lost my Labrador Duck innocence and gone through Hahn’s correspondence like a smutty scientific voyeur, it was time for Gina and me to drive on in search of duck number two.

  FOR MOST SPECIMENS of the Labrador Duck, we know very little of their history. In centuries past, birds were shot and stuffed more as curios than as items of scientific value, an ornithological equivalent of stamp collecting. If note were ever made of the date and location of their demise or their collector, those records may not have survived. There are a few notable exceptions, including the specimen in Toronto, and the one in the very capable hands of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa; not only is its history well documented but the story is entirely Canadian, and at least as odd as anything else in Canadian history.

  In the fall of 1803, the Reverend Thomas McCulloch and his family sailed from Scotland and into the harbor at Pictou, at the north end of Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast. Beyond his qualifications as a man of the cloth, having taken a course in medicine at Glasgow University, he was also qualified as a physician at a time when many recent immigrants were ill. McCulloch accepted the post of Minister of the Harbour for the Prince Street Church, and remained in Pictou for the next thirty-five years. McCulloch House, built for the Reverend and his family around 1806, remains a tourist attraction.

  The good Reverend McCulloch is remembered today as the founder of Pictou Academy (1816), which later evolved into Dalhousie College, and then Dalhousie University in Halifax, with McCulloch as its first president, from 1838 until his death in 1843. This is all very noble, but he offset his positive qualities by shooting more than his share of Labrador Ducks in Pictou. Upon McCulloch’s death, his collection, including a male and female Labrador Duck, was presented to Dalhousie College.

  The trick is that one of the Labrador Ducks, the female, is not a Labrador Duck at all, but rather a Black Scoter, with its bill painted to resemble a Labrador Duck’s. Hoyes Lloyd, an early Canadian ornithologist, noted the error when the birds were still at Dalhousie College, and published a short paper to this effect in November 1920. Perhaps McCulloch made a mistake, and thought that he had shot both a male and female. Perhaps he felt that the display would be more attractive with both a male and female but, lacking a female Labrador Duck, doctored a female scoter for aesthetic purposes.

  By 1968, Dalhousie must have realized that it didn’t have proper facilities to house so valuable a specimen and its partner, and so “loaned” them to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, where they reside today. I suspect the curators in Ottawa are hoping that Dalhousie University will simply forget that the Labrador Duck and its Black Scoter mate ever existed, and they will get to keep them forever.

  Michel Gosselin, Collection Manager of the vertebrate section at the Canadian Museum of Nature, made the arrangements for my visit to examine the duck in their care. He explained that although the museum’s postal address is in Ottawa, Ontario, the duck is housed at their facility across the Ottawa River in Aylmer, Quebec. As Gina and I followed the precise directions Gosselin had provided, we began to think that he had been having us on. The community of Aylmer thinned out until we were back out into the countryside. Horses…cattle…surely this couldn’t be right. But, just a little farther down the road, we came across a small sign indicating that we had arrived. I had been expecting busloads of crazed schoolchildren, a gift shop, and entertaining interactive displays, not realizing that this was the national museum’s facility for storing its tremendous collection of natural history artifacts, and not a museum open to the public.

  Gosselin welcomed us. Like so many other curators, this is a man who clearly loves his job. He is proud of the newly constructed facility and the important work it does, and loves to have visitors who also appreciate the value of the work done there. Before bringing out the specimens, Gosselin showed us around parts of the facility that houses birds and mammals. He showed us how a handle could be turned to move the collection cabinets around, and so conserve space by not wasting any on aisles. He showed us the extraordinary measures in place to prevent pest infestation and dust, two deadly archenemies of museum collections. Security was also a primary concern, with swipe cards necessary to get from anywhere to anywhere else. Frankly, all of this security might be a bit over the top. The place is so big, and all the doors and corridors look exactly the same as all the other doors and corridors; if someone broke in one night, they would eventually grow weary of trying to find their way out and just sit down and wait for the police.

  The facility reminded me of a very exclusive casino, where people are invited to lose huge sums of cash as quickly as possible. Not just anyone is allowed into a ritzy casino—you have to have lots and lots of money to
lose. It wasn’t that the museum was trying to keep people away from the artifacts—you just had to have lots and lots of the right sort of credentials. If Cameron Diaz, to choose a person at random, were to show up and ask to see a stuffed Whooping Crane, she would be thanked for her contributions to American cinema, and then politely but firmly turned away, with the explanation that it just wasn’t that sort of facility. Because I had an appointment and a good reason to be there, and because I have “Dr.” in front of my name and Cameron Diaz doesn’t, Gina and I were not only admitted, but treated as honored guests.

  Labrador Duck 2

  The male Labrador Duck and the female scoter are in pretty good shape, given how long they have been dead. Their bills and feet are a little beaten up, and someone had painted the bills black, mustard yellow, and baby blue. The drake has a small orange-yellow patch on either wing, which, according to X-ray images, is the result of rusting wires that keep the duck upright and in more or less the right shape. They are mounted on a base covered with pebbles and dried algae, perhaps to represent the seashore at Pictou. The base is cracked and perforated in spots with exposed nails, but then the Dead Sea scrolls aren’t in perfect shape either.

  In fact, there are only two really peculiar things about this Labrador Duck and his unlikely bride. First, the bottom of the wooden base on which they are mounted has a crown symbol and ROYAL YEAST CAKES in large black letters, showing that it was made out of an old packing crate. Second, the drake’s left glass eye is dark brown, but his right eye is lime-yellow-green. Was the taxidermist a little drunk the day he stuffed it, or had he just run out of brown eyes halfway through? When they aren’t being gawked at by an ornithologist, these ducks live in a large locked gray cabinet with a Heath Hen and a small flock of Passenger Pigeons.