Wings Over the Sea

Tony Barclay is a retired juvenile corrections probation officer and a
former public-health research associate at the University of Toronto.

This book, which tells the story of Allan Moses, a native of Grand Manan
Island (situated off the coast of New Brunswick), deals with many
subjects other than his life. Since his greatest and most lasting legacy
was the preservation of a variety of sea birds in the conservation area
that he was instrumental in setting up, much of the book is about
ornithology, but it is also about much more than that.

Moses travelled widely in search of specimens—all over the South
Atlantic, all across Africa, and over much of Eastern Canada. He kept
diaries and wrote letters home describing his adventures, excerpts from
which form an interesting part of the book. His discovery of the rare
Green Broadbill in the highlands of Central Africa was an important
event in the world of bird studies. It led directly to the purchase of a
large island near his homeland by one of his companions on the African
safari, J. Sterling Rockefeller. Later, this island (and the rights to
use two other islands for study) was donated to Bowdoin College in
Maine; it has served as an important centre of scientific research since
then.

This book has both the virtue and the limitation of being a local
history. It is a virtue in that it deals with many matters from a local
point of view—for example, the politics of starting a museum, of
dealing with those who wanted to use the sea birds for commercial
purposes, and of resisting the penny-pinching of rich American
philanthropists. It is limited in that its subject will not be of
universal interest.