The Curse of the Labrador Duck (28 page)

Mlíkovský led us through a side door and we began a long ascent to the museum’s floor with the most rarefied air. When we got to the top, we followed Mlíkovský down a long series of halls and ramps with more twists and turns than a Gordian knot. I couldn’t have found my way back with a map, a compass, a trail of bread crumbs, and a tracker dog.

Mlíkovský deserves hero status. Besides facilitating our visit, he had delved deep into the archives to see what he could find about the male and female Labrador Ducks the museum was justifiably proud of. He found reference to them in the 1842 collection of Baron Christoph Fellner von Feldegg, who had purchased them for 12 gulden. Regrettably, no information was available about when, where, or by whom the ducks were collected. Feldegg died three years later, and seven years after that the Czech museum’s Director, Antonin Frič, purchased a portion of Feldegg’s huge collection of 4,500 birds. Strangely, the Labrador Ducks were not specifically mentioned. Even so, by 1854 they were listed as part of the collection of stuffed birds safely housed in the Czech museum. The catalogue system there has jumped around a bit over the years, and my drake and hen are now known by the numbers PMP P6V 4052 and PMP P6V 4053, respectively. And if that wasn’t enough, Mlíkovský was able to tell us that
the Czech term for Labrador Duck is
Kachna labradorská
, although he favoured
Turpan labradorský,
meaning Labrador Scoter.

Prague has long been proud of its pair of Labrador Ducks. The drake and hen are mounted on a single contoured base, the former placed a little higher than his mate. Sand and seashells had been glued to the base to simulate an algae-covered seashore. They were waiting for us in Mlíkovský’s office. As soon as I walked in, I said, “Oh, oh!” Lisa jumped in and said, “They’re both males, aren’t they?” Well, yes, dear, thank you for stealing my thunder. They are, indeed, both drakes. The bird thought to be a female is almost certainly a very young male. Mottled gray and brown all over, there was no evidence of a black neck ring or stripe on the head, and at first glance it certainly looked like a female. Even so, the specimen has a swoosh on his bill that I have found on almost all male specimens, no matter how young. Mlíkovský was philosophical about the revelation. “Well, it’s best to know.” Both specimens had been given cherry-red eyes, which seemed a little big for their heads. The taxidermist had been overly enthusiastic with the paint, giving both specimens orange legs and toes.

After my examination was complete, Mlíkovský gave us a tour behind the scenes. The Labrador Ducks normally reside in a locked cabinet with two Great Auks, a couple of Huias, nine Passenger Pigeons, a Carolina Parakeet, and a Dodo skull. I took a photograph of Mlíkovský with the Dodo skull, a priceless artifact. These specimens won’t be in their present locality for long. The building was 115 years old, and while the front end was maintained beautifully, the back end hadn’t been. After years of insufficient care, the research collection is now due to be moved to the outskirts of Prague, to a facility better suited for preservation.

Just before our day came to an end, I went for a run through an early-evening mist that made the cobbled streets slick. I ran down a street that changed its name repeatedly, then south along the Vltava, crossing at a railway bridge and cutting back across the Jiráskuåv Most. I stopped halfway across the bridge to remind myself that I might never pass this way again. “Breathe it all in while you can, lad.” My upper bronchial tree burned a bit from the smog. My legs were gloriously tired from our adventures. The bridge deck trembled a bit
as each passing car hit an unfilled pothole. I could hear wailing sirens on both sides of the river. The city was gently lit as Prague’s one million citizens settled in for the evening. We were five days short of the Czech Republic’s six-month anniversary of entry into the European Union. I think great things are afoot.

