The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  My first letter, sent to Mr. O’Connell’s address as of 1977, received no response. I then dashed a letter off to the Central Scotland Chamber of Commerce in Falkirk, explaining that I was searching for O’Connell and his Labrador Duck egg. They leapt straight to the task. Executive Director Ken Whamond wrote to say that their initial inquiries had failed to find O’Connell, but that they were willing to continue searching if I wished. They also sent me a copy of a letter from Bob McGowan of the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and a newspaper report from the Glasgow Herald. McGowan’s letter said: “I think that the chance that Mr. O’Connell ever had a genuine Labrador Duck egg is so remote that it is quite impossible. Please find attached a copy of the press cutting which refers to his conviction.” His conviction?

  The article from the Glasgow Herald of Tuesday, August 30, 1977, was entitled “I’m Smashing All My Eggs Says Birdman: Nest Robber Fined £150.” The newspaper’s staff writers had provided the gory details of the heinous crime. According to the article, O’Connell, then fifty-six years old, had been arrested and charged with having taken eggs from the nests of protected birds. Members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had tipped off authorities. The sheriff had confiscated the eggs in question, and ordered O’Connell to pay the £150 fine at a rate of £5 per week. In response, O’Connell had smashed the remainder of his collection, which he had intended to pass along eventually to museums.

  At this point I began screaming. The thought that O’Connell might have destroyed a Labrador Duck egg, one of the very few in existence, perhaps the only one in existence, made me feel ill. If it wasn’t a real Labrador Duck egg, it wasn’t worth tuppence ha’penny, but if it was what O’Connell thought it was, the shell of this egg is probably worth its weight in gold. I asked Mr. Whamond to continue to search for O’Connell. A month later, he sent me the good news that O’Connell was still alive and living in Falkirk, and that he continued to have a collection of eggs, which, despite what he told the newspaper, he had not destroyed. Mr. Whamond suggested that, if I were to prepare a brief, one of their consultants, Dr. Alex Thompson, would pursue the matter further. I sent off the brief, and that was the last I heard of Mr. O’Connell and his egg for another five years.

  While waiting, I started looking into the possibility that the inscription Calton on O’Connell’s egg referred to a Canadian place-name. I turned to Andrew Geggie, toponymist-without-parallel at Natural Resources Canada, for help in figuring out the options. Possibility number one: there is a small community known as Calton in southern Ontario, west of Toronto and just a few miles from Lake Ontario. According to Geggie, the community was given its name by its first postmaster, Duncan McLauchlan, an immigrant Scot. However, by the time Calton, Ontario, was established, the Labrador Duck was either already extinct or very nearly so. Possibility number two: Calton Point, sometimes labeled Catton Point, is a finger of land in the Yukon Territory, pointing out into the Beaufort Sea. If you were kayaking along the Arctic coast, you would have to pass between Calton Point on the mainland and Osborn Point on Herschel Island to get through Workboat Passage. Of course, possibility number three is that the word, Calton, has nothing to do with where the egg was collected. Maybe it was the name of the collector’s nephew, and the uncle needed a reminder to buy the boy a birthday card and didn’t have a notepad handy.

  IN THE SUMMER of 2001, Lisa and I were really ready for a vacation. I was suffering the hangover of a very heavy teaching load, and Lisa had just finished her Ph.D. We agreed that a trip would make a great graduation present; somewhere nice but not too expensive. Somewhere with friendly people, worthwhile museums, notable architecture, and really good Scotch whisky. Somewhere like Scotland.

