Professional ornithologist Glen Chilton made quite the interesting offer in 2009: “I will pay a reward of $10,000 to the first person who can direct me to a genuine stuffed Labrador duck that I have not seen and described in my book, The Curse of the Labrador Duck. I don’t want to buy the duck; I just want to examine it. After I have verified its legitimacy, you get the money.”
A Canadian now living in Australia, Chilton is the world’s foremost authority on the extinct Labrador duck and was quite serious about his cash offer. No one ever collected.
“My editor at Harper-Collins Canada made the very wise suggestion that I put a time limit of one year on the offer,” Chilton says. “In that year, I had all sorts of claims on the money, but none of them turned out to be real Labrador duck skins. Some were re-creations from bits and pieces of other ducks, and some were females of other species.”
The Curse of the Labrador Duck, ornithologist Glen Chilton’s very entertaining book, is available at www.glenchilton.com.
Chilton made the offer because he had just completed a nearly 10-year study to personally examine all 55 known remaining taxidermic mounts and study skins of the bird, and he wanted to make sure he had located them all.
His quixotic quest took him to museums throughout North America and Europe. He logged 72,018 miles on airplanes; 5,461 miles on trains; 3,408 miles in cars; 158 miles in taxis; 43 miles on ferries; and 1,169 miles on buses. That total of 82,257 miles is longer than three times around the earth at the equator!
The Labrador duck became extinct more than a century ago. Its breeding grounds are unknown, though suspected to be in northern Canada, but it wintered along the Atlantic coast, particularly in the vicinity of New York City. The last known Labrador duck, an immature male, was shot in the waters around Long Island in 1875. That bird now resides in the Smithsonian.
Though a serious ornithologist, Chilton has a well-developed sense of humor, which, though it extends to all birds, is particularly focused on the Labrador duck. In his book, he writes briefly about the famous bird artist John James Audubon (1785–1851) and his brush — pun intended — with the Labrador duck.
“When I say that it was Audubon’s goal to ‘study and paint’ birds in Labrador, I mean that he planned to shoot a lot of birds, bring their corpses back to camp, stick wires up their bums to hold them in place, twist them into postures they never could have attained in life, and then paint them,” he says. “You don’t have to look at many Audubon paintings to get a sense of what I mean.”
Here’s Chilton’s tongue-in-cheek description of a male Labrador duck he tracked down at the Redpath Museum in Montreal: “While measuring its left wing, I glanced at its head, and could swear that it was giving me a reproachful look. I wanted to explain that he had been dead for at least a hundred years before I was even born, and that I am a vegetarian, and don’t shoot ducks or any other animals, and that I feed bread crumbs to ducks every chance I get, and … but I didn’t feel that he would be satisfied with any answer I gave.”
The closest Chilton ever came to Ohio during all his miles of travel was when he visited a Labrador duck specimen at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology. Of his experience there, Chilton said, “The city [Ann Arbor] 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. And the museum is free.”
(Of course, all of us Ohio State Buckeye fans somehow suspected that.)
W.H. “Chip” Gross is Ohio Cooperative Living’s outdoors editor. Email him with your outdoors questions at whchipgross@gmail.com. Be sure to include “Ask Chip” in the subject of the email. Your question may be answered on www.ohiocoopliving.com!