T
o my way of thinking, a one-hour airline flight is likely to bring you to a close friend. With a little luck, naughtiness will ensue. Family members or business deals are probably waiting at the end of a two-hour flight. You will be doing well if you get a hug or a handshake. If you are on a flight for four hours, you are likely heading somewhere exotic, hopefully with sandy beaches, palm trees, and a never-closing bar tab. In contrast, a nine-hour flight is simply an insult to the system. Nine hours in the air bring on dehydration, anoxia, disorientation, and nausea, particularly since longer flights are almost guaranteed to end with gut-wrenching turbulence and excessive yaw. And yet nine hours in the air were needed to get Jane and me across an ocean to the eastern United States, and a chance to snap up most of the remaining ducks all in one go.

I trust that you have been paying attention. If so, then you will have noticed that my wife’s name is Lisa, not Jane. Lisa was home continuing her life-and-death research into the recovery of heart muscle following a heart attack. I was traveling to the United States with Jane Caldwell, a Scottish cardiac specialist who had never been
to the U.S., but was keen for the experience. I had absolutely no intention of having a coronary, but even so, I felt a little more secure about life in the presence of a heart specialist. Everyone on Earth has an image of America. Jane was keen to see how America measured up to all the hype.

Before Jane and I set off from Glasgow, several friends had asked me how the United States had wound up with so many Labrador Ducks. I explained that it came down to a combination of geography and money. Labrador Ducks were silly enough to spend their winters in the waters around New York City, where they made good targets for shotguns. Secondly, Labrador Ducks became rare at the time when American museums found themselves with more money than their European counterparts, and so the Americans snapped up every rarity that became available. When it comes to stuffed birds, England has the single biggest collection in the world, but in second, third, fourth, and fifth places are collections in America.

There was just one small problem with this trip to snap up ducks in the eastern United States. It was not exactly clear how many Labrador Ducks were to be found there. The number that Paul Hahn had cooked up forty-five years earlier, something like twenty-four, didn’t exactly tally. I was going to have to play it by ear.

J
ANE HAD SHOWN
no reluctance to share rooms to cut costs, but when she saw our hotel room in Washington, D.C., she must have doubted my taste. The wall had holes where repairs to the electrical system had been carried out, the bathtub plug wouldn’t keep water in, and the plug hole didn’t drain the tub fast enough to keep a shower from turning into a bath. Long past its prime, the hotel seemed to cater mainly to school groups from Posthole, Nebraska, on a tour of the nation’s capital. The bedside clock said it was 8 p.m. Our brains said it was 1 a.m. Our bodies said they hated us. We gave in and went to sleep.

Not willing to jump right into an examination of the Smithsonian’s four Labrador Ducks after a long journey from Britain, I had scheduled a day of rest, relaxation, and exploration, and so Jane and I were off to tour some of Washington’s great attractions, starting with the Mall. This grand, tree-lined avenue seems to be the
American response to the Imam Square in Isfahan or Tiananmen Square in Beijing—built to impress visitors for centuries to come. The Mall, a mile long, with the U.S. Capitol at one end and the Washington Monument at the other, is lined by components of the Smithsonian Institution. The site of endless protests and celebrations, it is also the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. made his immortal “I have a dream” speech.

Having had a good go with her guidebook of Washington, Jane declared that Capitol Hill was a must-see. We found ourselves at the booth distributing free tickets for the Capitol Hill tour. I gather that on a warm day in summer, you need to line up for a tour ticket six months before you are born. Arriving early in the morning on a cold and windy day in March, we had only thirty minutes to kill until our tour.

At 10:15, Jane and I and thirty-eight other lucky ticket holders found ourselves at the marshaling area for the Capitol tour. We marched halfway up a hill, where we were marshaled again. All of our belongings were x-rayed, and then we were marshaled again. We each were given an extensive list of items prohibited in the galleries of the U.S. Capitol, including electric stun guns, martial arts weapons, guns, fireworks, razors, Mace, letter openers, battery-operated electronic devices, hand lotion, perfume, rodents larger than 8 inches, and rabid livestock. Marshaled again, we were led the remainder of the way up the hill, where we entered the Capitol Building by an entirely unassuming west-side entrance. Upon gaining the building, we were marshaled again. Now thirty minutes into our sixty-minute tour, we had yet to see anything of interest or hear anything worthwhile. The Capitol Hill police could probably teach the American armed forces a thing or two about security, but they could learn a lot from Disney about dealing with groups of visitors.