  You have to give me credit for being reasonably clever, convincing my wife that her graduation gift should be an opportunity for me to try to find O’Connell and his egg. In the weeks leading up to our trip, we got in touch again with Ken Whamond. He gave us the telephone number of Alex Thompson, who assured us that Mr. O’Connell, although elderly, was still alive. Thompson gave us O’Connell’s telephone number and offered to alert him that we would be calling when we arrived in Scotland. I asked Thompson to emphasize my goals to Mr. O’Connell. They were: 1. to find out if O’Connell still had his Labrador Duck egg; 2. to explain what I had found out about the place-name Calton in Canada; 3. to explain that science now had a technique to determine whether his egg had been produced by a Labrador Duck or by some other duck; and 4. to visit him, examine his egg, and extract material for DNA analysis. I most certainly did not want to: 1. turn O’Connell over to the Bird Police for having eggs that he shouldn’t or 2. steal O’Connell’s egg.

  As soon as we got settled into our hotel room in Glasgow, I wanted to ring up Mr. O’Connell, but this left me with a problem. The British telephone system completely bamboozles me. For me, the only thing worse than trying to make a call from a British telephone box is trying to make a call from a British hotel room, and so Lisa and I went in search of the lesser evil. We wedged ourselves into a telephone box on the high street, swiped a telephone card, apologized to an operator for pushing all the wrong buttons, and eventually got O’Connell on the line. At that very instant, a road repair crew started up their jackhammers just outside the telephone box.

  Despite O’Connell’s thick accent and the noise from the destruction of an innocent roadway, I was able to form the impression that he had been waiting for me to call, so that he could politely tell me to bugger off. He tried to ring off twice, but I used all of the best manners my mother had taught me in order to keep him on the line. I explained how excited I was to be speaking to him and how eager I was to help prove the identity of his egg. I offered to send him a copy of the Labrador Duck species account and to tell him what I had found out about Calton as a Canadian place-name. I didn’t mention the newspaper article about his time in court. He told me that he would think about my suggestion to visit him the following year to examine his egg, and would get back to me. I hung up and made a rude gesture at the road repair crew.

  Scots have described Falkirk as a rubbish tip; some of these were longtime residents of Falkirk. As Lisa and I walked big lazy circles through Falkirk the next day, we found it anything but rubbishy. The man in the train station’s ticket booth was genuinely apologetic when he explained that there were no luggage lockers for our backpack. When we dropped in at the public library to see if the local paper had given O’Connell’s court appearance any more coverage, the lady in the reference section treated us as though her whole life had been leading up to our arrival. I made myself even more popular by fixing her photocopier. Falkirk isn’t on the first page of any traveler’s guide to Scotland, but is a thoroughly likable place all the same.

  DEAR OLD Mr. O’Connell was good to his word. He thought about my proposal to visit him to extract membranes from the duck egg in his collection. The analysis of DNA in these membranes would well and truly sort out whether or not this egg was produced by a Labrador Duck. Shortly after we arrived back in Canada, he wrote to say that we could visit him at his home the following year. That year stretched into two, but our day finally arrived.

  We were stationed in Oxford in the summer of 2003 when O’Connell, now eighty-two, telephoned to invite Lisa and me to visit him at his home in Falkirk. We set a time and date the following week. We offered to take him out for lunch afterward, but he passed on the offer, explaining that he was housebound with a bad hip that was awaiting surgery.

  Life is expensive. Perhaps this is a universal truth. I haven’t traveled to all parts of the universe yet, but the statement certainly applies to the United Kingdom. My wage as a university professor in Canada wouldn’t pay the rent on a potting shed in Britain. One of the best ways to make life even more expensive is to travel. We decided to make the trip to Falkirk as cheaply as possible, and felt that our best option was to try to do the whole thing as a day trip. And so it became a matter of pride to try to make the trip from Oxford in En
gland to Falkirk in Scotland and back again in less than twenty-four hours.

  Our twenty-four hour goal would have been a breeze in a car, but our vehicle was separated from us by the Atlantic Ocean and most of the North American continent. It is possible to travel between Oxford and Falkirk by bus at a very competitive rate, but that would require more than twelve hours in transit each way. A train can do the journey in comfort and reasonable time, but to get a rate we could afford, we would have had to book well in advance—preferably before the end of the Crimean War.

