by Glen Chilton
Tate was in touch with each of his former colleagues, and claiming that his big mouth had gotten him into trouble again, asked if they could remember the conversation from so long ago. The responses came back one at a time. No. No. No. And then, fully two years after I started searching for the garage sale duck, the answer came from Robert Storer. “I think I have the answer to your questions,” wrote Storer, “although it is surprising how rumors have altered the facts.” A taxidermic mount of an adult male Labrador Duck, it was in a group of specimens that had been lying neglected in the University of Vermont’s small museum. The museum’s director wasn’t interested in birds, and so they were sold to an antiques dealer in 1957. Folks at U.S. Fish and Wildlife heard of the transaction and insisted that the dealer return the birds to the museum. A graduate student identified the Labrador Duck and convinced the people at the University of Vermont to donate the specimen to the outstanding museum at the University of Michigan. Storer catalogued the stuffed duck on May 21 as specimen number 152,253. Storer explained that there were no data to go with the specimen, but suspected it to be one of a pair of Labrador Ducks described on old lists as being in the collection of the University of Vermont. A search was made for the female, but she was never found.
So there you have it. There never was a garage sale duck. After searching for it for two years, I was able to dig up a photograph of the specimen in my files less than a yard from my left elbow, and Lisa and I were off to Ann Arbor to see it.
AT THIS POINT, I would have traded any two of my teeth for a good long sleep, preferably one that lasted until my next birthday. And yet, just ten hours after setting down in Calgary after the long flight from New Brunswick, I was in the air again, this time with Lisa. Having flown the width of North America the night before, I was now jetting the 1,364 miles back to Illinois. My duck quest was turning into an obsession, as quests so often do.
The first target of this quest was the 121st annual conference of the American Ornithologists’ Union at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I was scheduled to make a presentation on my birdsong research and chair a session. By delightful coincidence, the conference was not far from a couple of museums that housed Labrador Ducks. My duck business would follow the conference, but getting everything done would require rather precise timing. Lisa had booked passage on the 6:10 a.m. Amtrak train out of C-U for Chicago, where we would catch a taxi to the Field Museum of Natural History before returning to the train station at 2 p.m. for the journey east, bringing us into Ann Arbor, Michigan, around suppertime.
Monday morning we were up at 4:30 so as to get a hearty breakfast at the twenty-four-hour “We Never Close” restaurant next to our hotel. They were closed. “Sorry for the inconvenience” read the hand-printed sign on the door. Not an auspicious start. As instructed, we got to the train station twenty minutes before departure, only to be told that, due to mechanical difficulties, our train was running two hours late. The purveyor of this information had the look of someone for whom 90 percent of his job is passing along bad news to irate customers. I started to see why Amtrak is so unpopular with my American colleagues.
Incredibly, the train from the south spent the last fifteen minutes of its journey traveling backward into Chicago’s Union Station at glacial speed. America’s Second City. The Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Pride of the Rustbelt. That Toddling Town. Hog Butcher to the World. Somehow, backing into town several hours behind schedule didn’t seem to be a fitting way to enter Chicago for the first time. Luckily, Lisa was able to convince an Amtrak representative to trade our 2 p.m. train tickets to Ann Arbor for tickets on the 6 p.m. train, giving us time to complete our Labrador Duck work.
When we arrived at Chicago’s great Field Museum of Natural History, David Willard came straight down to meet us. Willard is the manager of the bird collection in the museum’s zoology department. He was tall and clean-shaven, and sported the big black-rimmed glasses that are so hard to find in a world full of miserly wire-rimmed granny glasses. Willard grabbed one of our suitcases and we followed him up a flight of stairs to the museum’s behind-the-scenes collections. Given our arrival time, he had guessed that something had gone wrong with the train. Not much of a stretch of imagination, he suggested.
Labrador Ducks 14 and 15
The ducks were waiting for me, and my examination of them was straightforward. Both are taxidermic mounts. The drake has a particularly jaunty look about him. He sits on a plastic rock atop an oval board. His face is more appealing on the left side, but his bill is prettier on the right side. The hen is a little more beaten up, missing a toenail, and with holes in the webbing of her feet. Her bill was painted with unflattering gobs of yellow and gray paint, now flaking off. Unlike the drake with his cool plastic rock, she resides on a simple wooden base. Except when nosey ornithologists are poking around, he has a plastic dust cover; she doesn’t. His catalogue number is 13352 and hers is 13353.
