I for one don’t often think of nineteenth-century statesmen when I’m up to my ears in bird stuff, but the note in the catalogue entries for two of the Smithsonian’s Labrador Duck specimens couldn’t help but catch my eye:
Daniel Webster received specimen from Audubon.
Yes, that Audubon. And yes, that Daniel Webster.
But as far as I can tell, that isn’t exactly the way it all happened. A quick e-trip ad fontes reveals that the collector was actually Webster, who killed — as Audubon reports —
a fine pair … on the Vineyard Islands, on the coast of Massachusetts, from which I [Audubon] made the drawing for the plate before you.
Audubon claims (I haven’t checked) that his was the first published image of the female of this species.
In 1846, Audubon passed the precious skins on to one of his more promising protégés, Spencer Baird, who, Ridgway tells us, “considered [them] his personal property while he lived,” even though Baird housed the birds in the Smithsonian.
You might think — you might — that specimens of such surpassing rarity and distinguished provenance would be left to lie quietly on their backs in the cambridge cans. But in the late 1950s, skin A 1972 was dismantled and relaxed for study by Philip Humphrey and Robert Butsch. After thoroughly photographing the bird and taking a series of eleven X-ray images,
Butsch … began by removing the wings and legs…. When study of the wings and legs was completed, Butsch relaxed the body of the specimen and opened the midventral incision.
But never fear.
Where the skin had been “in rather poor condition” when Butsch and Humphrey began — torn, broken, and “gray with dirt” — it was “considerably improved in appearance … washed and degreased” by the time they had finished their work and put the bird back together.
It’s a rare bird that can, in a sense, give its life twice for science — and a rare politician who can represent two states in Congress and serve two terms as Secretary of State.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
