# Kent Island (New Brunswick)

Kent Island is an island located 6 miles (9.7 km) from Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy. 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.
It is the site of the Bowdoin Scientific Research Station, which is primarily focused on local birds including the Leach's storm petrel, common eider, herring gull, black guillemot and a variety of songbirds including the Blackpoll Warbler. More than 200 bird species have been identified on the island, with at least fifty species nesting. It also participated in 60+ years of fog research, under Robert M. Cunningham.

## Settlement and early history

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.
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. Kent also worked as a maritime pilot. He was credited with saving a total of 93 sailors from wrecked ships between 1810 and 1824.$^{:116}$ His son Jonathan became keeper of the Gannet Rock Lighthouse in 1837.$^{:28}$
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. The island remained largely uninhabited until it was purchased by the McLaughlin family in 1920.
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. 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.

## Purchase by John Sterling Rockefeller

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.
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. This led to his participation in a 1928-29 ornithological expedition to Tanganyika Territory and the Belgian Congo led by John Sterling Rockefeller.
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.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.
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 $25,000, but the owner of the two smaller islands refused to sell. He was a fisherman who continued to live on Hay Island. However, he agreed to allow access to his property for "scientific purposes", such as counting nests.$^{:104}$ Rockefeller hired two resident wardens for Kent Island, Moses himself and Ralph Griffin of Grand Manan. Each received an annual salary of $1000. They moved to the island in June 1930. Over the succeeding years, the eider population increased dramatically, reaching several hundred nesting pairs by 1935.$^{:114}$ The only mammals on the island are muskrats, leaving the birds largely free from predation.
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.

## The Bowdoin Scientific Research Station

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.
The island can accommodate twelve researchers, and as of 1968, its chief caretaker was lobster fisherman Myhron Tate.