Two months ago, Melody Field saw a birdhouse mailbox at Sonoma Market, and showed it to her husband, Sam. “I said, ‘You can do that for me, can’t you?’ He said, ‘Sure, I’ll give it a try.’”
Now, the Fields’ yard is cluttered with birdhouses of all shapes and sizes. There’s a birdhouse mailbox, an elogated birdhouse planter, and a massive, cedar-shingled birdhouse perched upon a six-foot tall redwood stump. “A neighbor said, ‘Put a big one on it!’” Sam Field explained, pointing out that the each of the eight bird holes has its own individual compartment. “There’s eight apartments in there. Eight condos.”
Field, a heavy equipment operator, claimed no woodworking experience before building that first birdhouse — although he already owned a table saw, a jigsaw, and a drill. “I’ve always been handy,” he said. The only tool he purchased was a nail gun that shoots small brads, so as not to split the delicate pieces of trimwork he uses.
Field uses pieces of scrap wood he collects from his job sites, as well as leftover scraps from neighbors’ renovation jobs. “In the construction job, I go to different jobs, and there’s scrap. So if I see a good looking piece of redwood, or cedar, it’s coming home with me. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff gets thrown away on the job. You haul so much stuff to the dump. Let’s say you cleaned up three sites — you could probably build another house.”
That kind of foraging informs his designs, said Field, who doesn’t draw out any plans. “It just kind of happens. I don’t start out with a definite plan. I just walk over and see what kind of wood I have left, what I want to build it out of. I’ve got a little workbench in there, I just start stacking it up to see what I’m gonna do and what angles I’m gonna make.”
Such a system translates into a styllistic quirkiness that makes the birdhouses stand out: roofs made out of oak baseboards from a friend’s mobile home; tiny doorknobs from wooden hole plugs for screw holes; railings made from giant Sequoia branches; and rooftop ornamentation made from drawer pulls. “We were looking for something fancy to put on top.”
Field’s only purchase of materials has been a bundle of cedar shingles, which he used as roofing on the large birdhouse. “That’s the first project I’ve really spent some money on.”
Field has built a half a dozen birdhouses so far, and the couple has already noticed a difference in the number of birds that visit their yard. They used to have just a few finches, but now there’s 30 or 40; bluebirds have also made a home in one of their houses. “We put birdseed out, and they’re out here all the time,” Melody Field said.
“He just started it because I asked him to make some wedding presents,” she said. “It went from there.”
Sam Field insisted he has no plans to sell the birdhouses.
“It’s a hobby,” he said. “It’s cutting into my reading time.”
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