The Curse of the Labrador Duck (24 page)

I had been warned that the Halberstadt Labrador Duck might not be quite what I was hoping for. In 1959, Paul Hahn had received a letter from Kuno Handtke of the Halberstadt museum, indicating that some of the skin on the neck of the specimen had come from a Mallard. These things happen, and as long as we know that the specimen is something of a patchwork quilt, no harm is done. However, shortly before my visit, Dr. Bernd Nicolai, current Director of the Museum Heineanum, warned me that the situation wasn’t even quite as good as that. Apparently only the head and neck of the specimen are from a Labrador Duck, and the remaining material from specimens of some other species. Well, if the goal is to see absolutely every Labrador Duck in the world, Halberstadt must still be worth a visit, I should think.

Nicolai had written to say that he would be bird-watching in Spain at the time of my visit, but his colleague Rüdiger Holz would be awaiting my arrival. He also told me the museum was immediately beside the city’s
Dom
, so I figured navigation by its spires was a good way to get to the museum from the train station. It was another hot day and I tried to avoid the temptation to sweat myself into the ground by walking on the shady side of each street.

Arriving at the museum I was finally able to use my entire “Hello, my name is…” speech, and the lady at the front desk had absolutely no trouble understanding me. How odd that for the past ten days, without knowing it, I had been speaking German with a Halberstadt accent. I was guided from the reception building through a gate, across a courtyard, and into an old building to meet Holz.

If you were asked to describe the appearance of a typical ornithologist, you might be inclined to use expressions like
weedy
or
willowy
or
reedy,
or some other plant-related comparison. This is a shame, because most ornithologists I know are hale, hardy, and tanned, wearing denim and leather, and altogether ready to scale the tallest mountain with a machete in their teeth. Holz is not the machete type, despite trying for the look with a rough-and-tumble beard. In describing him, perhaps I can use the word
etiolated
without being insulting, because only botanists know what it means.

Holz started off by showing me the museum’s library, which contains volumes on all sorts of natural history topics, with particular emphasis on birds. It has, for instance, a complete run of the
Journal für Ornithologie.
I didn’t realize that any library had a complete run. I wasn’t shown any books worth
350,000, but the library certainly represents a worthwhile regional resource.

While all very well and good, this was only a precursor to my visit with the Labrador Duck, even if pieces of it weren’t genuine manufacturer’s replacement parts. My host led me down a steep lane constructed of cobbles that hadn’t been reset in a while. We passed a wall with tributes to Halberstadt citizens long dead, which made up part of a churchyard wall. Eventually we arrived at an unlikely-looking unmarked building that Holz explained had been constructed 250 years before as a horse stable. We entered through a locked door, passed through another locked door, and then another locked door, before arriving at the bird collection housed in 120 locked wooden cabinets, stacked floor to ceiling. Halberstadt had not entirely been passed over by Allied bombing, and the museum had lost about 1,000 of its bird specimens. But locked away safe and sound in cabinet 1, along with their Carolina Parakeet and a kaka, was the sixth and last Labrador Duck of my German trip. We cleared some room at a bench, set down the duck, and plugged in a lamp. Holz left me to get to work.

All of my warning bells went off immediately. This specimen just didn’t ring true. It was too big to be a Labrador Duck, and all of the feathers were either black or white, with none of the gray and brown splotchy patches that I would have expected. Worse than that, it was very clear that all of its black feathers had started life white, and had been turned black with tar-like paint. The black neck ring was too wide. The black mid-crown stripe was too thin and too faint, started too close to the bill, and finished too far back on the neck. The cheek feathers should have been a bit stiff and, in an adult male, should have had a yellow tinge. This specimen had neither attribute. At least the beak was right. It had the right dimensions and the correct flappy bits along the front margin. Sadly, even the bill was messed up, as someone had painted it black and yellow-brown, obscuring some of the finer details.

And so I now proclaim to all and sundry that, other than the bill, the Halberstadt Labrador Duck is a fake. I suspect that somewhere in the depths of time, a lovely Labrador Duck specimen was attacked by moths or mice, such that the only salvageable bit was the bill. Not wanting to throw it away, Heine or one of his cronies had stuck it
on the body of a white domestic duck, and painted some bits of it black to more or less resemble an adult drake. Given that the paint job was rather crude, I suspect that the model for the paint job had been a drawing of a Labrador Duck and not another stuffed specimen. And in the couple of hundred years since this was done, no one with enough experience with Labrador Ducks had dropped by to notice the forgery. I suppose that someone could do DNA analysis of feathers taken from different parts of the specimen, but I would wager dimes to doughnuts such an analysis would show that the whole body is that of a white domestic duck. Holz’s grasp of English was not perfect, and I didn’t want to screw up the explanation, so I didn’t tell him. Instead, I dashed off a letter to Nicolai when I got home. I snapped a few photographs, including one of Holz holding the fake.

