The Curse of the Labrador Duck (9 page)

The Labrador Ducks exited the research collection of the Liverpool Museum at 9:30 in the morning, and reentered the collection a little before 13:00. They were officially on loan to the Liverpool Museum’s Natural History Centre. The reason given on the exit receipt was “Research Loan.” Given the value of these specimens, it is probably the last time they will ever make a trip outside of the collection. I felt that I was creating an awful lot of bother.

Fisher was a star about it all. She is an imposing figure of a woman who immediately makes you feel that you are the most amazing person in her life. Her father was also a noted ornithologist, and I have been told by an unreliable authority that her grandfather was Geoffrey Francis Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury for all of the big events early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, including her wedding. Perhaps Fisher got her welcoming warmth from that side of her family. On the day of my visit to the museum, she had just had her hair dyed purple to match her scarf. I really appreciate that sort of free spirit; perhaps that approach to life came from her mother’s side of the tree.

Over lunch in the Walker Art Gallery’s coffee shop, Fisher filled me in on exactly why the collection had been closed to visiting scholars. During renovations to the museum, and moving specimens from their regular housing, into storage, and then back again, it became apparent that some of their bird specimens had gone missing. It is hard to imagine why some of the missing specimens would have been taken, being as common as dirt, and not particularly well known for their decorative qualities. However, some very valuable specimens of extinct species had also strolled off. In a collection of that size, it isn’t impossible that the missing specimens were simply misplaced in some dark corner. In any case, the situation called for a forensic audit, and a review of the protocol for visiting scholars. Fair enough, but the head of the Liverpool Museum apparently used my case to flex some muscle, despite my offer to submit to a strip search after my visit.

How did Liverpool come to have three Labrador Ducks in its
collection? In 1485, Sir Thomas Stanley was made the first Earl of Derby by King Henry VII, in gratitude for being rescued at the Battle of Bosworth Field. From then on, the Stanley family always seems to have been on the winning side of each armed conflict. That, and some mining interests, left the family very well off. Liverpool was decimated by the plague in 1548 and again in 1558, but the Stanley family continued on, sequestered in the Tower of Liverpool from rats, their fleas, and the bacteria they carried. Fast-forward a few earls to October 1834, and the death of the twelfth Earl of Derby. This generous act made his son, Lord Edward Smith Stanley, the thirteenth Earl of Derby. A bit like Walter Rothschild, Earl 13 had a passion for collecting, as well as the money to do something about it.

The year before his father’s death, Earl 13 purchased two Labrador Ducks from John Gould: an adult male (D920) and an immature male (D920b). It was still early days for Gould, who later became renowned as an artist, a businessman, and a great bird enthusiast. Earl 13 apparently thought that the drably colored bird he got from Gould was a female, although it appears to me to be a very young male. Earl 13 was also given a female Labrador Duck (D920a) by Thomas C. Eyton, a Shropshire magistrate, on February 18, 1840. With the death of Earl 13 in 1851, and the ascendancy of Earl 14, all three Labrador Ducks and 15,000 other specimens passed by bequest to the Liverpool City Council, which served as the foundation for the Liverpool Museum’s natural history collection. Today the museum has about 55,000 bird specimens.

The next specimen (T9597), an adult male, was shot by Colonel J. W. Wedderburn in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia, in April 1852. It was given to Canon H. B. Tristram in November 1876 and received by the Liverpool Museum in 1896. As mentioned earlier, the breastbone of this male was put into the collection of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge in 1879.

By my count, that makes four Labrador Ducks, and yet the Liverpool Museum has only three. One of the adult males had gone missing, and the curatorial staff wasn’t clear when or how it disappeared. The missing Labrador Duck wasn’t the only bird specimen to go astray at some point in the distant past. In 1959, R. Wagstaff, Keeper of the Liverpool Museum’s Department of Vertebrate Zoology, responded
to Paul Hahn’s questionnaire about stuffed extinct birds. He wrote to say that the museum had eleven Passenger Pigeons, an Eskimo Curlew, three Carolina Parakeets, and three Labrador Ducks. Wagstaff also explained that three stuffed Whooping Cranes were listed in the museum’s catalogue but could not be found. How do you misplace something as big as a Whooping Crane, and something as cute as a Labrador Duck?

