The Pied Duck, Audubon Plate 400: Now the Labrador Duck

Two ducks swim across the lower part of octavo plate 400. The male is almost white, with a black stripe over the crown and a dark band across the back and wings; the female beside him is a plain gray-brown. Audubon named the pair the Pied Duck, and the plate appears in volume VI of the octavo Birds of America, printed in Philadelphia in 1843. Nobody can now see a living example of the species. The Pied Duck of Audubon is the Labrador Duck, and it has been extinct for well over a century, so this plate and the two pages of text beside it count among the best surviving records of the living bird.

What the Pied Duck plate shows

The plate legend gives the figures as “Male and Female,” and the account heading reads “Pied Duck, Fuligula labradora, Plate CCCC.” The octavo plates were lithographed and hand-colored in Philadelphia, and this one is a reduced version of the folio composition, which Robert Havell engraved in 1836 as plate 332 of the double-elephant folio. The male carries the pattern that gave the bird its English name: a white head, neck and shoulder region, interrupted by a black crown stripe and a black collar, set against a dark body. The Sea Duck Joint Venture describes adult males the same way and adds that females were a uniform brownish gray, with slate tones on the back and paler underparts.

One detail of the bill shows even in Audubon’s careful drawing. The scientific name that the bird carries today, Camptorhynchus, refers to the flexible flaps along the sides of the bill, according to Birds of the World. Audubon’s technical description speaks of “soft membranous expansions” at the end of the upper mandible, which is the same feature seen from the anatomist’s side.

Audubon’s account, in his own words

The account begins on page 329 of volume VI and is short. It does not describe a bird Audubon watched. It describes one he drew from a gift and learned about from others. These passages are transcribed from the 1843 printing:

Although no birds of this species occurred to me when I was in Labrador, my son, John Woodhouse, and the young friends who accompanied him on the 28th of July, 1833, to Blanc Sablon, found, placed on the top of the low tangled fir-bushes, several deserted nests, which from the report of the English clerk of the fishing establishment there, we learned to belong to the Pied Duck.

The Honourable Daniel Webster of Boston sent me a fine pair killed by himself, on the Vineyard Islands, on the coast of Massachusetts, from which I made the drawing for the plate before you.

(Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo, vol. VI, Philadelphia, 1843, p. 329.)

The nests, he says, looked much like those of the Eider Duck: very large, built of fir twigs outside and dried grass within, and lined with down. From this he concluded that the Pied Duck breeds earlier than most of its tribe. He also remarks that Dr. Richardson left the species out of the Fauna Boreali-Americana, which he finds surprising for so hardy a bird that winters on the coasts of Nova Scotia, Maine and Massachusetts in the worst cold.

The second paragraph is about range and the people who handled specimens. Audubon places the southern limit at Chesapeake Bay, where he saw some near the mouth of the St. James river, and says he met with several in the Baltimore market. He adds that it turns up every year in greater or smaller numbers along the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island and sometimes ascends the Delaware as far as Philadelphia.

A bird-stuffer he knew at Camden supplied a detail that now carries more weight than he could have guessed. The man had many specimens, all taken by baiting fish-hooks with the common mussel on a trot-line sunk a few feet under the surface. He never found one alive, Audubon wrote, “on account of the manner in which these Ducks dive and flounder when securely hooked.” Audubon admits that he never saw the changes of plumage that the species goes through.

On page 330 he sums up the habits. The bird, he writes, “seems to be a truly marine bird, seldom entering rivers unless urged by stress of weather.” It dives in the surf over sand or mud bars for small shell-fish, fry and sea-weeds, swallowing sand and gravel, flies swiftly with a whistling sound of the wings, and is usually seen in flocks of seven to ten, “probably the members of one family.” The synopsis at the end gives the range as the Atlantic shores from Nova Scotia to New Jersey, rather rare, in winter, breeding from Labrador northward, and never seen in the interior.

The Labrador Duck today

The modern species name is Camptorhynchus labradorius, and Birds of the World lists it as extinct. Its breeding grounds were never properly found. The Cornell account names the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the coast of Labrador, Hudson Bay, the Ungava Peninsula and Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island as putative records, while the wintering distribution rests on specimens. The Sea Duck Joint Venture puts the winter quarters mainly on Long Island and in the Canadian maritime waters of the Bay of Fundy, with the range reaching south to Chesapeake Bay. The last Canadian bird on record was shot at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, in April 1871, and the last in the United States was taken off Long Island, New York, in the autumn of 1875.

The Sea Duck Joint Venture counts fewer than 60 specimens in museums worldwide, skins, mounts and bones together. Birds of the World admits that knowledge of the species is “extremely limited” and confined almost entirely to its wintering habits, and that numbers apparently fell so quickly that few noted the decline. No single cause is established. The Joint Venture mentions one possibility, disturbance of the breeding grounds, for example by foxes reaching islands that had not had land predators. Audubon’s text shows that in the 1830s the duck was still being sold in markets and found every year along the mid-Atlantic coast, which is a reminder of how quickly a bird could pass from “rather rare” to gone.

Two editions of Birds of America: plate 400 and plate 332

The folio plate came first. The double-elephant folio, issued in London from 1827 to 1838, has 435 hand-colored engravings, and plate 332 is the Pied Duck, engraved by Robert Havell after Audubon in 1836. In the octavo edition the same subject receives plate 400 in a much smaller format, and the text sits beside the picture instead of in a separate volume. The earlier version of the account is cited in the synonymy as “Aud. Orn. Biog., vol. iv. p. 271.”

The two numbers differ because the editions are organized differently. The folio was issued in parts, which mixed large and small birds to keep each sheet useful, while the octavo follows a systematic order and runs to 500 plates in seven volumes. Anyone looking up the Pied Duck in a library catalog therefore needs to state the edition: plate 332 in the folio, plate 400 in the octavo.

The Pied Duck among Audubon’s extinct birds

The Pied Duck is one of several species in the book that no longer exist. The extinct birds list sets it beside the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Great Auk and the Heath Hen. A species that is still debated is the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, whose plate is on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker page. For a bird that still thrives in the same book, compare the Carolina Turtle Dove, the Mourning Dove of today. For the volume and plate ranges of the whole book, see the Birds of America overview.

How this page’s number works

The number 00665 in this address is the site’s own running count of text sections in volume VI, not a plate or page number. Short genus introductions count as sections, so the count runs ahead of the plate numbers. The Pied Duck is plate 400 and begins on page 329, and neither figure appears in the address.