This video is from the 20th Anniversary of Birds & Beasleys in 2013. 2018 is the 25th Anniversary of Birds & Beasleys opening. We are very grateful for such wonderful customers and a great community surrounding us over the past 25 years. Thank you all for the love and support. Enjoy the video from our 20th Anniversary.
For events, I come to the store and then I sit here and really I want to go home. It was a gutsy move. I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it, but Sandy did. Sandy put it all together and full speed ahead and here we go you know because you look at the floor space and you have to fill that up. Some good days and some bad days and then you forget about the bad days and look at all the good and all the people around.
Mom started the store about 20 years ago this month at Birds & Beasleys over on Park Avenue. A year and a half ago, we moved up to this location, tripled the space, and I thought, we need to have a party about it. So, we invited some raptors down, we invited mom down, we got a new book for her as we took all of her current illustrations and put them in a journal and we are selling that today and she is signing them. It is about a one hundred page journal, it could be used as a travel log, a birding guide, someone just said: “Hey, how about recipes?” And it is just a fun time to celebrate. We have lots of people coming who are first-time customers. I had someone talk to me yesterday and said “Oh, I used to come down with my granddaughter. We used to visit the Cockateal and you guys.” I said, “How old is your granddaughter now?” And she said, “Twenty-three.” And I went, “Oh, we have been here a long time!”
We started 20 years ago and people have been coming in all these years. It is not just a wild bird seed supply house, it’s also an art gallery, and now we even have Montana food out which is very very nice and it has just been an incredibly wonderful time with this business over all these years. We had been in business for almost four years when Ray and I suddenly thought about our daughter Sandy because I am illustrating and writing the whole time, it was really hard for me to do. I would go home at night and work on those things. So, we called Sandy about that and she called back about a half-hour later and she said, “Yes, I want to come.” So this has been wonderful because Sandy basically runs it now and I am only here on Mondays and it has just been marvelous. I am still working on this bird book, I still have quite a few pages to go. Hopefully, I will be through soon because I am 83 now, going on 84, and I am still no cavities, no arthritis, I am a very lucky lady.
This is a journal you can write in, it has all of my paintings over here. It is just a lot of fun. And I not only just do it by birds, I do animals and people and everything else and just have a lot of fun. It is a fun journal that just came out, Sandy has just put this out and it has really been very nicely done and like here is how it will be in the book. Here is the Bohemian Waxwing and the Cedar Waxwing painted together to show you how, that’s why we did the book this way. Now, you can tell them apart and it will be a lot of fun once we are finished because it is going to be a lot, a lot of paintings. I still have quite a few paintings to do for it and I paint these with colored pencil. I use all kinds of mediums, I started using colored pencil about a year ago. I just love it and it’s just really nice. It’s hard to believe I use colored pencil. Once in a while I use a little acrylic on it, but not very much. I just thoroughly enjoy my artwork and I have been doing this since I was in Kindergarten. Imagine I have been doing this all these years and here I am now, 83 and I will be 84 in February and I just have a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoy it, I am a lucky lady.
I first met Sandy and Jackie when I came to help out at the store, in 1997 or 1998, somewhere around there. We were neighbors with Sandy’s sister, so we have known them for a long time and we have become really good friends, it is fantastic. We were part of a crew that helped with the migration from the old building over to here. That was such a fun occasion to see over 100 people helping out and doing that. The new space is excellent.
I think that Birds & Beasleys, it has been open 20 years and it has just been marvelous. If our daughter Sandy Shull hadn’t joined us, we would have closed by then and we have ten lovely ladies who are with us also. We are very very fortunate.