The Curse of the Labrador Duck (16 page)

How often can you say that the most beautiful thing on the horizon is a casino? This four-hour trip took six hours, getting us to Ann Arbor many hours behind schedule, long after dark, and way too late to get anything to eat. I swore to God Almighty that I would never get on an Amtrak train again.

Lisa never lost her good humor, but I needed something to give me a sense of perspective. Our cab driver provided just that. Farhan had arrived in Ann Arbor just two months before, having escaped from the war in Somalia. He was bright and happy and made me realize that, while I had the right to feel tired, I had no right to be grumpy. He offered to be our driver the next day, but we explained that we hoped to see Ann Arbor on foot.

I
WAS NOT
well rested the next morning, due in part to the inability of our very costly hotel to meet the needs of someone in need of sleep and a shower. Someone should explain to them that you can’t turn a smoking room into a non-smoking room by simply taking out the ashtray when the guests arrive. When the pillows get to be as thin as the towels, it is probably time to toss them out. When the towels become as rough as the non-slip shower mat, it is probably time to replace those as well. I remembered Farhan, and the death and destruction in Somalia, and felt much less critical.

Whichever advertising genius described our hotel as “close” to the University of Michigan was probably the same person who described mad cow disease as a cure for high beef prices. At least we got to see a good chunk of the town as we walked north to the university to see my next duck. According to its promotional literature, the University of Michigan has more than 38,000 students. The institution brags that its graduates include one U.S. president, seven NASA astronauts, three Supreme Court justices, and 248 people convicted of illegal duplication and distribution of videotapes. The city has a population of 109,000, but Michigan Stadium seats 105,000 for university football games. Oddly, attendance at a single football game almost exactly matches the number of visitors to the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art in a year. The art museum is free.

The streets around the university were lined with quirky cafés, second-hand bookstores, cheap bars, and clothing stores catering
to fashionable college students. These establishments must all suffer quite badly when school is not in session. The university buildings themselves are opulent, and we had the impression that the architects had been influenced by the European tradition of post-secondary institutions, with lots of stonework and plenty of unnecessary ornamentation. This place is here to stay.

We found the Museum of Zoology but then walked around looking a little helpless until a hot dog vendor pointed out the front door. Admission to the museum’s public displays is free, so we wandered in. The problem with this arrangement is that there is no reception desk and no one to direct us to the research collection. We spotted a door labeled Museum Personnel Only, found it to be unlocked, and strolled through. Up some stairs, down a corridor, around a corner, up an elevator, along another corridor, until we found Janet Hinshaw, Collections Manager of the Bird Division, working away at a desk in a back room.

I don’t think that Hinshaw immediately registered who we were or what we were doing there. To give her credit, I had made the appointment to see the duck four months earlier. She recovered quickly and led Lisa and me to Interior Steel Equipment cabinet 27A, and brought out the garage sale duck. Hinshaw carried the duck to a workbench with good natural lighting, and I settled in. In most cases, curatorial types get on with their work and leave me to mine, but Hinshaw was pleased to chat with Lisa as I measured. We swapped a few stories as often as I could break my concentration without breaking the duck, and we had a pleasant little time.

The drake is a pleasing presentation, a taxidermic mount on a simple wooden base, stained and varnished. The feathers around his bill are a bit grease-stained, but at least no one had ruined his bill or feet by painting them. The duck’s wooden base was inscribed “AJ Allbee and Sons,” and an illegible name of a town in Vermont. Might Allbee have been the duck’s taxidermist? Also visible on the base, below the name, were the words
Manufacturers of Doors, Sash, Blinds.
According to the website of the township of Derby in Vermont,
A.J. Allbee operated a sash, door, and blind factory in Derby village in the nineteenth century, employing six hands and generating $5,000 worth of stock annually. Rather than having been put together by a taxidermist named Allbee, I think that someone made a base for the Labrador Duck using a discarded crate from the factory owned by Allbee. The duck probably has nothing to do with either Allbee or Vermont.

