Lifestyles

Of a Feather: The ghost of a bird

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

Have you ever been guided to a “historical place” and, when you got there, all you found was a sign that said, in effect, “It was here,” and nothing else? Well, that is what it is like to go looking for the Labrador duck.

There are very few specimens preserved and no eggs are known to have been collected. The extent of its distribution is so unclear that there is no definitive proof that it actually bred in Labrador. And finally, no one has conclusively showed why it went extinct, or exactly when. It is, however, known to be the first bird to disappear from existence following European settlement of North America.

There was a great flurry of excitement in 2004 when it was thought that a few ivory-billed woodpeckers might have survived in the swamps of southeast Arkansas. The last reliable sightings of this bird were in the 1940s, and the last photographs were taken in the 1930s. But efforts to confirm the 2004 sighting failed, and most ornithologists admit that the species is likely gone. The Cuban population is also extinct; none have been seen since the 1980s.

All current bird guides of which I am aware leave out the ivory-bill; Sibley (2000) calls the pileated “our largest woodpecker.” Yet, perhaps since the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (which curates the website) was so prominent in the 2004-2010 effort to confirm the recent sightings, allaboutbirds.org still lists the bird at its website.

The “Audubon Land Bird Guide” by Richard H. Pough was published in 1946 and, while he includes a regular entry for it, he is downbeat: “It is so rare that any record of one is noteworthy and should be passed on at once to the National Audubon Society, which is trying to save the bird from extinction.”

The second edition of the Peterson guide published in 1947 also lists the bird, but so does the National Geographic’s “Song and Garden Birds of North America,” published in 1964, two decades after the last sighting and one year after several ornithologists returned to the Singer Tract in northern Louisiana, where Arthur A. Allen had photographed it in 1935, and didn’t find a single one.

Unlike the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Labrador duck was never widely observed. The last purported living specimen was shot in 1978 in Elmira, New York, much farther inland than nearly all other sightings. A 2016 article in the Elmira Star-Gazette reports a “search” for the duck during a New York State Birders’ Conference. In fact, they had a John James Audubon re-enactor tell them about ornithologist William Dutcher’s account of the collection of the last duck in his 1891 book about the species.

It is a third-hand account, which is typical of records of this species. A hunter told Dr. W.H. Gregg, who told Dutcher, that the collected bird had been shot on Dec. 12, 1878, in the lowlands of the Chemung River. Gregg had someone else pack his specimens and the head was lost. There are, at most, only 55 specimens of the species extant in collections, so the head was a significant loss.

In 2014, geneticist Eugene M. McCarthy claimed without evidence that the Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius) was not a real species, but a regularly occurring hybrid of the Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri) and the common eider (Somateria mellissima). (McCarthy is a heretic who believes evolution occurs primarily by hybridization.) A 2018 mitogenomic study by Janet C. Buckner of Louisiana State University and others showed that C. labradorius is indeed a species and its closest relatives are the eiders, with Steller’s being the closest.

What is the most usual explanation when an animal is naturally uncommon? Generally, they have a very narrow niche. Many rain-forest species, for example, have limited distributions and occur in small numbers because that environment is so stable and spatially complex that it can be split up into very small niche spaces.

But this generalization scales upward too. In the U.S. appropriate habitat for snail kites exists only in Florida. They specialize in eating apple snails and hunt visually, so they can’t find their prey if there is too much vegetation or the water is too murky. The present Florida population is ~1,000, but it has been as low as 65 in 1972. They are common, though, in Central and South America, where water levels are more stable and apple snails more common.

Just as snail kites have beaks different from other kites, Labrador ducks had bills that were highly modified compared to those of other ducks. There were thin plate-like structures inside, a broad, flat tip, and the whole bill was softer than is usual. Scientists believe these allowed the species to specialize in foraging for molluscs in shallow water. Mollusc populations were decimated by over-harvest after European settlement.

In the 18th century duck populations were also decimated by hunters, who sold the down and feathers to stuff pillows and mattresses. In the 19th century feathers were a fashion craze on hats. Audubon, writing the 1840s, already thought of the Labrador or pied duck as somewhat rare. Sightings of the duck increased, however, in the 1850s and ‘60s, likely only because there were more naturalists looking for them, because they went extinct quite abruptly.

“The Birds of New Hampshire,” a record of all birds ever sighted in the state, finds no definite sightings in New Hampshire. “It seems inconceivable that this species could have reached [Plum Island, Mass.] without coming into what is now considered New Hampshire waters, either along the mainland, or more likely, at the Isles of Shoals.”

Well, as they say, “A guess is as good as a wish.”

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now works and lives in the town of Wilmot.

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