Allan Moses

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 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.

They arrived in Dar es Salaam in August 1928 by steamer after a voyage through the Red Sea and down the east coast of Africa. 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. It was moved to the recently opened Grand Manan High School in the village of Grand Harbour, where it was named the Moses Memorial Museum of Natural History. Now known as the Allan Moses Bird Collection, it is one of the largest in Canada.

By influencing Rockefeller to purchase Kent Island as a bird sanctuary, Moses made possible the revival of the dwindling eider population. By the same act, he was instrumental in Bowdoin College's eventual acquisition of a field station in the Bay of Fundy. By 2023 research done on Kent Island had resulted in over 220 published scientific papers.