After finishing my work, Hinshaw gave Lisa and me a little tour. The University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology in Ann Arbor has about 200,000 stuffed bird specimens, which is 1.83 birds for every man, woman, and child in the city. Among these is an impressive collection of Kirtland’s Warblers (on the road to recovery after a close brush with extinction) and Dusky Seaside Sparrows (gone after a full-on collision with extinction). Hinshaw seemed very proud of the scientific value of the specimens, including a stuffed extinct Heath Hen and the extinct-or-very-nearly-so Eskimo Curlew. Unlike other institutions of this sort, the museum wasn’t smelly. The story goes that a long-gone curator had been allergic to mothballs, and instituted a policy of killing pests using a less fragrant insecticide.

And so our week-long duck adventure in America came to an end. In the morning we caught a cab to the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County airport, and our plane took off just five minutes before a colossal blackout that blanketed most of eastern Canada and the northeastern United States and stranded airline passengers for several days.

L
ife is full of opportunities that seem like a good idea at the time. Time-share condominiums, lap dogs, and amateur dramatics come to mind. When I first received notice about a conference on European museum bird collections in Leiden, the Netherlands, it seemed like a perfect opportunity. I knew there were two stuffed Labrador Ducks in Leiden. The conference would be full of curators of European museums that I still needed to travel to. And the conference was a full year away.

The best way to be involved fully at a conference is to make a presentation. This provided something of a problem, since I was likely to be the only person at the conference who was not involved in the curatorial care of stuffed birds in Europe. As an outsider, might a useful (perhaps “irritating”) topic be a summary of all of the things I thought curators were doing wrong? A user’s perspective on museum cock-ups, as it were?

Not quite brave enough to venture into this myself, I contacted Errol Fuller, who had made his feelings about the cock-ups of museum curators very clear on many occasions. Errol indicated that he would be pleased to co-author a presented paper in Leiden and take half of the grief for it. So we submitted an abstract, which was immediately
accepted by the conference organizers, and wrote the date on our calendars. After discussing topics we thought most important, I put together a supporting presentation, booked my transatlantic flights, reserved a hotel room in Leiden, and paid my conference fees.

Oh, but surely the conference would not be enough to fill a weekend. Sixteen time zones, seemingly unending flights, a conference, and an oral presentation—surely I could do better than that. Remembering a colleague at the university in Leiden, Hans Slabbekoorn, who also did research on the songs of birds, I offered to give a presentation on that bit of my research just before the conference started. Done!

Luckily, the conference happened to fall during the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada. So I could, by missing just three lectures, fly across the Atlantic, ignore jet lag brought on by the first eight time zones, spend about ninety minutes measuring the two Labrador Ducks at the national museum, make a sixty-minute presentation at the university, rip back to make a twenty-minute presentation at the conference, meet a lot of people and shake a lot of hands, eat some Dutch pancakes, drink as much foreign beer as I could, and then zip back across another eight time zones, just in time to give my Tuesday lecture at 8 a.m.

When reality set in, I had to give serious consideration to my loss of sanity. It was costing me several thousand dollars for flights, $400 for a hotel room, and $300 for conference fees, and the only tangible result would be my written notes on the colors and linear dimensions of two more Labrador Ducks. But just to make it seem a little worse, the day before flying out of Calgary, I received an email message from Errol explaining that some unspeakable horror had come up, and that he might not be able to join me at the conference. He hoped to jump on a flight at the last minute, but I wasn’t to hold my breath.

I
WOKE TO
face the morning of an action-packed Friday in Leiden with a headache. It has always seemed unfair to me to wake to a hangover not preceded by heavy drinking. Suspecting dehydration, I downed a lot of juice and milk with my complimentary breakfast in the hotel lounge.

