New York Zoological Park. Office of Director. W. Reid Blair collection of records from Matameck Conference on Biological Cycles

In 1931, thirty naturalists gathered at the Matameck Factory, Copley Amory's manor on Moisie Bay, near the Labrador boundary for the Matameck Conference on Biological Cycles (also known as the Canadian Biological Conference). The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and attempt to define the natural laws that govern the alternating plenitude and scarcity of Canadian wildlife.

New York Zoological Society President Madison Grant delegated the directors of the Zoological Park and Aquarium, W. Reid Blair and Charles H. Townsend, to represent NYZS at the conference. As a result of the conference, NYZS extended a three-year grant to Charles Elton, Director of the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford University, which enabled him to study the records in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives and to trace recurrent cycles of abundance and scarcity among the snowshoe rabbit, lynx, and other furbearing wildlife in the MacKenzie River District and Labrador.