Birds: Avocation to vocation

By Liz Barry

(434) 385-5524

On a birding trip last summer, a puffin latched onto Allen Hale’s left thumb and wouldn’t let go.
“Blood was drawn, but there were no life-threatening injuries,” the avid birder says, eyes twinkling.
Hale was at Matinicus Rock — an island off the coast of Maine — to help put bands on the small sea birds, so that researchers could track them. Little did he know he would become victim to one’s razor-sharp bill.
The battle story is one of many Hale has accumulated over the years.
The Nelson County resident has built a life and livelihood around birds.
Since 1991, Hale has owned Buteo Books, an independent bookstore specializing in everything ornithology, which he runs out of his home. The business was founded in 1971 by a couple in South Dakota, before Hale moved it to Shipman.
Today, Hale offers one of the largest selections of bird books in North America, from common field guides to rare books valued at more than $10,000. While other businesses have been battered by the recession, Halesays his business is steady and he’s looking to expand his offerings.
He lives in a cabin down a secluded gravel road. His home is 35 acres of forested land, providing a perfect haven for bird-watching.
Most of Hale’s sales come from Internet and phone orders, though a few determined customers make the trek out to his store each year.
“I have one to two customers a month who actually come here,” he says. “A guy comes all the way from Pennsylvania to shop.”
His bookstore is a dim set of rooms connected to his home. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with books, and the sound of the humidifier rattles through the air to keep the mold away.
As Hale winds through the rows of books, he pauses at a bookshelf that conceals a hatch door.
“If you get tired of the bird books, you lean on this and there’s the wine cellar,” he says, with a wry smile.
The 66-year-old has a friendly smile and curly white hair that is a bit disheveled. He wears his glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose.
Though his interest in birds runs deeps, Hale is something of a Renaissance man. He serves on the Nelson County Board of Supervisors and also runs a land surveying company.
His fascination with birds began years ago, when he was a student at University of Virginia, where he got in the habit of leaving sunflower seeds on his windowsill. Hale was not content with just watching the birds; he wanted to know what they were and everything about them. He still has his first field guide, which is so fragile that he keeps it in a plastic zip lock bag. The pages are dog-eared and the binding is almost completely worn away.
In the years since, Hale’s love of birds has led him across the world. But he’s still fascinated with the birds that come by his window, like the ruby throated hummingbird which comes to his hummingbird feeder like clockwork each spring.
“They come back in April every year, and if you don’t have your hummingbird feeder out, they’ll buzz around your window where it is,” Hale says.
Between his duties on the Board of Supervisors and the bookstore, time can be scarce for bird-watching. In three years, he plans to turn over the bookstore to his son and daughter-in-law.
“I’m 66; I want to do more bird-watching and less book-selling,” He says.
Birds on his list to see: the elusive ivory billed woodpecker, a bird thought to be extinct until unconfirmed sightings in recent years, and the secretary bird, a dinosaur-like hawk that lives in the grasslands of Africa and catches snakes and lizards with its feet.