With Willard’s help, I had tried to sort out the origins of these ducks. It is abundantly clear that their origin is anything but abundantly clear. The Field Museum’s database claims that both specimens came from the Charles B. Cory Collection after being shot at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, where Sarah and I had been a few days before. However, just because someone enters it in a computer database doesn’t guarantee that the information is correct. Writing in 1959, Jim Baille of the Royal Ontario Museum claimed that the hen came from Swampscott, Massachusetts, about 1862, and that the drake came from Grand Manan Island about 1860. A note on file, in the handwriting of ornithologist Emmet Blake, explains that both specimens were shot near Calais, Maine, on dates unknown, and that the museum purchased them from George N. Boardman of Calais around 1880. The Calais locality seems to have been Boardman’s home, but whether the ducks were shot there is anyone’s guess. So, to summarize, the Labrador Ducks at the Field Museum in Chicago may have come from New Brunswick, Maine, Massachusetts, or somewhere else.
Having finished my work, and with some time to kill before our evening train, we told Willard that we were going to have a look at the museum’s exhibits. He replied that we were very welcome to take in the exhibits, but as guests of the museum, we were not to pay the entry fee. God bless this man. We carried our luggage to the coat and baggage check, and Willard explained to the lady attendant that we were valued guests of the museum, and that she wasn’t to charge us for watching our gear.
As we had seen, the two real Labrador Ducks are stored safely in locked cabinets, far from damage by light and dust. However, in tribute to creatures now extinct, the Field Museum has a replica duck on display, along with a replica Great Auk, and one real specimen each of extinct Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, and Eskimo Curlew. As Lisa and I stood in front of this exhibit, a family walked up—parents accompanied by a son and daughter, both in their teens, and both with neon-blue hair. To my absolute delight, the girl looked at the iridescent yellow and red Carolina Parakeet and said, “Can you imagine being in a whole flock of those? That would be awesome!” I wanted to shake her hand for resisting the temptation to fall into the cynicism of youth, and for having the imagination to see that an extinction had denied her generation of a unique treasure.
We wandered through the other bird and mammals exhibitions and, like those patrons around us who had paid to be there, were very impressed. Stuffed specimens of fully 90 percent of all North American birds were on display, and each had sufficient room so as not to appear crowded. Some very large display cabinets had as few as one large horned mammal each.
Well into the afternoon, we stopped at the cafeteria for our first meal of the day. Shrink-wrapped white-bread sandwiches weren’t good enough for the Field Museum cafeteria. Lisa had chili, and I had pizza on focaccia bread. As we ate, we had a good gawk at the architecture. The building was clearly designed to say: “The contents are important, and we want you to be impressed.”
We missed the museum’s exhibition on baseball, but we did see some of the
other very good exhibits, including displays of gems and human history. Surely no one would fail to be completely impressed by one of the Museum’s crowning glories—an almost compete skeleton of “Sue,” a Tyrannosaurus rex discovered in North Dakota in 1990, and the biggest one ever discovered. Nothing about the film Jurassic Park, even on a large screen, can prepare you for the enormity of the real thing, and camera flashes popped all around us. A recently published paper has suggested that T. rex might have been a scavenger rather than a fierce predator, but part of me wants to think that these devils once terrorized the Cretaceous landscape.
The train pulled out of Chicago for Ann Arbor on time, but that was little comfort, because for the first hour, our speed didn’t exceed 20 miles an hour. The journey was punctuated by long periods of immobility while the train caught its breath. Along with everyone else in our car, we tried to find seats as far away as possible from an obnoxious, loud, dysfunctional family. I realize that Amtrak is not responsible for the antisocial behavior of some of its clients, nor for the unappetizing view around the south shore of Lake Michigan. Where we should have been looking out over a Great Lake, we could see only factories, warehouses, steel mills, and water treatment plants.
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.
Labrador Duck 16
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.
Chapter Ten
Star-Crossed Ducks
Life 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 submit
ted 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.