The answer is quite simple in the end. After my examination of the ducks, Steven Cross of the museum’s Nature Centre gave me a tour of the facility. Along with many amazing natural history artifacts on display, he showed me striking before-and-after pictures of the museum, in this case before-and-after bombing during World War II. Early in the war, most of the collection had been removed to a system of caves in Wales, just in case of that sort of attack, but many specimens were left on public display, apparently including a Labrador Duck and three Whooping Cranes. It would be difficult to prove, but these birds appear to have been casualties of war. If they weren’t blown to smithereens, they were likely carried away from the rubble by children the morning after. Kids are like that. There are probably still a few such artifacts in the attics of Liverpool homes.

I don’t mean to minimize the devastation of war by making the loss of a stuffed duck sound like something important. Liverpool was Britain’s major port in World War II, and the Germans made a concentrated bombing effort on the docks, particularly on three nights in May 1941. Bombs don’t always fall precisely on their targets and the air raids resulted in the death of more than 2,500 people, and serious injury to a similar number. More than half of Liverpool’s homes were damaged and 11,000 were totally destroyed. As a tribute to the human spirit over bombs, cargo was being handled again at Liverpool within a week, and the docks were operating normally within a month.

So here is what I found in examining the three remaining Liverpool ducks. The adult drake, the one not bombed by Germans, has only one glass eye, and his left foot looks as though it has been nibbled by
mice. The taxidermist may have made him a little plump, but otherwise he is in good shape. The second bird has been described in the past as a female, but subtle markings on the bill, and lighter feathers on the breast, head, and neck suggest that it is probably a very young male. His tail and wing feathers are a bit beaten up, but he is otherwise getting by. The third individual, presumably a female, isn’t doing quite so well. Both legs are broken, and her right foot isn’t attached to the rest of her body. Instead of standing, she now sits forlornly on her belly on a small wooden base. When the time comes, some creative taxidermist will probably have to rebuild her, using the legs from another, less valuable, duck specimen. She is mottled brown and gray and white, as befits a hen that would have been trying to hide from predators as she sat on her eggs. These three remaining specimens are kept together in a well-crafted wooden box in a large cabinet along with other valuable specimens. A small card on the box explains that Wagstaff examined it on February 15, 1962, and found that all of the ducks were in place, and that someone else tossed in a Vapona no-pest strip on March 31, 1980, to treat a bug infestation. Museum curators really, really hate bug infestations.

I accomplished all of that in my first full day in Liverpool, leaving me with two full days to slob around and see the sights while Lisa listened to talks about inward rectum calcium channels and ATPase-activated smooth-muscle death rays. I toured museums, and helped visitors from France get hopelessly lost. I helped some German tourists by taking their photographs in front of the Mersey. I discovered that the “Liverbird,” an ugly cross between a cormorant and an eagle, was added to the city’s coat of arms in 1797. I took in an amazing exhibition on transatlantic slavery, which was one of the major factors that allowed Liverpool to become such an important city.

On my last day in Liverpool, I checked my email and found about twenty messages. Most of them were work-related and so I was able to ignore them. But a message from one’s mother is one that can be ignored only at the risk of a few millennia in purgatory. In her message, my mom caught me up on family news from Canada. She also said that the Chilton family had an interesting link to my current adventure. It was from the once mighty docks of Liverpool that my parents and older brother had departed England late in April 1954,
looking for a better life in Canada. They had sailed from Liverpool’s docks on RMS
Ascania
on her last transatlantic voyage.

I took the long downhill walk from the University of Liverpool to the dock area. Half a century ago, the area would have been a far more serious place, involved in commerce and insurance as it had been for a couple of centuries. Today, ships continued to sail in and out of Liverpool harbor but at a much reduced rate, and much of the waterfront has been reborn as upscale shops, museums, and eateries. There was no way for me to know which particular bit of the Mersey my family had departed from, so I spent an hour walking up and down the waterfront. My parents had taken my genes out of Britain through Liverpool in 1954, and now, a half century later, I had brought them back, even if only for a while. My time in Britain was done.