On the day of our visit, a new statue was being installed. Hence all of the best bits of the tour were not on offer that day. Our tour guide did her best. She gestured in the air and asked us to imagine what the rotunda looked like. Rotund, I would have thought. She was a fount of famous dates and names of architects and vice presidents, which tumbled out at a frightening pace. Between the tour and a pamphlet, I managed to scrape together a few details. The original
Capitol was designed by someone named Thornton. It has housed the U.S. Congress ever since moving south from Philadelphia in 1800. In 1814 a bunch of drunken Canadians visiting Washington burned down the whole shebang, leaving just the naked exterior walls. It took four years of reconstruction before the north and south wings were reopened, and a further seven years for completion of the center building to join them.

With the Capitol tour behind us, we were spoiled for choice. Much of the Mall is occupied by the Smithsonian Institution. A legacy of the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland, the Smithsonian is not just a museum, but a tribute to marital infidelity. It is also an amazing amalgam of eighteen museums and galleries, nine research centers, and the National Zoo, making it the largest museum and research complex in the world. The combined collection includes 143.5 million items, one for every 1.94 people in the U.S. The whole shootin’ match was overseen by the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lawrence M. Small. By all accounts he had been doing a smashing job, but then he had a little slip-up. According to an article in the
Washington Post,
Small had registered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It seems that his private collection of Brazilian tribal art contained feathers of protected bird species. Oops.

With all this choice, it was a challenge to know where to start. “Ay, it’s all six a half a dozen to me,” Jane claimed; “I’m not particularly fussed.” And so I put in my bid for the National Air and Space Museum. Like every other little science geek growing up in the 1960s, I was fascinated by everything to do with space, and, dear God in Heaven above, this museum has it all. As a child, I would have sold my soul for a chance to visit it. Even at this point in my life, I would have happily sold Jane’s soul for the chance. Luckily for Jane, I wasn’t asked to. Like the Capitol Building, the museum was free, and our possessions got another jolly good dose of X-ray radiation. When I held my camera to my ear, I could hear it humming.

The items on display really were top-shelf. We saw the Wright brothers’
Flyer
used at Kitty Hawk to make the first sustained powered flight in 1903. Then it was the
Spirit of St. Louis
, which took Charles Lindbergh 3,610 miles on the first solo flight across the
Atlantic in thirty-three hours and thirty minutes in 1927. Near the entrance to the museum we saw
Friendship 7,
which circled Earth three times in 1962, and the
Gemini 4
spacecraft that allowed Edward Higgins White II to make a twenty-minute space walk in 1965 while his companion, James McDivitt, looked on jealously from inside the craft. We were even permitted to rub a small slice of moon rock retrieved by the crew of
Apollo 17
. Given that the six combined missions that put men on the moon had brought back 838 pounds of rock, when this sliver is worn away by the hands of thousands of visitors, there will be plenty of opportunity to replace it.

On display were a backup Mars Rover, a backup Hubble telescope, and a backup Skylab. The originals were, of course, on Mars, in orbit, and in a billion tiny fragments after a fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in July 1979. But for me, the absolute pinnacle of the museum’s displays was the command module of
Apollo 11
, the mission that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon, along with the third guy, who had to stay in orbit in the command module, and whose name no one ever remembers. Along with a good chunk of humankind, I was glued to the television on July 20, 1969, when Armstrong messed up his immortal one-line speech. He meant to say, “That’s one small step for a man, (and) one giant leap for mankind,” but he forgot the eighth word, and the omission meant that the sentence didn’t make much sense. To give the man his due, the third member of the expedition was Michael Collins.

