by Glen Chilton
The trip from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was on a state-of-the-art ICE train. The interior was painted in soothing shades of blue, green, and aubergine. The WC had a lovely floral scent and was nicer than any I have visited on an airplane. At the end of the carriage, an LCD display showed the anticipated time of arrival and our current speed. My handwritten notes read: “The top speed I saw was 161 km/hr!, 183 km/hr!, 196 km/hr!, 212 km/hr!, 234 km/hr!, 250 km/hr!” Some of my fellow passengers munched on pastries or pretzels, but two gentlemen across the aisle toasted each other’s health with goose liver pâté on crackers and a big bottle of champagne. If airline travel were anything like this, I would do a lot more traveling.
The train from Stuttgart to Tübingen was less sophisticated, but no less fun. I traveled with seven students from the Atlanta university system, plus one fellow who wanted to make it absolutely clear that he was from Columbus, Ohio, not Atlanta. They were a delight to be with. Enthusiastic, polite, engaged, and forward looking. Bound for Heidelberg, but with a long layover, they had decided to fill the time with a side trip to the university town of Tübingen. They were particularly keen on Tübingen because of its ties to Goethe, who drank heavily and vomited wildly there in the late eighteenth century. They politely asked about Canada, and showed at least a passing interest in my duck quest. I was polite too, pretending that I knew all about Goethe.
I really, really wish I could have spent the night in Tübingen. The city of 87,000 residents is usually described in terms of the grace of medieval stained glass, cobbled alleys, and half-timbered houses, all enriched by the presence of its enthusiastic university student body, which swells the population by 22,000. No inconspicuous regional college this, it employs every eighth person in Tübingen. Count Württemberg established the university in 1477, after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His vision was of an institution to help “the world to drink comforting and healing wisdom and thereby extinguish the pernicious fire of human ignorance and blindness.” These seem like particularly lofty goals considering that, for many students, their time at university is mainly an opportunity to move away from home. An overnight stay would have given me a chance to see some of this, and more time to work on my pronunciation; Toob-in-ghen, not Tube-in-jen.
My first goal at Tübingen’s Hauptbahnhof was to unload my backpack. I couldn’t find a checked luggage desk, so I scouted for lockers. None was really big enough, but I crammed my bag into a locker that asked me for 1.50. The locker told me that it would accept coins in any combination of 0.50, 1.00, or 2.00, but that I wasn’t to expect any change. Fair enough, but no matter what combination of coins I gave it, my offering wasn’t satisfactory. I tried another locker, with the same result. Figuring that I had to be doing something wrong, I asked a train station employee for help. After hearing me speak German with an accent, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away. In desperation I tried creative combinations of British pound coins, Canadian quarters, and American nickels, but my locker loved me none the more. I thought about stuffing my chewing gum into the coin slot, but didn’t. It looked as though I was going to be stuck with my backpack.
Dr. Weber had sent me an email describing my options for getting to the university. If I didn’t want to walk, the number 5 bus would take me straight to campus. I found the number 5 bus pulling away from the train station, and leapt on, my backpack, briefcase, and duck-measuring kit trailing behind me. I asked the driver to confirm that the number 5 did, indeed, go to the university, and he replied, “Nein.” The passenger ahead of me turned around as though keen to help, and I asked her if the number 5 would take me to the university, and she said, “Ja.” I split the difference, and decided that the bus would get me somewhere close to where I needed to be. The “Ja” lady then asked if I could change a five-euro note, as neither she nor the driver had any coins, and tickets were to be purchased from a coin-operated machine on board. I didn’t have enough change for both of us. A lady further back in the bus was able to provide change, and showed the “Ja” lady how to purchase a ticket. “Would you mind showing me, too?” I asked.
By this point, I was dripping with sweat from the exertion of carrying all of my luggage and the fear that this bus was going to deliver me many miles from my destination. I broadcast a question, in English, to my fellow passengers. “Would someone please tell me when we get to the university?” One very kindly young woman, taking pity on me, looked at my little map and said that she would get off at my stop and escort me where I needed to go.
