Timeline
| 10,000 BP | Pleistocene glaciers cover Kent Island |
| 5,000 BP-1930 | Abenaki cross from Passamaquoddy Bay to spend summers hunting seals |
| 3,300 BP | As global climate warms and ice sheet rise, sea levels rise, submerging hemlock forests along shoreline (stumps still visible in intertidal) |
| 1799 | English settler John Kent arrives with family to serve as pilot in Bay of Fundy, farm root crops, raise sheep, and burn limestone |
| 1828 | John Kent dies (age 62) |
| 1853 | Kent’s widow Susannah Kent dies (age 92) |
| 1913 |
Wood Island fisherman Ernest Joy shoots yellow-nosed albatross west of Kent Island Grand Manan Island naturalist Allan Moses prepares scientific specimen, eventually donating it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in exchange for future opportunity to join collecting expedition |
| 1920 | McLaughlin Bros. Ltd. buys Kent Island |
| 1928 | Moses joins expedition to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) with Yale-educated amateur ornithologist J. Sterling Rockefeller |
| 1929 | Moses succeeds in collecting African green broadbill, one of world’s rarest and least known birds and one of the main objectives of the expedition |
| 1930 | At Moses’s suggestion, Rockefeller buys Kent Island in gratitude in order to protect one of the most important breeding colonies of endangered common eiders. Allan Moses and Ralph Griffin hired by Rockefeller as the bird sanctuary’s first wardens, while managing Rockefeller’s silver fox farm |
| 1932 | Bowdoin College ornithology professor Alfred Gross conducts field study of eiders; Ernest Mayr visits island |
| 1934 |
Bowdoin sophomore Bill Gross and other Kent Island pioneers spend summer studying Leach’s storm-petrels and other seabirds Harvard University evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr recommends that Rockefeller give island to Bowdoin |
| 1935 | Bill Gross, influenced by childhood experience with father at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado Island, Panama, approaches Rockefeller about donating Kent Island to Bowdoin College |
| 1936 |
Rockefeller donates Kent Island to Bowdoin College for $1 Bowdoin Scientific Station, with Alfred Gross as director and Bill Gross as field director, is founded |
| 1937 | Bob Cunningham arrives to help set up meteorological station (continues research on fog chemistry through 2006) |
| 1939 | Henry Ingalls dies |
| 1948 | Joy’s “housekeeper,” Carrie Chase, dies; Bowdoin President Casey Sills visits |
| 1949 | Ernest Joy leaves Kent Island |
| 1951 |
Ingalls’s “housekeeper” Hannah Cheney dies Ernest Joy dies in Lubec, Maine (age 72) |
| 1953 | Alfred Gross retires; Chuck Huntington serves as director; Bowdoin President Spike Coles visits |
| 1959 | Snowshoe hares introduced on Hay Island |
| 1986 | Chuck Huntington retires and is succeeded by Nat Wheelwright |
| 1992 | Bowdoin President Bob Edwards visits |
| 2003 | Bowdoin College purchases Hay and Sheep Islands from Owen and Jack Ingalls |
| 2004 | Bob Mauck succeeds Nat Wheelwright; Bowdoin President Barry Mills visits |
| 2008 | Damon Gannon succeeds Bob Mauck as director. Workshop held on Kent Island to chart future research plans and new programmatic initiatives; attended by Bowdoin faculty from the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, History, and Visual Arts; visiting researchers; and Dean of Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd. |
| 2016 | Don Dearborn, interim director, succeeds Damon Gannon |
| 2017 | Ed Minot, interim director, succeeds Don Dearborn |
| 2017-2018 | Patricia Jones succeeds Ed Minot as director; Ian Kyle is hired as assistant director |