Before I left, I was invited to sign the museum’s guest book. Lots of museums have guest books, but I have never seen the like of the one at the Museum Heineanum. Leather bound and housed in a fancy slip cover, it had signatures of visiting biologists going back to the late nineteenth century. Out of reverence and respect, I used my favorite engraved silver ballpoint pen and printed neatly. Then Holz dashed off to get a digital camera to take a photo of me signing the book. With treatment like this, I was going to start to think that I was somebody important.

W
ITH FOUR HOURS
before my train pulled out of Halberstadt, I was determined to find out what was so reprehensible about the city that it had been expunged from every tour guide to Germany. At the tourist information office, I was given a very good map and an English guide,
Halberstadt and Its Picturesque Surroundings: Your Gateway to the Harz Mountains.
Passing the
Dom
, I had seen that it was the site of some rather serious construction efforts, and I asked the tourist information lady if it was open to visitors. “
Nein
, it is closed to two weeks. They have pets.” That’s odd, I thought. “Dogs and cats?” I asked. “
Nein
,” she replied, “
small
pets.” “Puppies and kittens?” I think she may have been going for “pests,” which only goes to show you that even God cannot protect you against cockroaches. I also received a small but glossy brochure describing three self-guided walking tours of the town. I had never been on a walking tour, self-guided
or otherwise, and over a lunch of salad and beer, I chose to treat myself to Walk Number One, with bits of Walks Two and Three thrown in to flesh out my Halberstadt experience.

My tour started off at the Stadtkirche St. Martini, patron saint of vermouth-based cocktails. The towers to either side of the entrance are of unequal size, and these have come to be an emblem of the town. How odd that a city emblem should be based on a building whose asymmetry probably resulted from a budget overrun. At one end of the
Domplatz
—the cathedral square—stands the Gothic Cathedral of St. Stephen. At the other end stands the Romanesque Liebfrauenkirche. To me it seemed as though the two churches were smirking at each other, each firm in the conviction that its God was bigger than the God of its rival.

In front of the cathedral sits the Lügenstein, the Stone of Lies, or Devil’s Stone. According to legend, when Satan saw that a church was being constructed, and not a tavern, he decided to use the rock to destroy the cathedral. The rock is only about 6 feet along its greatest axis, so Satan would have needed a fair few whacks to do much damage. In the nick of time, a tavern was built beside the cathedral, and the Devil was saved the trouble.

Just around the corner, I found number 11 Grubdenberg, the birth house of Ferdinand Heine Sr., founder of the natural history museum’s collection. Number 11 is next door to a nice-looking hotel, but the rest of the buildings on the block were boarded up and kind of rubbishy. Down the street, at Bakenstrasse 37, is a complex of buildings apparently known to locals as “little Venice” because a water channel used to flow under it. Or so said my self-guided tour brochure. Nothing suggested this was anything other than a fib, but I was willing to let it go.

Given the nature of my quest, I departed from Walk One, and tromped north to the
Ententeich
, stop number 10 on Walk Two. Now a duck pond, this little ditch was at one time part of the rampart and moat complex outside the town wall. I am very pleased to report that on the afternoon of my visit, there were several dozen ducks on the
Ententeich
. Most of them were snoozing in the shade and the rest were swimming. I didn’t have the sense to do either and resumed my tour of Walk One.

Stop number 7 was the
Grauer Hof
, or Gray Courtyard. It is a “charming collection of half-timbered houses, dating from around 1700.” It was truly charming, with no line of construction parallel to any other line. I would be a little irritated if someone put my street on an official town tour, but locals sunning themselves in their forecourt were very friendly and waved as I meandered by. The next stop was the
Johannistor
, a town gate and part of the town’s fortifications. It had been torn down in the 1800s in order to widen the road. Now, let me get this straight…you want me to stop and admire something that was torn down more than a century earlier? There was no picture of the ex-gate, and my imagination isn’t that good.

A little further along was the
Johanniskirche
. Constructed 350 years earlier, it is the biggest half-timbered church in Germany, and has a freestanding bell tower. Regrettably, the gate was locked, but being a pretty sneaky sort of fellow, I found a back entrance and was able to admire both the church and its freestanding bell tower.

