Allan Moses
By encouraging John Sterling Rockefeller to purchase Kent Island as a bird sanctuary in 1930, he was instrumental in the revival of the Bay of Fundy common eider population.
His taxidermy collection of over 300 birds, all mounted by his grandfather, father, or himself and now displayed in the Grand Manan Museum, is one of the largest in Canada.
His grandfather, John Thomas Chiselden Moses, was born in England, where he learned taxidermy before emigrating to Canada as a young man.
John Russell Moses learned taxidermy from his father and continued to build the family collection of mounted bird specimens, while prospering as a businessman.
[2]: 31 On August 1, 1913 a Grand Manan fisherman named Ernest Joy shot a large seabird near Machias Seal Island.
For several years Moses refused to sell it, but eventually agreed to donate it to the museum in return for a chance to take part in a future scientific expedition.
Moses was one of two taxidermists and collectors on the expedition, which left Long Island in November 1923 on board a three-masted schooner called the Blossom.
[2]: 43–56 In 1928 and 1929 Moses served as the taxidermist on an ornithological expedition to Tanganyika and Belgian Congo to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History.
Their main goal was to find and collect the rare Grauer's broadbill, which was known only by one 1908 specimen in the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in England, and which had eluded collectors for twenty years.
[2]: 101 Rockefeller held Moses in high regard and wanted to repay him personally for his work on the expedition, and particularly for collecting the first Grauer's broadbill.
Moses suggested that Rockefeller buy a group of three small islands in the Bay of Fundy near Grand Manan and make them a bird sanctuary.
By doing so, he could protect the eider ducks which nested there, and whose numbers had been declining seriously for several years until there were estimated to be at most 30 breeding pairs from the Gulf of Maine southward along the Atlantic Coast.
[7] By influencing Rockefeller to purchase Kent Island as a bird sanctuary, Moses made possible the revival of the dwindling eider population.