E
ven though I come from a country that is officially bilingual, I can claim to be absolutely horrid with foreign languages. My grasp of French is limited to a handful of words like
jambon, crayon, chien
, and
bibliothèque
. These disconnected words are unlikely to be of any use unless I find myself in need of a pencil in a library to make notes about types of ham preferred by dogs. And so it was that with three Labrador Duck adventures awaiting me in the far-flung corners of France, I knew it was best to engage a minder. I needed someone who could ensure that I got a hotel room and not a room in a brothel, and who could assure me of a glass of wine and not a prison record. I needed someone to keep me calm by booking train tickets during an impending general strike, and to translate technical expressions like
duck
in natural history museums. This special someone would be my guide to some of the most beautiful cities in Europe. In short, I needed Julie Rainard, a biology student just returned to Paris after completing undergraduate studies in England, and a work colleague of Lisa’s.

For all of its glamour and efficiency, the Eurostar train deposited me in Paris’s Tenth Arrondissement, often described as a conglomeration of commercial zones and sex shops and best avoided. I was
met at Gare du Nord by Julie, holding a placard with my name on it. Julie is that most precious of all commodities—a beautiful woman who doesn’t seem to know that she is beautiful. She has large and sparkly eyes capped by razor-thin eyebrows. The right eyebrow has a narrow break, the result of an endearing unconscious nervous habit of touching it repeatedly in one place. Her pouty lips are just the sort that keeps Julia Roberts salivating with envy. Her hair is the color of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

I have an amazing trick for ensuring that Lisa doesn’t get jealous when I am on the road with beautiful young women like Julie. It probably belongs in the
Handbook for a Happy Relationship,
wedged somewhere between “Spend at least as much time listening as talking,” and “Don’t murder your in-laws.” My little trick is this: “Never, under any circumstance, give your partner a reason to doubt your fidelity.” That’s it. No need to thank me for the advice; that’s what I’m here for. In twenty years of marriage, I have never given Lisa any cause to suspect that I was doing something that I shouldn’t, and so she trusts me implicitly. After all, there is nothing so powerful as the company of another woman to remind me how fortunate I am to be with Lisa.

In the weeks leading up to my trip to France, it was clear that engaging Julie had been exactly the right thing to do. Her efficiency and persistence with ticket agents and museum administrators showed, but the first hour after my arrival demonstrated just how perfect the decision had been. She met me with a Métro ticket in hand. She had booked a great inexpensive hotel room, and had ridden the Métro to my hotel the day before my arrival so that we wouldn’t have to waste time searching for it when I arrived. In short, my adventure was going to go as smoothly as adventures ever do.

O
UR FIRST FRENCH
Labrador Duck adventure was, conveniently enough, in Paris. However, the museum wouldn’t open until Monday morning, leaving Julie a whole day to give me a taste of her fair city on the Seine. We started with a tramp up Montmartre hill to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, which should probably be famous for housing a portion of the Sacred Heart of Christ, but is probably more familiar from a scene in the film
Amélie,
involving a telescope and
arrows drawn on the pavement with flour. The view of Paris from Sacré-Cœur is unbeatable, but those travelers who are committed to the very, very old should look elsewhere, as the basilica was not consecrated until 1919.

The Montmarte region around the basilica had been a hotbed of artistic energy until tourists found it. Even now it is a very fashionable address occupied by many famous Parisians I had never heard of. After passing an older lady in sunglasses walking two small dogs, Julie pointed out that she had been quite a famous actress in her day, although she could not remember the lady’s name or any of her films.

We had lunch in a restaurant district south of the Seine, offering every form of culinary delicacy I had heard of and a few that I hadn’t. We then visited the great Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité, the largest island in the Seine. Rather oddly, this cathedral devoted to Our Lady is only one of ten by that name in France. This particular Cathédrale Notre-Dame has a long and glorious history as a living church. Construction began in 1163 on the site of a Roman temple, and it narrowly survived the French Revolution. It probably represents France’s second most frequently photographed monument after the Eiffel Tower.

