[1] In July 1928 Rockefeller, his Yale classmate Charles B. G. Murphy, and the Canadian collector and taxidermist Allan Moses went to Africa on an ornithological expedition to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History.
[3]: 59 The main goal of the expedition 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.
[4] On July 26, 1929, in a mountainous area at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, Moses was the first to find and shoot a Grauer's broadbill.
The common eider population had been declining for several years and there were estimated to be at most 30 breeding pairs from the Gulf of Maine southward along the Atlantic Coast.
They moved to the island in June 1930 and over the following years the eider population increased dramatically, reaching several hundred nesting pairs by 1935.
They had two daughters; At the time of his marriage in 1931 Rockefeller was "associated with" the Chatham Phenix National Bank and Trust Company of New York.
[1] In 1948 he joined with other Rockefeller and Thomas Fortune Ryan heirs in forming the Enterprise Development Corporation to invest in "securities of privately owned companies making mechanical end-products".