I finished my tour with Walk One, stop number 13, a sculpture by local artist J. P. Hinz, attached to the side of the telephone exchange building. The work is entitled
Joy of Being Alive.
I was not immediately impressed, so I stepped back into a field of daisies to get a better look. As much as I tried, I couldn’t make the sculpture bring forth a joyous feeling. To me, it sort of looked like three musicians being crucified, while two other people lounged nearby, pretending not to notice. However, the House Sparrows, nesting in the sculpture’s various nooks and crannies, made me feel joyous.

So what can I say about Halberstadt? The self-guided walking tours are a little goofy, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not every retail space is occupied and not every patch of grass is uniformly green, but everyone I passed seemed pleasant and happy. The trams run nearly silently, and the buses are really posh, having been built by Mercedes-Benz. The fountains all had water and the town has a rich choice of dining opportunities. All in all, I think that editors of guidebooks to Germany need to give Halberstadt another look. My tour of Germany was coming to an end. It had all come down to a train ride, another train ride, a long walk, a taxi ride, another train, another train, a bus, a plane, another train, and one last train to take me back to Lisa. None too soon.

A
re you up for a little challenge? It may be trickier than it first sounds. Try to name five famous Belgians. Male or female, ancient or contemporary, rich or poor. I’ll even spot you the muscled actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, so you only need four more. I was once told that the most famous Belgian of all is Tintin, but since the boy reporter is, of course, a cartoon character, he can’t be counted as one of your four, and Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot doesn’t count either.

And therein lies one of the problems for poor old Belgium. It just doesn’t get the rave reviews showered on all of its neighbors. Most folks can come up with an image of France even if they have never been there. The same must be true for Germany and the Netherlands. But unless you have actually been there, your image of Belgium is probably a bit vague, involving an amalgam of impressions of France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Indeed, Brussels has a reputation for being unassertive, colorless, and just plain boring. In essence, the city has real identity problems. So when I set off to see a Labrador Duck at the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique in the
capital city, I decided to put a spin on it by looking for a little color. Literally.

This was to be my shortest duck-related adventure. Just a quick hop to Brussels, have a little look at their duck, and hop back out again. My mother, Kathleen, who has as sharp an eye for color as anyone else, joined me for this journey. She seemed very keen to be on this adventure, particularly since she didn’t have to do any of the planning, or fiddling around with airlines schedules or hotel reservations. My mother’s job was to tag along and have fun.

Traveling with the cheap blue-and-yellow airline, we didn’t fly into the real Brussels airport, but rather into the “Brussels South” airport near the city of Charleroi, about one-third of the country away from my target. As our flight descended through drizzle and heavy low clouds, the three predominant colors were blue-gray, green-gray, and glaucous.

After settling into our hotel, we strolled through the early evening streets of Charleroi in search of a meal. It was mid-September, and the sun had long since abandoned its attempts to push aside the rain clouds. The streets were quiet, even for a gloomy Monday evening. Dominating the neighborhood were banks, optical dispensers, employment agencies, and prostheses shops, punctuated by restaurants and bars. A few businesses displayed neon lights in their advertisements, which were reflected on the rain-slicked streets. The evening seemed to cry out for the strains of a saxophone or an accordion. You may choose to add Adolphe Sax to your list of famous Belgians. Adolphe invented, and named, the saxophone. I have no idea who invented the accordion. We found a bright and warm restaurant that served food of many types. With the help of my French-English dictionary, I translated the menu. My mother chose a ham and cheese (
jambon et fromage
) concoction from the “small appetite” column. I had
penne avec quatre fromages.
We washed these down with surprisingly small glasses of Bass Pale Ale. Back at the hotel, Mom got into the spirit of the color-themed adventure by pointing out that the bathroom was decorated in two shades of dull blue.

W
HEN
I
HAD
first peeked out of the hotel room window the next morning, the weather had been gray, windy, damp, and cold. On our
way to the train station, it had changed to bright blue, windy, damp, and cold. Charleroi isn’t a big city, but I still managed to get us a bit turned around and wound up in the red-light district. Only one lady was working the street, and another, nearly naked, lounged provocatively in a chair in a shop window. Not a lot of choice, but it was only 9:30 in the morning.