  That left carjacking and air travel. Although I have a vaguely threatening look about me, Lisa looks altogether too disarming, which reduced our options to one. Oxford doesn’t have an airport, and neither does Falkirk. Even so, a bargain-basement airline offered us a very good fare between London, Gatwick, and Edinburgh if we could fly at unfashionable times. It would be a little complicated, but if we squeezed hard enough, we could fit the whole journey into the allotted twenty-four hours. And so, the journey began.

  We were up at midnight, just two hours after going to bed. A cab took us to the Oxford bus station, and a bus delivered us to Gatwick by 4 a.m. After a prolonged and unexplained delay on the tarmac, we were off to Edinburgh, arriving at 8:10. Another bus took us to the train station, and by 11:00 we were on our way to Falkirk. We walked into town, jammed down some lunch, and watched the noon-hour crowd in anticipation of our 2 p.m. meeting.

  O’Connell welcomed us to his home, high in an apartment block with an impressive view of the surrounding system of lush parks. Awaiting hip surgery that would hopefully set him right, he slowly came forward with the aid of a walker to greet us. His hip clicked frighteningly whenever he moved, and the sudden termination of a sentence with a sharp inhalation of breath told us that we were dealing with a gentleman in considerable pain. Despite all of this, O’Connell seemed genuinely pleased to see us. He was ready for us with a kettle just off the boil, a jar of instant coffee, a can of evaporated milk, and a plate of biscuits. Lisa tucked in, but I was a little too excited to think of anything other than eggs.

  O’Connell led us into the second bedroom, which housed his collection. Cabinets lined the walls, and the little boy inside me began to imagine the treasures that were housed within. He pulled out keys for two cabinets, and we spent a half hour examining tray after tray of the shells of birds of all description. Terns and warblers and bustards and owls and eagles; we saw about two thousand eggs, all set neatly in cardboard boxes with identifying tags. Each box contained all of the eggs taken from a single nest. There was one exception—the egg marked Labrador Duck resided in a box beside a single flamingo egg. I said a little prayer of thanks that O’Connell had fibbed when he told the newspaper that he had smashed his collection, as I judged this assemblage to be of considerable scientific merit.

  While Lisa and O’Connell chatted, I sat down at a card table and assessed the potential for getting material from the blown shell of the duck egg. It had two small blowholes, one slightly larger than the other. I considered the possibility that the collector, whoever he or she was, might have been so scrupulous in removing the contents of the shell that there would be nothing left for me to extract. As I peered through my goofy-looking magnifying headpiece, armed with an assortment of lenses, I was pleased to see that there was some material adhering to the interior of the shell. Using my series of small dental probes, I worked the dried goop out. Whatever the goop actually was, it was bound to have DNA.

  As careful as I was, I was hindered by lack of sleep. With just a slight misjudgment of distance, I chipped a small piece of the shell from the smaller of the two blowholes. It turned a neat hole into a more jagged figure eight. My heart fell, because even though it was only a teeny fragment, just like a chip in a precious vase, it was bloody obvious. I confessed my act of vandalism, and Mr. O’Connell was very gracious, saying, “Never mind, never mind, never mind,” and quipped about cracking eggs and making omelets.

  O’Connell had been kind enough to invite us into his home, and I was too polite to ask him a hundred rude questions, even though my scientist’s curiosity was burning me up: “So, who is going to get your collection after you die? How much money would it take to get your Labrador Duck egg away from you? How much for the rest of your collection? Is that your whole collection, or do you have more in all of these other cabinets?” Lisa astutely noted that all of the eggs O’Connell had shown us were from unusual and exotic birds, and that he hadn’t shown us a single egg from a run-of-the-mill bird. Perhaps he collected only eggs of special birds, or perhaps he wanted to show us only the really good stuff.

  One question that O’Connell answered without being asked was how he felt, in an era of great environmental concerns, about having collected all of those eggs. He explained that his collection had been amassed in a different era with different priorities. Collecting natural history artifacts had been a gentleman’s pursuit. Even so, O’Connell felt a degree of remorse over his collection. Lisa and I had made a new friend. We were invited to stay longer, but we didn’t want to tax the hospitality of an elderly gentleman in discomfort. We were off, still hoping to be in bed within our twenty-four-hour limit.

