Kent Island (New Brunswick)
 Kent Island dock | |
  Kent Island | |
| Geography | |
|---|---|
| Location | Bay of Fundy |
| Coordinates | 44°34′55″N 66°45′22″W / 44.58194°N 66.75611°W |
| Area | 247 acres (100 ha)[1] |
| Length | 1.8 mi (2.9 km) |
| Highest elevation | 61 ft (18.6 m) |
| Administration | |
Canada | |
| Province | New Brunswick |
Kent Island is an island located 6 miles (9.7 km) from Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy.[2] It is the outermost island of the Grand Manan archipelago in Charlotte County off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada. It is typically reached by boat from Ingalls Head.[3]
It is the site of the Bowdoin Scientific Research Station, which is primarily focused on local birds including the Leach's storm petrel,[3] common eider, herring gull, black guillemot and a variety of songbirds including the Blackpoll Warbler.[4] More than 200 bird species have been identified on the island, with at least fifty species nesting.[5] It also participated in 60+ years of fog research, under Robert M. Cunningham.[5][6]
Settlement and early history
[edit]Abenaki people regularly visited Kent island to hunt seals, but there were no permanent inhabitants until the arrival in 1799 of John Kent, a British settler, with his wife Susanna. They had eight children, three of whom were born on the island.[7] Kent cleared the island's centre to allow for agriculture; the southern portion of the island saw its forests die from unknown causes, leaving only the north wooded with fir and spruce.[3] Kent also worked as a maritime pilot. [7] He was credited with saving a total of 93 sailors from wrecked ships between 1810 and 1824.[8]: 116 His son Jonathan became keeper of the Gannet Rock Lighthouse in 1837.[8]: 28
John Kent died in 1828 and his widow lived alone on the island until her death in 1853. She was said by local people to be a witch who had caused a shipwreck by luring a vessel onto a reef. She was also supposed to have proclaimed a "Kent Island Curse" prophesying that she would be the last inhabitant of the island. [9][10] The island remained largely uninhabited until it was purchased by the McLaughlin family in 1920.[7]
Kent Island was a main breeding ground for the Common eider. However, the activities of hunters and egg collectors had led to a serious decline in the birds' numbers. By the 1920s there were estimated to be at most 30 breeding pairs from the Gulf of Maine southward along the Atlantic Coast. Most of these nested on Kent Island.[7] The decline in the eider population as a result of excessive hunting alarmed Allan Moses, a naturalist, taxidermist, and conservationist who lived on Grand Manan.[9]
Purchase by John Sterling Rockefeller
[edit]In 1913 a Grand Manan fisherman named Ernest Joy shot a large seabird near Machias Seal Island. Allan Moses identified it as an Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, a bird normally found in the Southern Ocean. Joy gave the albatross, only the second ever sighted in North America, to Moses, who prepared a study skin from it.[7][9]
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.[11] This led to his participation in a 1928-29 ornithological expedition to Tanganyika Territory and the Belgian Congo led by John Sterling Rockefeller.[12][9][13]
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.[14]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.[14]
In order to thank Moses for his work on the expedition and for collecting the first Grauer's broadbill, Rockefeller undertook to purchase Kent Island and the two nearby islands, Hay and Sheep, and make them a bird sanctuary. The owner of Kent Island sold it for $25,000, but the owner of the two smaller islands refused to sell. He was a fisherman who continued to live on Hay Island. However, he agreed to allow access to his property for "scientific purposes", such as counting nests.[11]: 104 Rockefeller hired two resident wardens for Kent Island, Moses himself and Ralph Griffin of Grand Manan. Each received an annual salary of $1000. They moved to the island in June 1930. Over the succeeding years, the eider population increased dramatically, reaching several hundred nesting pairs by 1935.[11]: 114 The only mammals on the island are muskrats, leaving the birds largely free from predation.[15]
In 1936, after visits to Kent Island by scientists including Ernst Mayr and Alfred Otto Gross of Bowdoin College, Rockefeller donated the island to Bowdoin College as a research station in exchange for the nominal fee of one dollar ($1.00) and the college's commitment to maintain it as a bird sanctuary.[7][16]
The Bowdoin Scientific Research Station
[edit]In 1937, motion picture engineers unable to get a truck of equipment to Kent's Island to record the calls of the Leach's Petrel instead made use of a shortwave radio at the research station and a portable field amplifier to transmit and record the sounds.[17]
The island can accommodate twelve researchers, and as of 1968, its chief caretaker was lobster fisherman Myhron Tate.[3]
References
[edit]
- ^ "Research". Bowdoin College. Retrieved 17 March 2025.
- ^ "Visit". Bowdoin College. Retrieved 17 March 2025.
- ^ a b c d Huntington, Charles E. (Fall 1967). "Leach's Petrel". Bowdoin Alumnus. 42 (1): 6–10. Retrieved 16 March 2025.
- ^ Bodum, Peter (11 October 1985). "A summer of bird watching on Kent Island". The Bowdoin Orient. p. 4. Retrieved 16 March 2025.
- ^ a b http://grandmananmuseum.ca/kent-island-s-bowdoin-college-research-station
- ^ Daley, Beth (5 August 2001). "A patient breed: For 64 years, scientist watches fog roll in". Boston Globe. p. A1. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f Wheelwright, Nathaniel T. (2008). "First, there was an albatross" (PDF). Bowdoin Magazine. 79 (2): 26–33.
- ^ a b Lorimer, J[ohn] G. [from old catalog (1876). History of islands & islets in the Bay of Fundy, Charlotte County, New Brunswick;. The Library of Congress. St. Stephen, N.B., Printed at the office of the Saint Croix courier.
- ^ a b c d "History". Bowdoin College. Retrieved 17 March 2025.
- ^ Sclanders, Ian (1 October 1953). "The island that's too good to be true" (PDF). Maclean's Magazine: 16–17, 74–76. Retrieved 17 March 2025.
- ^ a b c Ingersoll, L. K (1991). Wings over the sea: the story of Allan Moses. Fredericton, N.B., Canada: Goose Lane Editions. ISBN 978-0-86492-101-7.
- ^ Fowler, Shane (10 July 2023). "The wild history of Kent Island: How a tiny isle off Grand Manan became a scientific sanctuary". CBC News New Brunswick. Retrieved 18 March 2025.
- ^ "To study birds in Africa: J.S. Rockefeller and C.B.G. Murphy sail on survey for museums". The New York Times. July 6, 1928. p. 24.
- ^ a b Rockefeller, J. Sterling; Murphy, Charles B. G. (1933). "The rediscovery of Pseudocalyptomena" (PDF). The Auk. 50 (1): 23–29. doi:10.2307/4076544. JSTOR 4076544.
- ^ Fowler, Shane (24 July 2023). "Unlocking Kent Island's secret life of birds". CBC News New Brunswick. Retrieved 19 March 2025.
- ^ "The Heath Hen and Other Early Ornithological Films of Alfred Otto Gross". Bowdoin College Special Collections and Archives. 2018-08-03. Retrieved 2023-06-07.
- ^ Kellogg, P. (February 1938). "Hunting the songs of vanishing birds with a microphone". Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. 30 (2): 201–208. Retrieved 16 March 2025.