At the
gare
I went through my prattle in limited French to the man behind the counter. “
Bonjour. Je voudrais deux billets aller-retour pour Bruxelles Centrale, s’il vous plaît.
” I must have butchered the part about return tickets because he asked, in perfect English, “You want to come back?” Mom chuckled, and suggested that I start every conversation with “
Parlez-vous anglais?
” before annihilating the French language.

The clickety-clack train had gray seats, a gray floor, and gray-and-orange walls. As we pulled through the outskirts of Charleroi we passed gray and brown warehouses. Might we find the rest of Belgium as colorless as I had been warned? Some of the villages along the route were small enough that all the homes were detached. In larger towns, folks lived in very tall, very skinny, charming row houses. The train zipped past the town of Waterloo. Several days passed before it occurred to me that this was
the
Waterloo.

After detraining at Brussels’
Gare Centrale,
I told Mom about my unique form of navigation in foreign cities—following people who look as if they know where they are going and hoping for the best. For a change, it worked. We soon found ourselves in the shadow of the spire marking the Grande Place, the center of Brussels in almost every sense. The cobblestoned marketplace has been a gathering place for traders for about one thousand years. Today the architecture of many great European cities is dictated by the reconstruction efforts following World War II bombing. In contrast, the Grande Place owes its character to buildings erected after two days of cannon fire by the French in 1695, but I never discovered what residents of Brussels had done to irritate the neighbors. Trading guilds had constructed their guild houses to match dictates of the city, resulting in buildings in glorious harmony. The judicious use of gold relieves the possible monotony of the gray cobbles and gray-and-tan buildings. Statues of what I took to be kings, knights, saints, and gargoyles festoon the
town hall. My favorite was a gargoyle parrot. Some of the statuary may be missing an arm here or a head there, but the overall effect is stunning. The plaza, probably overflowing with sellers and buyers on a sunny day in July, was just pleasantly occupied on our mid-September midweek morning.

Tucked away in a corner of the square, we found the brass statue of Everard ’t Serclaes. Mom rubbed his arm, which is said to bring good luck. Not the luckiest fellow himself, he was murdered while defending Brussels in the fourteenth century. From the shine on Everard, he must be rubbed almost continuously. All over. Lucky devil. Before leaving the square, Mom found a shop that sold her a handmade Belgian lace table piece that cost almost exactly as much as our airfare. We then stumbled across one of the most famous landmarks in Brussels. It is, sadly, a small statue of a boy urinating. The original dates to the early seventeenth century. After attempts by the French and English to steal it a century later, it was finally nicked, broken, replicated, and remounted in 1817. In a corner shop close by, I spied the ugliest souvenir on the face of the Earth. It was a two-inch-tall replica of the peeing boy with a bottle opener sprouting from the top of his head.

We walked uphill to the escarpment that divides the two portions of Brussels and entered Parc de Bruxelles, once a hunting estate for mucky-mucks, redesigned as a public park in the late 1700s. We sat on a bench near a fountain at the park’s north end, admiring the tree-lined avenues and watching runners fill their lunch hour with fresh air. The sun played with clouds. When the sun briefly took the upper hand, it created a lovely rainbow in the fountain’s mist. Then the wind changed direction, giving us a good hosing down.

From the park, we walked east down the rue Belliard, aiming for the European Parliament, on the margin of the Parc Léopold. Just beyond, we should find the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles and their Labrador Duck. Our walk took us through the Big Business and Administrative and Don’t-You-Damned-Well-Forget-It District. I expected the odd restaurant for the lunchtime crowd. I expected the odd bar for the after-work crowd. Not a one to be seen. Our lunch would have to wait until after my examination of the duck. Walking through the Parc Léopold and past the Bibliothèque Solvay, we came
across a field full of young women playing baseball, using a tennis racquet instead of a bat, and hula hoops for bases. It seemed to be some sort of team-building exercise. Instead of the flamboyant colors of youth, each wore a white T-shirt and black sweat suit bottoms.

According to my contact at the institute, Georges Lenglet, the best way to find the museum building was first to find the European Parliament buildings, and then look for a yellow-and-orange tower. The first part was easy. The European Parliament is a behemoth. Then we scanned for a yellow-and-orange tower. Well, I suppose that color might be called yellow on a really sunny day, and that color could be mistaken for orange if it had an immediate transfusion of red. And yellow.

The Institut royal des Sciences naturelles is not the oldest museum in Europe. It was inaugurated by Léopold II in 1891. The builders designed it to show off a particularly stunning set of iguanodons found near Mons twenty years earlier. The museum’s promotional material didn’t explain what the iguanodons were doing in Mons. The museum’s ornithological collection ranks twenty-fourth in the world, with about 100,000 items. The portions of the museum open to the public display lots of minerals, shells, and stuffed animals and their skeletons, but the real highlight is the dinosaur exhibit.

