In 1929 Allan Moses, a fisherman from Grand Manan, parleyed an ornithological "find" into a bird preservation area, leading the way for the development of several bird sanctuaries on Canada's eastern coast. Without his work, the common eider population would now be decimated and many of the shorebirds which nest in the Bay of Fundy would be endangered, if not extinct.

But the discovery of an albatross also gave a strange twist to Moses' career, bringing his interests to the attention of several museums, including the Cleveland Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, which later sponsored his ornithological expeditions to the South Atlantic and West Africa.