  It was a long tramp back up to the Falkirk train station, but by 4:30 p.m. we were roaming the streets of Edinburgh, looking for a quick meal. The early evening found us on the bus to the airport. Our 8:50 p.m. departure time came and went with a big blank spot on the tarmac where our airplane should have been; the airline seemed insensitive to our self-imposed twenty-four-hour time limit. We arrived at Gatwick fifteen minutes late for the 11 p.m. coach. Finally arriving at Oxford at 3 a.m., we found plenty of kebab wagons doing a brisk business, but no taxis, and so had to hoof it. We arrived home at 4 a.m., twenty-eight hours after leaving.

  And so, despite having missed our target by four hours, I had all of the material needed to determine whether or not the carefully guarded egg of O’Connell was something rare and valuable or something rather more ordinary. Was I in for a long and expensive trip to see the desolate spot in the Canadian Arctic where the egg had been laid? Michael Sorenson sent me a message with the results of the genetic analysis of O’Connell’s egg. Like one of the eggs in Tring, rather than being worth its weight in precious metals, the egg turned out to be the product of a Mallard. It would be a while before I could sample the last six egg possibilities.

  To date, my search for the remains of Labrador Ducks had been something of a bust. I had visited the spot in Labrador where Audubon’s son almost certainly didn’t find Labrador Duck nests. I had scampered over Great Britain in search of eggs that hadn’t been produced by Labrador Ducks. It was time to change my luck, and so I set off in search of stuffed birds. No one could say quite how many stuffed Labrador Ducks were waiting for me. Published records told me that I could expect something like fifty specimens scattered among the world’s greatest natural history museums, but some of these seemed more legend than substance. One specimen was to be found here, and another one way over there. Twelve countries…thirteen…perhaps more. Given that I had a life to live and a living to earn, this was going to take some time.

  Chapter Three

  Old Friends and Older Ducks

  To this point I had been something of an imposter, claiming to be the world’s most noted authority on something that I had never actually seen. Even though I had been reading and writing about Labrador Ducks for seven years, and despite having traveled to Labrador and Europe chasing down eggs and other leads, I was part of that enormously vast majority of humans who had never actually seen any of the surviving specimens. It was time to join the small but elite band of explorers who had lost their Labrador Duck virginity.

  My journey to examine every stuffed specimen in the world could have started anywhere. I could have dashed off to somewhere exotic and romantic like Paris or New York City, and yet, since the species probably bred in Canada, that seemed as good a place as any to start. More importantly, having just finished a month of fi
eldwork on songbirds in California and Oregon, I was trying to get over a near-fatal encounter with poison oak. Even though the vesicles on my legs had stopped weeping, somehow I just couldn’t get myself in the mood to struggle with the intricacies of the public transit system in Prague or explain my quest for dead ducks to Russian customs and immigration officials—yet.

  Having tricked my wife into two Labrador Duck–related trips, I felt I might just be able to pull a similar stunt on an old university friend. I was able to hunt down Gina Brown-Branch and her husband, Steve, in Ontario. We agreed that sixteen years, fully one-fifth of a lifetime, was too long without a visit; we should try to get together for a reunion.

  “Well, you know, I do have research to do in Ontario and Quebec. What do you think about a road trip to see some dead ducks?”

  Gina and Steve own a magnificent old farmhouse in Cambridge, Ontario, about an hour southwest of Toronto, dating back to the first European settlement of the area. The house was added to and subtracted from over the years, and passageways were inserted and then plastered over, but it still maintains a lovely cool atmosphere on a hot summer afternoon, as though too proud an old lady to allow herself to become overheated. The yard has many impressive trees, and one grand oak in the backyard was probably well along when vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons passed through that part of the province, roosting in trees of exactly that sort.