Member

Allen was born on October 15, 1910. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and was an acquaintance of Luther Goldman in early years of his life; they played sandlot football together. Allen was a friend of H. C. Oberholser and came to the old Biological Survey in 1936 to work under him. He was a museum aide at the Smithsonian until 1946. Allen also worked under John Aldrich, and they published several papers together especially on the various races of mourning doves. Allen collected specimens with Charles Handley in Northwest Territories, Northwest Greenland, Devon Island, and elsewhere in the Canadian Arctic; with H. S. Peters and Fred Lincoln in Cuba, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia; with Gorman Bond in Illinois, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas; and with Tom Burleigh in Cuba, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. Burleigh and Duvall published a new subspecies of flycatcher (Contopus) from the southern keys of Cuba in 1948 in Proceedings Biological Society of Washington. Allen attended George Washington University before the war, and during the war served with the Army Medical Corps involved with operations at Walter Reed Hospital. During the 1950s, Allen was head of the Bird Banding Office at Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Maryland, and was an ornithologist on the Pesticide Review Board. He was elected to membership in the Washington Biologists’ Field Club in 1950. Allen died in February, 1983, in Plano, Texas.