No one would argue that Notre-Dame isn’t a really whiz-bang church. The architectural superlatives go on and on, as do the really keen stories. For instance, the cathedral can house 9,000 worshippers, and is 425 feet long and 115 feet high. On the facade, above the portals, is a parade of statues of the kings of Israel and Judea, which were apparently pulled down in 1793 by people who thought they represented the hated French kings, but later restored to their pedestals. The cathedral houses such relics as a fragment of the True Cross, a bit of the Crown of Thorns, and a Holy Nail. Unlike at Sacré-Cœur, there was no mention of Holy Body Parts. Despite all of this, it is not the sort of place that I wanted to stop for a good long chinwag with God. The stained-glass windows beggar description, but they leave the interior rather gloomy. With endless hordes of visitors, quiet contemplation was right out of the question. The gift shop inside competed with hawkers outside the church. This magnificent monument felt a little less like a house of worship, and a lot more like a very elaborate museum.

Past the pyramids of the Louvre and through the Place de la Concorde to the Champs-Elysées, Julie and I wove our way through grand gardens perforated with opulent fountains, gawked at a 3,200-year-old Egyptian obelisk brought to Paris from Luxor, and passed innumerable gold statues of heroes with and without horses. The city was a riot of people enjoying the sun and warmth of the Sunday in the company of friends and strangers. We saw the start of a 2,000-strong in-line skating cavalcade in support of the fight against AIDS, and then picked up the procession as it doubled back along the avenue.

At the western end of the Champs-Elysées is the Place Charles de Gaulle. Twelve major streets converge on a giant traffic circle at the Place, and sitting squarely in the middle is the magnificent Arc de Triomphe, one of only four arcs de triomphe in France. Guidebooks rabbit on and on about the history and dimensions of the Arc, but what most don’t tell you is that you can climb to the summit for an astonishing view of the city. The top observation platform at the Eiffel Tower may be a tad higher, but it also has great snaking lineups. We walked through a tunnel to the center of the Place, and, without having to wait in any lineup, handed over a few euros. By the time we finished with the 296 stairs to the top of the Arc, I was a little dizzy from the heat and oxygen starvation, but that did not diminish the experience at all. Julie pointed out great structures that constituted the Parisian skyline, but also the near absence of construction cranes, something that she considered to be a blight on the landscape of London. With the childlike glee of an ornithologist I looked down on swifts swooping for insects.

As we gazed on the Place Charles de Gaulle, the driver of a small, cheap car lost his confidence and brought it to a screeching halt in the giant traffic circle. Eight other cars became trapped behind the first car, as everyone else rocketed around them. Ten minutes later, all nine ensnared cars were still there. According to Julie, in 1986, a Volkswagen Beetle stalled going around the traffic circle, and the driver could not restart it. In the next forty-five minutes, more than seven thousand cars became hopelessly enmeshed in the Place and adjacent streets. Since no one could decide how to deal with the problem, the cars were abandoned, and travel in western Paris came to a virtual standstill for seven months.

B
UT, OF COURSE,
in this city of splendors unending, my voyage was all about the splendors of Labrador Ducks, and so bright and shiny early on Monday morning, Julie and I were off. We followed the directions provided by my contact, Dr. Claire Voisin, researcher at the Laboratoire de Zoologie, Mammifères et Oiseaux, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, in the Fifth Arrondissement. Down rue Buffon, past old unnumbered buildings, through a gate and across a yard to an arch with four doors, to door number three. Push a button, climb a wooden staircase, and there we were—welcomed by Voisin into the behind-the-scenes world of the museum’s ornithological research collection. I asked Voisin how the collection had avoided destruction in World War II when so many other museums in Europe had been leveled by bombs. Voisin indicated that salvation had been sheer luck; a building just down the street had been demolished in just that way.

The stuffed adult Labrador Duck drake is one of many great ornithological treasures in the care of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. According to documents from 1935, the Paris duck was donated to the museum by MM. Milbert and Hyde de Neuville in 1810. Jacques-Gérard Milbert was born in Paris in 1766 and died there in 1840, spending much of the intervening period as a professor of drawing in the great French capital. As a break from this vocation, which probably involved sketching a lot of nude models, he traveled to the United States as a naturalist in 1815, returning to France in 1825 when he ran out of cash. His voyage to America was in the company of Hyde de Neuville, the French consul-general at New York, who went on to facilitate Milbert’s extensive travels in the American East and South. If his voyages took him north into Canada, he might have collected the Labrador Duck on the breeding grounds himself. Perhaps he collected it on the wintering grounds of the northeastern United States. Otherwise he and/or Hyde de Neuville probably traded for it or purchased it—the records offer no hint of the real story. Yet we do know that Milbert contributed many specimens to the Paris collection.

