The Curse of the Labrador Duck (6 page)

F
OR 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.

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.

At one point I needed to take a toilet break, and Gosselin had to escort me out of the collections, all the way back to the reception area. The collections have no bathrooms because bathrooms require water, and water pipes come with the risk that one might burst, and water is another danger of incredible destructive potential to a natural history collection. With duck number two behind us, it was time to be on our way to Montreal to see duck number three.

W
HEN PEOPLE FIRST
arrived in Canada, about 14,000 years ago, they apparently managed the crossing from Asia at a narrow land bridge across what is now the Bering Sea. As a paleontologist explained it to me, an ice age tied up so much water in the formation of ice sheets that it lowered the level of the ocean to the point that a land bridge was exposed. It sounds a little far-fetched to me, but I wasn’t there at the time, so I’ll have to take his word for it. These explorers went on to explore and colonize the continent, rather quickly, from west to east.

In contrast, when Europeans arrived in Canada, some 13,500 years later, they also ran roughshod over the continent, but this time from east to west. This means that historians concerning themselves with European settlement and its fallout have a lot more to say about eastern Canada than they do about the west. Being east of center, the city of Montreal has more recorded history than most communities in Canada. For instance, the Redpath Museum of McGill University, erected in 1882, was Canada’s first building designed to be a museum. It must be one of the few remaining museums in the country that do not charge for admission. The Canadian Automobile Association charitably describes the museum by saying “collections are displayed much as they were then.” This appears to be a polite way of saying that the displays are dark, dusty, and boring. However, if you are strolling through that part of Montreal in a heavy rainstorm, and you can’t afford a cup of coffee, then I can highly recommend it.

The Redpath Museum is very fortunate to have a Labrador Duck in its collection. In 1893, Ernest D. Wintle of Montreal was strolling through the now defunct museum of the city’s Natural History Society, spotted a stuffed bird, and correctly concluded that it was an immature Labrador Duck. There is no record of who shot it, where or why, or how it got into the museum. Being a young bird, not in the bold black and white plumage of an adult drake, it had managed to evade proper identification until Wintle’s sharp eye fell on it. In 1926, this stuffed duck made a very short one-way migration from the headquarters of the Natural History Society at 710 Sherbrooke Street across the street to the Redpath Museum at 859 Sherbrooke Street, where it has resided ever since.

Gina and I arrived at the Redpath Museum during a downpour. I suppose we were lucky to get to the museum at all, given that the streets of Montreal seem to have been laid out by a city planner who accidentally dropped two decimal places in calculating how many vehicles the roads would have to handle. We filed in behind a large flock of elementary schoolchildren, and they gave the place the delightful buzz that can only be produced on a day away from school. It took a few minutes for the teachers and tour guides to organize the students into manageable groups, but when they exited the foyer, we were left completely alone.

To prepare for my visit, I had traded email messages with David Green, the curator of vertebrate animals. Green is also past chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and so is no slouch when it comes to extinction. Green explained that he would be out of town on the day of my visit, but he arranged for someone to meet us and to show me their Labrador Duck.

And so, when Gina and I arrived at the Redpath, we were surprised to find that no one had ever heard of us. Gina found a reception office, and inside was an unpleasant little troll who was convinced that she owned the museum and everything in it, and felt that it was her duty to keep us away from anything valuable or interesting. Explaining that I was there to see their Labrador Duck, she responded, “Oh, I don’t think you are going to be allowed to see that.” I described the arrangements that I had made with David Green, and offered her my business card. She wouldn’t have any of it and left to find someone else to assist her in being really unpleasant to me. Was I going to be stumped on just my third duck?

The museum’s horrid little receptionist was unable to find someone else equally horrid, and instead sent us up to the office of a very pleasant young lady, Ingrid Birker. She listened to my story, and said, “Well then, I had better go and get the duck for you.” She set me up in an unoccupied office with a broken photocopier, a microwave oven, and a desk.

The Labrador Duck at the Redpath Museum, whatever its origin, was never given the opportunity to get into much trouble. Its feathers are mainly brown and gray, much like the plumage of a female, but when it is tilted just right, a slightly darker brown ring of feathers around its neck and a slightly darker stripe along the top of its head show that it once had high hopes of growing into an adult male. When it was first mounted, it probably wasn’t in the best shape, being full of bullet holes and indignation. One hundred and ten or so years in Montreal museums hasn’t helped its condition. The wire through the left leg that holds the specimen erect has broken through the skin in back. The webs between the toes are perforated. The feathers are generally messed up and in need of a thorough cleaning. There is an odd dark patch on the feathers of its belly, probably a grease stain from the time when the guts were pulled out. Its feet are nailed to a block of wood, 15 by 15 by 2 cm, with a sloppy gray paint job and an undercoat of blue showing through chips in the gray.

The taxidermist had given it a yellow glass eye on the left side, but didn’t bother to give it a right eye, so that stuffing pokes out through

the orbit, rather like a teddy bear that has been loved too much and repaired too little. The skin around the left side of the head wasn’t set in place properly, leaving its jaundiced eye to protrude unnaturally from its head, staring backward. This gave the duck a most uncanny expression. While measuring its left wing, I glanced at its head, and could swear that it was giving me a reproachful look. I wanted to explain that he had been dead for at least a hundred years before I was even born, and that I am a vegetarian, and don’t shoot ducks or any other animals, and that I feed bread crumbs to ducks every chance I get, and…but I didn’t feel that he would have been satisfied with any answer I gave. I finished my measurements, took some photographs, and let Ingrid know that I was done.