By the time I got to Weber’s office, I was spewing sweat at an Olympic rate. This seemed to concern Weber, particularly since he thought the day was on the cool side. I laughed it off, explaining that we Canadians thought anything above the freezing point of helium was too warm. He looked at me as though I might be in the throes of advanced malaria or perhaps leprosy. Or insanity.
Despite my potential for contagion, he took me to the basement, to a preparation room with fume hoods and cluttered workbenches, and set me up at a trolley. The bird collection is an interesting one. Founded around 1841, it is a part of the Zoologisches Institut der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, and includes something like 2,000 skins and mounts, 1,300 partial skeletons, and 500 sets of eggs. These were all locked safely away, but the Labrador Duck was waiting for me.
Labrador Duck 20
As I prepared to get down to my poking and prodding, Weber explained that my duck came from the collection of Herzog Paul von Württemberg, who was responsible for much of the early bird collection. He had been a wealthy hunter who had traveled extensively in search of things to kill. This isn’t to say he necessarily shot the Labrador Duck himself; a member of his party might have nabbed it, or he may have purchased it on his travels. And just because the tag around my duck’s leg says that it had been collected at Hudsonbai, this shouldn’t be taken as unimpeachable evidence that my duck had necessarily ever been anywhere near Hudson’s Bay.
Weber also explained that this specimen, remounted in the 1950s, had probably been a study skin before being remounted as a taxidermic preparation. Therefore, this drake, an adult, probably had brown glass eyes only because the preparator had a bunch lying around at the time. He asked me if I needed any feathers for DNA analysis. “Why? Do you have some to spare?” A few small feathers had come out in cleaning, and these were in a ziplock bag attached to the base. The vandal in me wanted to take one or two as souvenirs, but I resisted temptation, as I knew that a thorough DNA analysis of Labrador Ducks had already been completed.
The museum’s current preparator, Jürgen Rösinger, asked me how this specimen ranked as Labrador Ducks go. Well, let’s see…He has been repaired in spots, but those spots are fairly inconspicuous. He was shedding some of his filling through a hole in his flank. He wasn’t particularly dirty, and no one had felt inspired to apply too much paint to his feet or beak. His base is covered in sand, which is unique without being gaudy, and his posture is a little out of the ordinary. His right wing hangs a bit lower than it did in life. All in all, he is somewhere near the middle of the pack. The drake, that is, not Rösinger. Rösinger was quite near the top of the pack.
Having finished my peek and poke, I asked Weber to recommend a place for lunch, and he took me across the way to a student cafeteria. The hall was nearly full, as students were still immersed in their classes before being given a break until mid-October. I tried to pay for lunch, but Weber insisted on catching the bill, explaining that I was his guest. The last of the museum’s bad reputation died on the spot. We chatted for a spell about common interests, including the taxonomy of birds and the pressures of a university position based largely on teaching. Given his teaching load, Weber has precious little time for research. It seemed to me that he would benefit from a couple of months in the sunshine chasing birds. We compared our two universities. His was founded in the fourteenth century and had 22,000 students. Mine was eight years old and had 600 students. At my university, students paid about $4,000 each year in tuition. At his,
students paid a small registration fee and no tuition at all. There had apparently been a student revolt when the registration fee had been increased to 80.
Probably fearing a return of my unique commitment to sweating, Weber offered me a ride back to the train station an hour hence, suggesting that I might want to tour the department’s small public museum and could chat with his long-time museum associates, Herr and Frau Mickoleit. In contrast to Rösinger’s punky black haircut and punky black style, the Mickoleits were severe. Both sported vigorous haircuts, and both spoke in a clipped, intense manner. They told me a lot about the history of the collection and how it came to be where it is now, but a lot of it whizzed by before I could take any notes. Herr Mickoleit implied that he had been at the university for a great many years, as man and boy.
