The Curse of the Labrador Duck (7 page)

Museums face a dilemma. Usually, the most treasured artifacts are not on public display but protected behind locked doors. But a specimen hidden away isn’t much good for public education on the finality of extinction, hence the dilemma. Two years earlier, after considerable discussion, the curatorial staff of the Redpath Museum had decided to put their Labrador Duck on display. Under perfect storage conditions, a stuffed bird specimen should last about five hundred years before falling apart. Nothing, except extinction and bad credit, is forever. A specimen on display, exposed to light and dust and high humidity, will disintegrate much more quickly. The Redpath Museum’s Labrador Duck resides in a glass cabinet in the stairwell between the second and third floors, along with a pair of Passenger Pigeons, an “Arctic” Curlew (I think they mean Eskimo Curlew), and an extinct snail. Also on display in the stairwell are an irritated gorilla and a surprised lion. (Irritated and surprised to be dead and stuffed, I suppose.)

While at the ROM, Millen had asked me how many Labrador Ducks I had seen so far. Although it felt awkward, I answered honestly that his was my first. He knew that my goal was to examine every stuffed specimen in the world, and I had to wonder if he would have given odds against me completing the task. I now had three ducks to my credit. True, I had snapped up some easy ones, but the adventure was well and truly under way. As my plane left the tarmac, I probably would have felt a little more comfortable with the quest if I knew exactly how many specimens lay ahead of me. It was time for a little duck hunting in England.

L
et’s be honest with ourselves—Great Britain is, for all intents and purposes, one and one-third small chunks of rock jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of mainland Europe. Even so, from this entirely unlikely setting the world has taken the parliamentary system of government; a pretty good judicial system; the language of industry, commerce, and science; and the line that defines zero degrees longitude. Having provided the world with some of its best literature, most of its best rock music, and the best beer anywhere that I have been to date, Brits have also given us soccer, the world’s most popular spectator sport, even though they seem to think it should be called football. On the downside, Britain has an obsession with lawn bowling, cricket, and mushy peas, an unhealthy fascination with Pete Doherty, and an almost pathological aversion to the Argentine national soccer team. Great Britain is also blessed with more than its share of stuffed Labrador Ducks.

The
Blue Guide
to travel in England, published in 1930, describes the city of Tring in fewer words than it devotes to the Roman ruins at Richborough. It gives the population of the community as 4,352 inhabitants. It also provides the names of two hotels and explains what you can expect to pay for a night’s stay at each, although the
Rose and Crown may have increased its rate from three shillings and sixpence, so you might want to call ahead. The guide describes Tring as an ancient town situated at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, tells the traveler to expect a 1
³
/
₄
; mile tramp from the train station to the town, and tells of a baptismal register that refers to the ancestors of the American president George Washington. Before going on to attractions beyond Tring, the guide summarizes the reason for my journey. It says: “Adjoining the town is
Tring Park
, the seat of Lord Rothschild, who has stocked the deer-park with emus and rheas (visible from the footpath through the park) and has also built an admirable
Zoological Museum
(adm. free).”

The area around Tring has been occupied for at least four thousand years, but much of its more recent history has been dominated by the Rothschild family. Nathaniel Rothschild came to Tring in 1874 and was elevated to the rank of Lord in 1885. When he passed away, thirty years later, he was thought to be the richest man in the British Empire, which seems to me to be exactly the wrong time in your life to be fabulously wealthy. While still alive, he contributed to the community in many positive ways. He had slums in Tring cleared away and replaced with modern cottages. These he promptly turned over to the town council on the condition that tenants should be charged only nominal rent during their first year. He built a hospital, supported local industry, and was generally the sort of fellow whom you want living in your community. To this day, however, the locals blame Nathaniel for ensuring that the railway station was built so far out of town. But, to be fair, the Rothschilds didn’t move to Tring until forty years after the station was built.

One of the more peculiar contributions of Nathaniel and Lady Rothschild was their son, Walter Rothschild, born in 1868. From an early age, Rothschild was fascinated by all things zoological, and set about collecting natural history artifacts. As a birthday gift, Rothschild was given a museum to house his collection. The museum cost £3,300 to construct, and the builders threw in a cottage for Rothschild at no additional charge. Lord and Lady Rothschild probably imagined that their son’s fascination for all creatures great and small was the harmless passing fancy of a young lad. Little did they know that Walter was to become world famous for his contributions to the
field of zoology, writing many hundreds of articles and books in the field, and describing five thousand new species of animals.

