Allan Leopold Moses (1881 – 1953) was a Canadian naturalist, taxidermist, and conservationist. A native of Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, he participated in scientific expeditions sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. 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.
Family and early life
Moses was born on the island of Grand Manan in 1881, the second of three children in his family. His father and grandfather were both taxidermists who collected and mounted birds as a hobby.
His grandfather, John Thomas Chiselden Moses, was born in England, where he learned taxidermy before emigrating to Canada as a young man. He later lived in Maine and finally settled in the village of North Head in 1872 with his wife and several of their ten children. He compiled a list of Grand Manan birds for a book published in 1876, in which he was described as "our Grand Manan ornithologist", who "makes birds his specialty and his pastime". John Thomas Moses died in 1885. His son John Russell Moses, born in 1853, was Allan Moses's father.
John Russell Moses learned taxidermy from his father and continued to build the family collection of mounted bird specimens, while prospering as a businessman. He was one of Grand Manan's major fish buyers, with a processing plant in North Head. Part of his business was selling the dried swim bladders of hake for the manufacture of isinglass. This was highly profitable, as the bladders were an otherwise useless by-product of processing.
John Russell taught his taxidermy skills to his son, Allan, and to his daughter Sarah, Allan's older sister. Allan Moses left school early and worked in his father's fish plant before becoming a fisherman himself. Sarah, who wrote for local newspapers under the name Sarah E. M. Smith, dealt with her father's business and natural history related correspondence and later helped Allan with his scientific reports and edited his travel journals for publication.
The albatross
On August 1, 1913 a Grand Manan fisherman named Ernest Joy shot a large seabird near Machias Seal Island. He did not recognize the bird and took it to Allan Moses, who identified it as a Grey-headed albatross, a bird normally found in the Southern Ocean. It was to be the first of its species ever recorded in the American Ornithologists' Union's Checklist of North American Birds. Joy gave the albatross to Moses, who prepared a study skin from it.
The American ornithologist Leonard Cutler Sanford made two visits to Grand Manan, attempting to purchase the specimen for the American Museum of Natural History. 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.
Cleveland Museum expedition
Moses spent the summer of 1923 in Labrador as a warden, enforcing the recently enacted Migratory Birds Convention Act. While there, he was invited by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to join a collecting expedition to the South Atlantic. 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. They spent five months in the Cape Verde Islands, where Moses collected birds on eight of the ten islands and made about 800 study skins. The expedition then went on to Africa, arriving in Dakar in May 1924 and spending another five months there before returning to Cape Verde and then sailing to the island of Trindade, where they arrived in December 1924. From there they sailed to Rio de Janeiro, where Moses left the expedition, arriving back on Grand Manan in April 1925.
American Museum of Natural History expedition
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. The expedition was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and led by John Sterling Rockefeller, along with Rockefeller's friend and Yale University classmate Charles B. G. Murphy. 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.