The Labrador Duck was housed in an uninspiring gray metal cabinet along with two Pink-headed Ducks, four Great Auk eggs, and an assortment of other extinct and precious items. Julie waited patiently as I slowly pored over the drake, poking and peering and measuring with calipers and dividers. Trying, but failing, to improve on nature, someone in the specimen’s murky past had painted portions of the bill mustard yellow. The most peculiar feature of the Parisian Labrador Duck is that its feet are not its own. The base on which it stands is careful to point out that “
les pattes sont factices
,” “the feet are fake.” The duck’s original feet were nibbled by mice and replaced by those of a Mallard. At some point the specimen’s eight-sided wooden base had been painted gray-white, but the painter had been too lazy to remove the duck first, and had slopped some paint on the feet. I filled Julie in on what I was doing as I proceeded to examine my tenth specimen, and in a little less than an hour we were done.

As Voisin led us toward the exit, we passed a number of large white cabinets labeled TYPE. I guessed that the word meant the same thing to a French biologist as to an English one, but I asked anyway. Yes, indeed, said Voisin, the cabinets were filled with valuable type specimens; the museum owned a couple of hundred of them. These are the individual specimens that taxonomists use for comparative purposes to represent the whole species. For perspective, you might keep in mind that Canada’s National Museum in Ottawa does not have even a single type specimen of a species of bird. She gladly pulled out a number of cormorant and penguin type specimens. Most had been prepared as taxidermic mounts, but had been removed from their wooden bases and restuffed as study skins, lying flat on their backs in plastic storage boxes, in order to take up less space and to minimize the risk of damage.

J
ULIE SET OFF
for home and I set off in search of dinner. Being an exceptional hostess, Julie had provided me with a very thoughtful gift—a French phrase book to lead me through those awkward little social encounters when she wasn’t available to keep me out of trouble. Ordering dinner, for instance. The book provided me with helpful suggestions for conversation starters, including
“Pouvez-vous me donner des bon marché préservatifs, s’il vous plaît?”
(Can you give
me some inexpensive condoms, please?). The book suggested that I try such helpful French expressions as
“Permettez-moi de vous offrir quelque chose à boire.”
(Let me buy you a drink, baby!), followed by
“Si on allait dans un endroit un peu plus calme?”
(Shall we get out of this joint?). If the first request fails, but the second and third work out, the guide suggests that I might be listening to a physician say,
“Vous avez une inflammation de les chaussettes”
(you have an inflammation of your socks), to which I am apparently supposed to respond,
“Je voudrais du citron et une couche!”
(I would like some lemons and a diaper!). This sort of dialogue left me wondering how much Julie had paid for the phrase book.

Even so, I became quite dedicated to the little book. It did, however, overlook the one key phrase that might be more valuable than any other. It would go something along the lines of “Pardon me, but I am astonishingly useless at French. Instead of having me mess up your beautiful language, if I point at something, will you please package it up in exchange for a handful of euros?” In the absence of that altogether invaluable phrase, the book still allowed me sufficient hacking and slashing of the French language to obtain milk, a vegetable panini, and raisin buns from an assortment of shops.

I took my culinary treats to a park close to the police station and sat on a bench with all of the other patrons enjoying a quiet moment in the early evening’s warmth, after a long day of work. I ate while watching children play in the shade under the careful eye of their keepers. A couple of pigeons wandered by, hoping for a handout. Julie had warned me that Parisians are not all so fond of pigeons as I am, and so I left the little fellows to forage for themselves. My reserve held until a particularly pathetic little pigeon hopped by on one leg, trying to hold the stump of his amputated second leg out of the dust. I ripped a few crumbs from my raisin bun and tossed them to the little guy. An instant later he and I were surrounded by five of his avian friends, followed moments later by five young screaming boys with toy guns and water pistols, trying to shoot the pigeons. The tranquillity of that corner of the park had been shattered, and I was under the full glare of every park patron. I bundled up the remainder of my dinner and fled to find another park.