The museum, too, was a cracking success. When it opened in 1892, it attracted 30,000 visitors a year, which is all the more incredible when you think that most of those visitors would have arrived on foot. Admission to the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum was free seventy-five years ago, and it is free today.

Rothschild accumulated the largest private collection of birds ever, with about 300,000 stuffed specimens, including two Labrador Ducks, and 200,000 eggs. If you are impressed by really big numbers, you will be pleased to hear that he acquired two and a quarter million butterflies and moths by hiring more than 400 professional collectors. He also purchased huge collections from other bird maniacs. And what he couldn’t collect he had created. The museum contains a model of a giant moa, a flightless bird formerly found in New Zealand but driven to extinction 500 years ago. With no moa feathers to work with, the model is covered with emu feathers. With a flair for the dramatic, Rothschild brought the model to London for a meeting of the British Ornithologists’ Club, its great bulk sticking out through the top of a taxi. Before he died of cancer in 1937, Rothschild arranged that his museum and its collections be given over to the British Museum.

Oddly, most of the stuffed bird specimens weren’t turned over to the British Museum, having been sold to the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. The trick was that, although Rothschild’s income was enormous, it wasn’t infinite. Sooner or later something had to give. Rothschild, who never married, found himself in a spot of trouble after a series of affairs. It was bad enough that Walter had concurrent affairs with actresses, at least one of which left him with an illegitimate daughter, but he made the mistake of an indiscretion with a ruthless peeress, which left him subject to crippling blackmail demands for most of the rest of his life. In order to raise the funds to pay off the peeress without alerting his domineering mother, Rothschild had to sell the stuffed birds in his collection. Like most of the rest of us, Rothschild spent a lot of time inventing interesting ways of getting himself into trouble.

Rothschild made it a condition of his gift to the British Museum
that his museum in Tring remain a center for research into all matters zoological, as it had been for many decades. When the Natural History Museum in London found itself running short of space in the late 1960s, the museum decided to move its Bird Group to Tring, freeing up space for other collections. The Natural History Museum’s collection of bird skins and eggs is, without a doubt, the finest collection in the world. Moving the specimens away from the polluted air of London to the green and pleasant lands of Hertfordshire probably extended their life span immeasurably. The curatorial staff will probably last longer too.

If you wish to visit the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, you simply show up, leave your vehicle in the free car park, say a cheery “hello” to a lady in a glass booth, and stroll in. If, however, you wish to visit the collection of eggs and birds skins of the British Museum, housed next door, you had better have a really good reason and an appointment. I had both. Wanting to examine their two Labrador Duck specimens, I had made an appointment two months earlier and confirmed it the week before. At 9:00, the security guard told me that each of the three men I had arranged to see, Robert Prys-Jones, Michael Walters, and Mark Adams, was keeping later hours than I, but curator Frank Steinheimer would take care of me. After issuing me a visitor’s pass and relieving me of my traveling case and toiletry bag for security reasons, the guard sent me off through a maze of dimly lit hallways, in search of Steinheimer.

Steinheimer set me up with a pile of paperwork. First I had to fill out a form with my name, address, and a description of the reason for my visit. Then I had to sign a document stating that I had read the safety instructions for the museum. I was not to lick any of the bird specimens, for instance, as some were preserved with cyanide.

I pulled out my notebook, calipers, rulers, and magnifying lenses, and began the work of examining the beautiful drake and hen. The male has a couple of small holes in his upper bill, and his feathers are a bit dirty, but I think that a bit of grime can be expected after being denied a bath for well over 150 years. The female is missing the small hind
toe on her right foot, and the outermost toe on her left foot is broken, but otherwise she is in pretty good shape for an old gal. Her head is drawn slightly back over her shoulders, giving her a demure, submissive look. The drake’s bill is slightly agape, as though he is about to say something important like, “Hey, is that guy holding a gun?” Her glass eyes are green-gray-brown and his are lemon yellow.

Birds’ bodies can be prepared in one of two main ways. If a specimen has been prepared as a taxidermic mount, it is meant to depict the individual as it might have been in life, much like a trophy fish or the head of a deer with a particularly impressive set of antlers. If the work has been done by a skilled taxidermist, the result can be quite stunning. All three Labrador Ducks in Canada were prepared this way.