They took me to a locked room where particularly valuable specimens were displayed. Students were allowed to visit, but it is normally locked up because of fears of theft, presumably by internationally organized gangs. Herr Mickoleit was particularly proud of a Passenger Pigeon, a Carolina Parakeet, two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, and a thylacine. At the far end of the room was the most eye-catching display of all. It was a longitudinal section through the head of an elephant, a couple of inches thick, housed in a huge glass case filled with foul-looking preservative. To obtain this bizarre apparition, an elephant’s head had been frozen in a block of ice, taken to a quarry, and sawn through with a diamond blade.
With a few minutes to spare before my ride to the train station, I took in the zoology museum used by the university’s students. Like the museum in Mainz, it was plain and had been constructed on a small budget. Unlike the museum in Mainz, in some intangible way the display of birds, mammals, and insects made me care. There was a bit of flair to each display. Perhaps this should be the first stop on the grand tour of small museums by the bean counters in Mainz.
AT THE PLOCHINGEN train station, the itinerary generated by Deutsche Bahn gave me only six minutes to get from platform 59 to platform 4. Luckily, the Plochingen train station isn’t a very big place, and the platforms were only 500 feet apart. Leaping on the Munich-bound train with two minutes to spare, I found it completely packed. It is a good thing I had reserved a seat, or I might have been seated on the roof of the smoking car—facing backward.
A lady named Eva sat in the seat beside me, and proved to be an absolute joy as a companion. She, her physician husband, and their three young children were on their way to a wedding at a monastery on a lake east of Munich. Like many Germans, she spoke fluent English but seemed flustered every time she hit some rarely used expression that she couldn’t translate into English. She put her rusty English down to a period that she had spent in Strasbourg, polishing her French. I feel such an idiot when people tell me things like that. I am fairly fluent in the language of birds, but that isn’t much help when a message comes across the public address system of the train, as it just had. Eva told me that the message explained why we were still sitting in Plochingen when we should have been fifteen minutes on our way to Munich. While the train was pulling into Plochingen, a woman had either suffered a seizure or gone into a coma (Eva’s English failed her here). Her husband had assisted until help arrived at the train station.
Even Eva’s children were getting in on the linguistic act. Attending some sort of international school, they were rapidly becoming quadrilingual. Hearing that Eva’s youngest daughter was celebrating her fourth birthday, I pointed to her, smiled, and said, “Eins, zwei, drei…” “Four,” she replied, looking at me as though I were a dim-witted circus clown.
THE ZOOLOGICAL COLLECTION in Munich was founded in 1759 as a private collection of Kurfürst Maximilian III Joseph von Bayern. The collection really took off only after Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix arrived in 1807, and then, after a six-decade slowdown in bird activity, picked up again with the arrival of C. E. Hellmayr in 1903. The collection now belongs to the Bavarian government, and Zoologische Staatssammlung München translates as the Zoological Collection of the State of Bavaria. One of the highlights of the museum is its collection of 6 million butterflies, which probably rank it number one in the world. No prizes for correctly predicting that they also have a Labrador Duck.
The walk from the hotel to the museum was less than a mile, but by the time I drew close, I had resumed my routine of freestyle sweating. As I passed one of Munich’s 800,000 Apotheke shops, I discovered why. Large weather dials showed that the temperature had made a healthy commitment to the mid-90s, and the relative humidity was slightly higher than I like it in the shower.
The museum building that houses Munich’s natural history research collection is a curious structure, with much more belowground than above it. Located in the suburban outskirts of northwestern Munich, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would be excused for thinking that the place was just an abandoned construction site. The Labrador Duck and many of his contemporaries survived World War II by being moved out of the city center to buildings in outlying regions. The old museum building and all specimens that had not been evacuated had been destroyed. At the end of hostilities, the collection had been moved to the Schloss Nymphenburg. But more than twenty-five years ago, the director general of the facility suggested that a new facility be constructed to house the research collection, while the public displays remain in the castle. As I approached the subterranean facility, an air vent brought me the faintest whiff of mothballs and other preservatives, but I am sure very few residents of the neighboring community even noticed.
