Nowhere Left to Land: Why a Dying Michigan Craft May Be the Songbird's Last Good Address Before the First Hard Frost
First Light in Ishpeming: A Workshop That Smells of Woodsmoke and Pine
The workshop is the hunting cabin his father built behind the house in 1952, barely bigger than a one-car garage. Frank Richardson's double-bit axe hangs on the back wall, its handle worn into the shape of somebody else's grip. On the bench sits a row of boards gone dark brown from seventy winters of woodstove smoke, cut, planed and stacked by the same pair of hands. Gene Richardson, 77, doesn't look up. He is running a block plane along the edge of a board no wider than his forearm. He has been doing this since 1988.
"It isn't quitting that bothers me," he says, still not looking up. "It's what I don't see anymore. When I was a boy, that dead white pine out back was so loud with birds you couldn't hear the radio through the screen door. Chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, all of them at once. The pine's long gone now. I stood out there for an hour last spring. One sparrow."
What Everyone Knows About Songbirds, and the Part Nobody Mentions
Nobody needs to tell you that birds are in trouble. Since 1970, North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds, more than one in four. That has been in the papers since 2019. What hasn't been in the papers is that most of those birds weren't rare. They were the everyday sparrows, finches and warblers, the ones that used to sit outside your grandmother's kitchen window. And what hasn't been written down anywhere is what happens to one particular chickadee in one particular backyard over one particular winter. That is what Gene has spent 38 years writing down.
"Everybody blames the big stuff," he says. "Logging, the cities, whatever's on the news. But a chickadee doesn't live in a national forest. He lives in backyards. Go look at a new subdivision. There's more than forty million acres of lawn in this country, a vinyl fence around every yard, and every dead tree cut down 'for safety.' A chickadee works a dozen yards a day. Tidy them all up and you haven't got a hundred little habitats anymore. You've got a hundred yards of nothing."
His father, Frank Richardson, cut timber in Marquette County for forty years, and he had one rule his crews thought was soft in the head: leave the dead ones standing. A dead tree full of woodpecker holes, a snag as foresters call it, is home to roughly a thousand kinds of wildlife. For most of the last century, they were routinely cleared out of yards and woodlots as eyesores and hazards.
They were homes, those dead trees. Not eyesores. There was a family of something in every one of them. Then people started calling them hazards, and they went in about fifteen years. My father left his last one standing in 1983. The man who bought the lot had it down by spring.
The Places Backyard Birds Really Live, and What Becomes of Them by November
Here is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the only one that matters: if a bird isn't at your feeder or in your birdhouse, where exactly is he?
Gene has asked it at every house he ever hung, going back to look winter after winter, and wrote down the answer: 4,312 entries across nine notebooks. The answer isn't pretty, and it isn't a birdhouse:
Nearly four in ten. Not a birdhouse, but a soft old trunk with a hole somebody else drilled. "And what happens to a dead tree in a new subdivision?" Gene says. "Somebody calls a guy with a chainsaw." It comes down in exactly the season they've settled into it.
The best of the lot, and pure luck: it depends on whether anybody has swapped it for a six-foot vinyl privacy fence yet.
Perfect cover, right up until the fall cleanup. To a wren, a heap of branches is indistinguishable from a house. Curbside pickup day is the worst day of his year.
Dry and quiet, until it gets sided over, sealed up or torn down by somebody who had no idea.
Drained, filled in, or turned into irrigated lawn. And in January, frozen solid and no use to anybody.
Read that list again and notice what it is really telling you. Not one of those five places was put there for him. Four of them are on borrowed time: a tree waiting to be cut, a hedge waiting to be replaced, a pile waiting to be hauled off, a ditch waiting to be filled. None of it is safe past the end of October.
That is the whole argument for a feeding house, and it isn't the argument the big-box stores make. It isn't that a box beats a dead pine. A dead pine beats anything anyone can sell you. The argument is that most American yards have no dead tree, no brush pile and no water, and the one thing you can hang up in an afternoon that will still be there in March is a roof with food, water and a dry back room under it.
He isn't fussy. He's hungry and he's cold. Give him one place that's got everything and that nobody's going to move, and he'll take it. That's the whole trick, and folks make it a lot harder than it is.
"The Bird People All Say Plant Native Shrubs"
They do. Put that to Gene and he doesn't argue with it for a second.
"They're right," he says. "Native plants beat anything I've ever built, and they feed him too, because all the caterpillars live in them. There's a fella named Tallamy who says every plant in your yard is a bird feeder: either it's got food in it or it hasn't. He's right. If you've got a piece of yard you can honestly leave alone for five years, do that instead and don't send me any money."
He puts the plane down.
"But go ask the ninety-nine in a hundred who haven't got one. A lawn, a patio, a vinyl fence and a homeowners' association. Telling them to let a third of the yard go wild? Most people won't, and it isn't fair to make them feel bad about it. A house on the tree by the kitchen window, that they'll do. Twenty minutes."
The same goes for building one yourself. "Good," says Gene. "If you can hold a saw, build it. There are decent free plans out there. A good homemade one beats a bad bought one every time. It's the bad bought ones I've got a problem with."
The Feeders Bird Rehabbers Wish Nobody Would Buy
Which brings us to the endcap by the door of every big-box store in September: the little resin cottages, the wire cages, the bargain tube feeders at ten or twelve dollars. They're the cheapest things in the aisle and far and away the prettiest on the shelf, and the people who actually pick sick birds up off the lawn spend their time warning against them.
One buyer of a popular metal "church" feeder put it about as flatly as it can be put: it can be a death trap for birds. Gene has spent 38 winters arriving at the same conclusion from the other end, and he can tell you exactly which four things do the damage.