It was time for our next chunk of the Smithsonian. My camera avoided a fourth X-ray, but got a ruddy good cavity search when we arrived to see some natural history. According to the promotional literature, the museum’s floor space is greater than eighteen National Football League fields. By my calculations, that makes it a little smaller than twelve Canadian Football League fields, or a shade over one-fifth the area of Vatican City.

This Natural History Museum is a tribute to what can be accomplished with the will to be great and very deep pockets. Jane and I saw only a small portion of the exhibits, but we were gob-smacked with what we saw. For instance, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was told that the museum’s meteorite exhibition was the best in the world. Big meteorites, little meteorites, a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite…
we even saw a vial of diamond dust isolated from a meteorite. The Smithsonian has managed to gather 20,000 of these space travelers.

A guard in the next room admitted that the Hope diamond was probably the most popular exhibit in the museum. “Yeah, and it’s probably worth more than everything else in the building put together,” he said. When it was first cut, the Hope diamond weighed a whopping great 112 carats, but it has been hacked at over the years, until today it weighs in at a comparatively slim 45.53 carats. It is 25.6 mm long, 21.8 mm wide, 12 mm deep, and surrounded by tourists. It has a faceted girdle and extra facets on the pavilion. I once dated a woman who could be described in exactly the same way. My date was either pink or taupe, depending on the lighting; the Hope diamond is either blue, deep-blue, dark gray-blue, or violet, depending on who is looking at it. Unlike my date, the gem is semiconductive. Exactly like my date, the Hope diamond phosphoresces red under ultraviolet light. The Hope diamond was donated to the Smithsonian in 1958. My date is, presumably, still skulking through the underbrush.

Jane and I went looking for the Smithsonian’s display of stuffed birds, but before finding it, we came to the Hall of Mammals. With an impressive 274 mammals, the display occupies 25,000 square feet, or a bit less than half an NFL football field, or the area covered by 131,000 CD jewel cases. Special emphasis had been given to mammals of the African savannah. Every few minutes, the lights in the hall dimmed, and flashes from hidden lights mimicked lightning. Moments later, hidden speakers issued a deep, chest-drubbing rumble of thunder. Small children ran to grab the trouser legs of their parents. They seemed to be listening to some primitive voice that said “run for cover.” I found myself reaching to turn up my collar against the imminent rainfall that never came.

After that, the display of birds came as a huge disappointment. With no signs, we had to ask for directions. We were directed to the basement and two dead-end hallways hidden behind an escalator. Overhead light bulbs were burned out, but in the gloom I spotted impressive cobwebs. The whole exhibit consisted of a few archaic cabinets stuffed with locally collected birds, badly in need of a thorough cleaning. Only one other party had found the birds. A father and his two daughters were told by a passing security guard that the Passenger
Pigeon on display had been the last one alive. He explained that the bird, a female, had died in captivity at thirteen years of age, after years of failed attempts to find her a mate. Hang on…that doesn’t sound right to me.

After the guard left, I gave the family the correct details. The last ever Passenger Pigeon, nicknamed Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens at the grand old age of twenty-nine. Efforts to find her a mate had indeed proved futile. As an extraordinarily gregarious bird, attempts to breed a single pair in captivity probably would have been futile anyway. When she passed away, Martha’s corpse was donated to the Smithsonian. Despite what the guard claimed, Martha was safely locked away in the research collection, waiting for the day when the museum has room for a proper bird display.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
saw me facing my next great duck adventure. Being a gentleman, and wanting to give Jane every opportunity to wake up slowly, I went for a stroll. Even at 7 a.m., I found an awful lot of armed officers in the area around the White House. An antiwar protestor seemed to have settled in for a long wait in a green-and-white tent across the street. He was probably visible from Bush’s bedroom window, and it is a tribute to the American state that he was allowed to continue his nonviolent protest in spite of the embarrassment he must have caused the senior administration. Despite all of the security, a gray squirrel ran back and forth with impunity through the fence and across the White House lawn.