Labrador Duck 21
A receptionist buzzed Josef Reichholf, an ornithologist and head of the museum’s Vertebrates Department. Reichholf sent his assistant to fetch me. As she escorted me to the duck, she said, “My English is not good.” “Mein Deutsch ist schrecklich,” I replied, and felt rather clever for getting that much out. The duck, a taxidermic preparation without a base, was lying on its side in a hermetically sealed plastic bag, and Reichholf’s assistant found a pair of scissors to free it. I immediately knew more about the duck than Paul Hahn ever had; he knew only that it was a male, but I could also see that it was an adult. Reichholf appeared, and we made pleasantries about my trip to Munich and my early impressions of the city. Noting that I was sweating like a pig at a luau, the assistant opened a big window. If we had been in one of the many rooms situated belowground, I probably would have quietly expired.
I got down to work. A few minutes later, the assistant came back to offer me coffee. A few minutes later, Reichholf came back to offer me coffee. A few minutes later, a custodian arrived. She proceeded to empty the wastepaper baskets but didn’t offer me coffee. She then got down to a serious assault on the work surfaces around me. She squirted liquid soap and turned the water faucet on a little higher than I thought prudent, given the proximity of the valuable duck.
The specimen is a good one, although his head is a bit loose. It was the first specimen I had seen that had been given cherry-red glass eyes. In the long term, he would probably be better off if he were attached to a new base. Lying on his side, his feathers were getting a bit pressed out of shape in places, particularly along his crown.
When I finished up, without stealing any of the loose feathers in the bag, I found Reichholf in his office, and asked if he could clarify a few points. He told me that the museum had about 60,000 specimens of 6,000 bird species. I asked about the initials H. v. L. on the duck’s tags. He dashed off to find a book. When he returned, Reichholf was able to tell me that the initials stood for Herzog von Leuchtenberg, who had originally been called the Duke du Beauharnais. A stepson of Napoléon Bonaparte, he married a Bavarian princess. Since no one in his adopted land could pronounce Duke du Beauharnais, he changed his name. The Labrador Duck had been in the collection of von Leuchtenberg when he lived in Eichstätt, a small community between Munich and Nürnberg. From there the duck entered the collection of the state of Bavaria. Considering that Hahn’s complete description of the Munich duck was “male,” I
think that I had done pretty well in gathering new information.
I then asked Reichholf about the museum’s holdings of Great Auks. At one time they had apparently owned two. When Errol Fuller wrote his magnum opus on Great Auks, he had encountered considerable difficulty getting much information out of this museum. Reichholf was able to confirm that the museum had only one specimen, and that the second specimen of song and legend was nowhere to be found. Although the remaining specimen wasn’t in the best shape, they were keeping a close eye on it to make sure it didn’t get any worse. Reichholf had a meeting to dash off to, but his assistant took me to room M110, labeled Magazin Ornithologie, to see the Greak Auk. As I prepared to snap a couple of photographs, the assistant turned the bird so that its best side showed.
I wandered back to my hotel room for my second shower of the day. As I dried off, I considered my options for my remaining time in Munich. I could rest and prepare myself for the latter half of my German expedition, but that wouldn’t give me much to talk about when I got home. Alternatively, I could take the train into the heart of Munich, visit its official tourist sites, get really, really hot, and wear myself out. Given how tired I was from the day before, I favored a third option, bound to be a lot less strenuous, but still a bit of fun. My cab driver had told me the Schlosspark Nymphenburg was an incredibly beautiful park. It wasn’t too far from my hotel and it would give me the chance to see where the Labrador Duck had lived from the end of the war until being moved to its current home twenty years ago. Who would blame me for taking the third option? Surely Munich is just another European city, with a central core pretty much like any other.