Setting off for the museum, which I knew to be quite close to the train station, I clutched the city map that I had printed from the
Internet. Having walked about two blocks, I cursed my forty-five-year-old eyes and my long day of travel, because I couldn’t make out any of the tiny street names on the map. And so I resorted to my time-honored mode of orientation in a strange city—I followed the main flow of traffic on the assumption that everyone must be going to the same place I was.

Vehicular traffic was light, but there was a steady stream of bicycles, all propelled with a great sense of purpose. These were not the high-tech mountain-bike-racing bike hybrids I was accustomed to, but something that I remember from the 1960s, with wide fenders, a broad and sensible seat, and a small satchel mounted under the seat with a single wrench for roadside repair. It’ll get you there and back and, best of all, no one would want to steal it. Among cyclists, schoolchildren outnumbered shopkeepers and office workers by about two to one.

Going in the right direction or not, I had a wonderful ramble. I was the only person at that hour without a coat on, something to do with being a cold-hardened Canadian, I suppose. The tide of commuters took me through tidy mid- and high-density housing, three and four stories high. With sidewalks, bicycle corridors, and automobile lanes, all neatly partitioned off, Leiden seemed a sensible and orderly place. By the time the morning commute had swept me to the train station, I could see the gleaming tower of Naturalis, just a few blocks away, beckoning me. Once again, my version of Zen navigation had served me well.

Naturalis is the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, founded in 1820. The first King Willem assembled it by drawing together several large collections of natural history artifacts into a single museum. Early in the twentieth century the collection was moved to a specifically designed museum building in Leiden. That wasn’t sufficient for the good people of the Netherlands, however, and they constructed a sparkling new facility, opening to the public in 1998. As evidence of just how wonderful this facility is, in 2001 the turnstile admitted its one millionth visitor.

This is no little backwater penny-ante research facility. The collection includes more than 5 million insects, 2 million other spineless animals, and 570,000 braver animals with backbones. For those who
like their natural history to be really long dead, there are 1,160,000 fossils, as well as 440,000 stones and minerals. Among recently extinct species in the collection are a quagga (think of a cross between a horse and a zebra), a thylacine (Tasmanian marsupial wolf), a blaauwbok (something that a cat hacked up), both Cape and Barbary lions, a Javan Lapwing, a Great Auk, and two Labrador Ducks. If you desperately want to see a stuffed White-winged Sandpiper, a trip to Leiden is in your future, because Naturalis has the only one.

A portion of this amazing collection resides in the part of the museum open to the public. I was scheduled to see that a bit later in the weekend. From the outside it looked cheery and welcoming. The vast majority of the research collection is housed separately in a great silver monolith towering 200 feet above the city.

The collection building is awe-inspiring. In a city where most buildings are just three or four stories, this tower was impossible to miss. Not a window perforated its exterior surface, which is sculpted like the skin of a snake. Security was tight. My appointment was for 8:30, and in typical fashion I arrived early. I was permitted through a hermetically sealed door and invited to sit in an alcove where I could neither advance nor retreat; in essence, I could cause no trouble whatsoever. René Dekker, Curator of Birds at Naturalis, had warned me that he might be a bit late because of traffic congestion, and so I settled in for a little wait. As other museum employees arrived, each offered me cheerful greetings, and although I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, no one seemed to be insulted by my reply of “Good morning.”

Eventually, Dekker swept in. He seemed exactly the sort of fellow who should be featured in television advertisements for sports cars—enthusiastic, friendly, and accommodating, with a glint in his eyes that said he would never grow old. We flicked through one security door after another; it was apparent that if you were to somehow sneak into the building, you wouldn’t get far. Or out. Dekker settled me in at a work desk and locked the door behind him, and I got down to examining my ducks.

Both the hen and the drake were in really fine shape. The feet were unpainted, and not nearly so bashed up as most specimens I had seen. The taxidermist had been judicious in painting the bills of both specimens, with very little paint splashed up on feathers above the bills. The right side of the male’s face around the eye and cheek had seen better days; perhaps that was the side where he had been shot. The female had patches of glaucous feathers, particularly on her wings, which I had not encountered on earlier specimens. Both birds stood on small wooden bases, painted white. In both cases, in neat script on a card in black ink above carefully penciled guide lines, were the words
Voyage du Prince de Neuwied. Acquis en 1863 Amérique du Nord.