The problem with taxidermic mounts is that they take up an awful lot of space in museum collections, require considerable time and skill to prepare, and are easily damaged. Many birds are instead prepared as torpedo-shaped study skins, and the bird is stored on its back, with its wings pressed close to the body.

A study skin is, in essence, the skin of a bird, cleaned and treated with a preservative to discourage pests; the body is stuffed to the proportions of the original specimen. A forty-year-old publication by the National Museum of Canada provides the most thorough description of how to turn a dead bird into a study skin. To save you from reading its forty-two pages of blood-soaked glory, I will summarize. Step one, don’t bother; the required permits are enough to discourage anyone. Step two, it is crucial to ensure that the bird has really expired; no one wants to be embarrassed by a bird pretending to be dead. Step three, an incision is made through the skin on the belly side from the breastbone backward. Step four, working through this incision, turning the skin partially inside out, most of the body is gradually removed, taking care not to puncture anything juicy that will make a mess. The skull, minus brain and eyes, and parts of the wings and legs are left in place to provide shape. Study skins are generally not given glass eyes. Step five, do a little exploratory surgery to determine the bird’s sex by identifying testes and ovaries. Step six, by this time there is bound to be guck on the feathers, and this must be cleaned off. Sawdust and cornmeal are among the best agents to help
keep feathers clean. Step seven, a stick or wire is inserted the length of the body to provide support. Step eight, cotton or some other material is placed in the body to give it shape. Step nine, the incision is sewn up. Step ten, tags with appropriate information about the specimen are tied to the legs. This information is likely to include the bird’s sex, age, locality, and next-of-kin. Step eleven, the skin is wrapped up and allowed to dry thoroughly. Step twelve, the resulting skin is carefully catalogued, then stored in such a way that it will be a valuable research tool for hundreds of years. For scientific purposes, study skins are perfectly adequate, if not particularly artistic, and a skilled technician with a good caffeine buzz can prepare three or four bird corpses in an hour.

The vast majority of birds at Tring were prepared as study skins, but the Labrador Ducks are taxidermic mounts, as evidenced by their posture and the small holes in the webbing of their feet, which show that nails had held them to whatever display base they used to stand on. Their bases have long since been discarded, and so the birds now lie awkwardly on their sides in a tray in the storage cabinet, as though caught in the grip of rigor mortis.

As with so many Labrador Duck specimens, very little is known about the origin of these birds. The tag tied to the leg of the hen, catalogue number 1863.12.15.27, claims that it was presented to the museum by someone named Verreaux in 1863 and was collected in Labrador. The drake, catalogue number Vel. cat. 42.59a, was presented to the museum by the Hudsons’ Bay Company, after being collected in North America somewhere around 1835. With the help of the Hudsons’ Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, Canada, I tried to find out more about the origin of the male by reading the company’s correspondence from that era, but all I got was a horrible headache from scanning microfilm copies of 165-year-old letters scribbled by a clerk with awful handwriting.

By all rights, the Natural History Museum collection should have five Labrador Ducks, not two. Another drake and hen had found their way into Rothschild’s collection, but they are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History collection in New York (specimens 734023 and 734024) because of Rothschild’s romantic indiscretion with the unnamed peeress. Another drake described in a
later chapter was offered to the British Museum of Natural History in the late 1940s for £500, but they passed on the offer.

After finishing my work with time to spare before my train, I decided to have a look through Rothschild’s birthday present. The museum appears much as it did in the late 1800s. In other cities this sort of presentation has been done very poorly, such that the displays look dated rather than quaint, and the specimens look sad and neglected. At Tring, however, the effect is brilliant. The Victorian cabinets are painted black so as not to detract from the specimens, but with splashes of gold paint as though to remind you that no expense was spared when putting the whole thing together. Elegant wooden doors open to reveal magnificent and exotic insects, and there are gentle reminders to take care in closing the doors because the specimens are fragile. There are stuffed lions and tigers and rhinoceroses and eagles and herons and birds-of-paradise and sturgeon and sharks and…well, just about everything! On and on through gallery after gallery. The mind boggles to think that virtually everything in the museum is from Rothschild’s own collection. When the mind is simply too full to look at another hummingbird, the museum has a gift shop full of reasonably priced souvenirs, and a coffee shop to recharge the batteries. On its wall I spied a picture of Rothschild in a carriage drawn by a zebra, the perfect image for so eccentric a character.