Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Joy, Ernest
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
[ca. 1876]-1951
History
Ernest Joy (ca. 1876-1951), the son of Edward and Annie Ramsdell Joy, had a keen interest in and great knowledge of birds. In the early 1920s, as he crossed from Machias Seal Island to Grand Manan, New Brunswick, he saw and shot an albatross, a yellow nosed mallemuck. He gave it to his friend Alan Moses, a taxidermist living at North Head, Grand Manan, who later used the interest in this rare bird to gain influence in the ornithological community. He donated the specimen to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in exchange for membership on an expedition to Tanzania and the Belgian Congo in 1928. While on there safari, he related the plight of the North American population of eider ducks to Sterling Rockefeller. In 1930, at Moses' suggestion, Mr. Rockefeller purchased Kent Island, located off the coast of Grand Manan Island, which he turned into a bird sanctuary with the intent to preserve the species, which had dwindled to only seven nesting pairs. Eider duck numbers quickly rebounded and the species was saved. In 1936, the Rockefellers gave the island to the Bowdoin College in Maine, for use as a research station.
Ernest was a game warden. In 1938, he began work as keeper, weather recorder, and all-round guide to the students of Bowdoin College Scientific Research Station at Kent Island. Ernest Joy wrote letters to accompany the weather reports he sent to Robert Cunningham, who was a research meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He retired in 1949 and died in November 1951
Source: http://www.bowdoin.edu/kent-island/history/kent-island-timeline.shtml