Ingersoll examines Allan Moses in `Wings Over the Sea’

WINGS OVER THE SEA, by L.K. Ingersoll, Goose Lane Editions, 142 pages, $15.95.

When a friend from nearby Inner Wood Island brought a strange bird to the Moses family museum, Allan Moses could hardly have imagined the future this lost albatross would eventually bring him: scientific collection expeditions to Africa and the South Atlantic, a reputation as a world-class ornithologist, and the foundation of a bird preservation area that ultimately would save the common eider duck.

This new biography of Allan Moses tells the story of a person known to few outside of Grand Manan Island in an authoritative voice — L.K. Ingersoll, who knew Moses for the last 20 years of his life, was able to draw a large fund of personal reflection. In fact, he stated in the introduction:

“If the reader notices detailed information not acknowledged as to source, let me acknowledge here that it comes from my own notes made during our conversations, or from my own observations.”

Oddly, though (and I would say unfortunately), Ingersoll wrote himself out of the story. Except in the introduction, no mention is made of their friendship; the author’s modesty kept the book from being that much warmer.

That is not to say, though, that the story is ill-told. Ingersoll’s is a voice full of detail, anecdote, and love for the place and person he plainly knows well.

The story, too, is fresh and deserves a place on today’s ecologically aware bookshelf. Ingersoll begins with a related chapter, “The Eider’s Circle,” decrying the devastation man has wrought: “Humans (he wrote) are among the few predators who will kill more than they need for food, and humans alone place commercial value on their prey.” Allan Moses, Ingersoll contends, was on the side of the animals and only killed them when necessary.

He goes on to relate that Moses, the son of a well-to-do Grand Manan entrepreneur (who, incidentally, was born and raised in Bangor), quit school early because he saw in it little relevance to his nature-oriented goals. He joined the Labrador Patrol game warden service in 1923, but left only after 3 1/2 months to begin one of his greatest accomplishments: collector and taxidermist on a scientific voyage through the South Atlantic from the Cape Verde Islands to South Trinidad, and even into French West Africa. This berth came as a direct result of his gift of the albatross mentioned at the outset to the American Museum of Natural History.

Moses’ second journey (into the heart of Africa with Sterling Rockefeller) had as one of its goals the rediscovery of a green broadbill of which the scientific community has only one specimen. And this discovery brought about the most important success of Moses’ career — the one he accomplished at home.

Rockefeller was so pleased with Moses’ find that he said “he would like to mark the achievement in some special way. Allan needed no further prompting. `For a fraction of what this expedition cost,’ he told his friend, `you could buy a group of three islands in the Grand Manan area, have them declared a sanctuary, and thus save the Bay of Fundy eider ducks.”‘

This advice was followed, and the eider population rebounded from “several” in 1929 to 7,000 in 1975. Today, the Kent Island station he founded is run by Bowdoin College, and it continues to study the birds Moses did.

Ingersoll’s portrait of Moses is one drawn with a careful, respectful hand. It is not, perhaps, strictly objective, but there is no life without subjectivity. And if a lesson is to be learned from “Wings Over the Sea,” it is of the necessity and the beauty of life.

Joe Jordan is a free-lance writer who resides in Chester.