The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  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.

  Labrador Duck 24

  The specimen in Halberstadt proved to be a fake—a Labrador Duck beak on the body of a crudely painted domestic duck.

  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.

  WITH 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Black-and-White Duck in a Colorless Land

  Are 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.

  WHEN 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, sa
ints, 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.