The slightly longer version of the story says German naturalist Prinz (Prince) Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied collected the ducks when he traveled to North America early in the nineteenth century. Museum officials in Leiden acquired the pair in 1863, probably as part of an exchange of specimens with Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum. It’s anyone’s guess whether Prince Neuwied ever visited the regions where Labrador Ducks were found and shot them himself, or
traded for them, or found them dead at the side of a busy carriageway. Today, when nosy ornithologists aren’t poking and peering at them, the ducks sit side by side in a special room for the museum’s most valued specimens, with dim lighting and heavy security.

It may have been jet lag, and it may have been a lack of sleep, but a very curious feeling came over me as I examined this pair. As a couple, they seemed unlucky. They were due to spend some approximation of eternity side by side, but never really together. A good guess is that they will outlast me by about 450 years, but only as star-crossed lovers. Heaven knows, they may have been shot decades apart, or they may have been collected as a mated pair—Prince Neuwied didn’t say. Perhaps they hatched a brood of cute little Labrador Ducklings in the nether regions of northern Canada and guided them to the wintering grounds before getting blasted by a collector. Clearly, I was getting a little lightheaded. After nearly two hours of measurements and careful consideration, I telephoned Dekker so that he could let me out of the locked room and escort me from the building.

L
EIDEN HAS BEEN
strongly influenced by its university, but unlike Champaign-Urbana or Ann Arbor, this influence has been going on for more than seven centuries. The center of the community is full of the sorts of restaurants, cafés, and bars that students and tourists alike enjoy. One large square featured a number of fast-food joints as well as three restaurants distinguished by the names ’t Panne koekenhuysje, Pannekoeke Backer van Dam, and Pannekoekenhuis, all presumably featuring pancakes. I wandered past a windmill, along canals, and over small arched bridges. Surprisingly, there seemed to be no park benches along the canals, so I couldn’t kick back for a few minutes to watch the citizens of Leiden flow by me.

I found the Evolutionary Biology Building, right where Slabbekoorn said it would be. He met me in the reception area, and I was slightly disappointed with myself to feel jealous that Slabbekoorn was more handsome than any scientist has the right to be. We chatted about life and birds and research in his office, and he then took me on a tour of the building, introducing me to professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. This single building had more people working in the field of cultural evolution than in all of Canada.

After lunch, a healthy group assembled in a lecture hall for my seminar, and I dug in. I had prepared a slide presentation rather than using PowerPoint. Good thing, too, as the computer projection unit had been stolen, ripped clean out of the ceiling. The topic was an overview of my work on songs of sparrows and New World warblers, and I was a little worried about getting across subtle concepts to a group whose first language was not English. I needn’t have worried, though, as my version of English was better understood in Leiden than it had been in Dublin. Along with methodology, results, and interpretation, I tried to throw in some anecdotes about the wilds of Canada (grizzly bear stories always go over well in Europe), and laughs came at the appropriate times. My seminar was followed by another ninety minutes of talks and tours with gracious folks in the department.

I retraced my steps through the city, over canal bridges and along centuries-old streets, back to Naturalis for the start of the conference, to find the opening reception in full swing. I quickly found Clem Fisher from Liverpool, and a group from the Natural History Museum in Tring, most of whom I had met on previous Labrador Duck quests. We spent the next hour drinking Dutch beer. I found myself beside Katrina Cook, who had just begun an appointment as a curator at Tring. She had the dark, sultry good looks and sexy swagger of an Eastern European who might have seduced British spies in the Cold War era. With bellies full of beer, we listened to an opening address by Michael Walters (Santa Claus) who told us about his life as curator of the world’s largest collection of bird eggs at Tring. We then sallied forth into the night in search of more beer and perhaps some food.