Arriving at the appointed hour of 13:00, I found that Lenglet was the quietest and least-assuming man I had met on my duck quest. He wore a sensible white lab coat and held his white-crowned head bent forward slightly, as though his brain were too heavy to be held perfectly upright. Anyone whose job title includes expressions like
vertebrate systematics
and
biochemical taxonomy
surely has a rather full brain. He was gentle, polite, and helpful, and probably had a lot of good stories to tell, but I bet those stories aren’t drawn out of him easily. He passed completely on the usual pleasantries of: “How was your journey? How are you enjoying Belgium? Did you manage to find the Charleroi red-light district? Did you like our statue of the peeing boy?”

Lenglet took us to room 15.55, then rolled the Labrador Duck down the hallway on an antique lab cart to his office, where I was to complete my examination. I appreciated his exaggerated care in negotiating every bump in the floor and every turn in the hallway. Not
everyone treats these specimens with sufficient reverence. He pulled up a chair for my mother while I examined and measured the duck. He also earned very big points from me by fetching her a cup of coffee.

This was another taxidermic preparation of an adult drake. While making detailed notes about the appearance of the duck, a strange question came to mind. If, years from now, a Labrador Duck were stolen, and then one came up for sale, would my notes be sufficiently detailed to give evidence in a courtroom? This one was a pretty standard-issue Labrador Duck, but I felt it was notable for two things. First, it was remarkably clean for a very old specimen. You can put this down to the glass case that fits over the preparation. Second, his tail was broken. Not as in broken off, but as in split into a left and a right side. I wanted to have a really good poke to figure out what might have happened to it, but felt that if I did, it might drop off in my hand. I also had notes about exactly where it was painted (legs, toes, and webs, but not the bill) and with what colors (black). I jotted in my book that it had small holes in the inner web of the left foot. I measured the bill and wings with precision. So, if a defense attorney ever asks me, “Are you sure this is the same duck you saw in Brussels forty years ago?” I will be able to give my answer with certainty. By then, stealing an extinct duck will probably be a capital offense. Regrettably, virtually nothing is known about the origins of this specimen. The Royal Institute got it from another Brussels museum sometime before 1845. With a sense of humor that not everyone would understand, my mother named this duck Georges, after our host.

Giving my eyes periodic breaks from squinting at the duck, I looked around Lenglet’s office. It was an absolute masterpiece. At least eight times as big as my office, it had a wealth of bench space, plenty of bookshelves, and room for all the filing cabinets that a scientist could ever want. The office was many floors up, and with windows on two sides, it had a great view. There were stuffed fish on the wall and foul-looking creatures in jars of foul-looking preservative. To add to the whole effect, the office had a spiral staircase that led
to a second level, which housed Lenglet’s research library. Tucked in the corner of the library was a grotesque skeleton. It was like a road accident, and I couldn’t help but look at it. Brown with age, it was the skeleton of a very small child, topped by a huge and grossly deformed skull. “Hydrocephaly?” I asked. “Yes,” Lenglet responded. He described his office as a museum within a museum.

L
EAVING THE INSTITUTE,
Mom and I zigzagged through the buildings of the European Parliament before aiming for the train station. Don’t let anyone tell you that Brussels is all gray. Some of it is silver, and some of it is sand-colored. I explained to Mom that I particularly hate tall glass buildings because of their impact on migrating songbirds. Traveling at night and navigating by the stars, when they pass over cities they can become disoriented by twinkling lights reflecting off the glass. Many die when they collide with buildings. To illustrate, I pointed out a small dead bird at the edge of the sidewalk.

We descended to train platform 6 to await the 15:36 train to Charleroi with about one hundred other travelers. At 15:30 a train pulled up to the platform. An information screen confidently told us that this was the 15:36 to Charleroi. A few people got on board, but most of us held our ground, looking at each other skeptically. One minute later when the doors closed and the train rattled away, the information screen told us that we had all missed our chance, and that the next train would depart at 15:47 for Brussels Midi. Everyone groaned, and a few vulgar words were uttered in both French and Flemish. “Oops, no, wait a minute,” proclaimed the information screen. “My mistake,” it said. “The
next
train will be the one for Charleroi. Sorry!” I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who wondered where the riders on the 15:30 mystery train finished up.