"Keeps the squirrels out for about a week. Keeps the cardinals out forever." A cardinal won't fold himself into a cage to eat. He sits in the nearest tree and waits, and eventually he leaves. This is the one failure on the list that does more than fail him: it teaches him your yard is empty.
"A bird finds food with his eyes. You've hidden it in a pipe." Worse, the seed at the bottom sits wet after every rain and cakes into a moldy plug nobody can see, and moldy seed can kill birds.
"First rain, the seed turns to mush. Fourth month, the wood's going green." Feeder owners report cheap cedar trays falling apart and molding in about four months, with a wet mat of seed in the meantime.
"You've built him a bedroom on the far side of town from the kitchen." Every trip from the box to food and back is another trip across open lawn, past the neighbor's cat.
"That's the part that gets me," Gene says. "Somebody's spent twenty bucks meaning nothing but well. And what they've bought is worse than the brush pile they already had."
Thirty-Eight Winters of Going Back to Look: What Gene Found Out
Gene Richardson didn't set out to make anything at all. He worked underground in the iron mines for thirty-one years and did joinery in the evenings, the way his father had done timber. When his wife Carol died in the winter of 1987, the house went very quiet, and the only thing he could stand to do was sit in the cabin with his hands busy.
"Carol fed the birds. That was hers, not mine," he says. "Come spring her feeder was empty and I couldn't stand to look at it. So I built a house out of some old boards from the lean-to and hung it on the pine, right where she'd have seen it from the sink. Didn't think about it again." He stops planing for a moment. "Two weeks later there's a cardinal sitting on the roof of it. First one I ever saw in Ishpeming. You didn't get redbirds up here back then. He didn't eat. He just sat there and looked at me. And I thought, well. That's not nothing, is it."
Ornithologists credit backyard feeders with helping the cardinal push north over the past century. Gene has his own theory, and he keeps it to himself.
He wrote it down: the date, the bird, exactly where the house hung. Then he built one for the widow next door and wrote that down too. That is the whole method and he has never changed it: build it, hang it, go back and look, write down what you found. By the ninth winter he wanted something better than a feeling, so he started doing a count. Fifteen minutes at first light, every species at his house, then fifteen minutes at whatever the neighbors had brought home from the hardware store.
That's when it clicked. All those years I'd been thinking about the seed. Seed isn't the job.
The Old Pine Principle: Why One Good Place Beats Three
A wild bird in a northern winter isn't shopping for a meal. He's shopping for a place. A chickadee can lose about ten percent of his body weight in a single cold night, and every morning he has to win it back: food, water, and somewhere out of the wind, before dark comes again at five.
The old dead pine gave him all three in one spot: a hollow to sleep in, food in the bark, and rainwater pooled in the crook of a branch. The modern yard splits those up, with a feeder here, a birdbath across the lawn and a birdhouse on a pole by the fence. Far more often, it offers none of them at all. "Mostly he doesn't freeze," Gene says. "He wears himself out. Too many trips, too far apart, too much open lawn. So the job of the house isn't to feed him. It's to give him the old pine back."
Seed sits in an open stainless steel bowl in full view, because birds find food with their eyes, not their noses. America fed its birds from open dishes for most of its history, and the tube feeder didn't come along until 1969. "Your grandmother had it right. Put it where he can see it."
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service puts it plainly: you may be able to double the number of bird species in your yard by providing a source of water. Gene puts the water right beside the seed, a couple of inches away. "Robins and bluebirds that'll never touch a seed feeder will come for the water."
Behind the bowls and under the roof sits a dry back compartment, walled on three sides. It's a place to duck out of the wind, sit out a storm, roost through a cold night, and build in come spring. The whole house is just 6.3 by 5.5 inches across and 6.7 inches high. "Folks think bigger's kinder. It isn't. A big box is a cold box. He's not after a ballroom. He's after a nook that fits him."
The roof reaches out over the bowls, so the seed stays drier and the back room stays dry. "Rain trashes seed. Snow does worse. Keep a lid on it."
Both bowls lift straight out. Rinse, refill, drop them back in: ten seconds at the kitchen sink. Wildlife agencies recommend cleaning feeders and water every couple of weeks, and steel makes that the easy part. "If it's a chore, you'll quit doing it. And then he'll quit coming."
It hangs on the trunk at eye level, in sight of the window, instead of out on a pole in the middle of the lawn. "If you can't see it, you won't fill it. And if you don't fill it, he'll go where somebody does."
"Eleven Kinds, and Three Next Door"
Gene takes the notebooks down from the shelf: not one book but nine, held together with a dried-out rubber band. More than four thousand entries, and from the ninth winter on, a second column of figures down the right-hand side.
"January of ninety-seven," he says, tapping a page. "Twenty below. Eleven kinds at mine that morning: chickadees, nuthatches, a pair of cardinals, a downy, juncos underneath. Mrs. Larson's tube feeder, same morning: three. Same weather, same street, forty feet apart." He shrugs. "That's a lot of birds going somewhere else."
He turns back further, to an entry from 2004: a house hung on a farm outside Negaunee. "Used every winter since. The lady's daughter has it now. She sends me a card at Christmas and writes inside it the date the first cardinal came back, so I've got the whole run in her handwriting."
That's the real payment. Not the money. Knowing there's something I made with these hands and there's still somebody living in it, twenty years on. Good wood does that. It doesn't give up.
Do This First. It Costs Nothing.
Before anybody sends Gene any money, he'd like a word about windows. Glass kills somewhere between 365 million and nearly a billion birds a year in this country, and close to half of those deaths happen at ordinary homes. A feeder in the wrong spot sends birds straight into it.
The rule everybody quotes is to hang a feeder more than thirty feet from a window. That thirty feet, Gene is quick to add, isn't what it seems. "Somebody wrote it down once and everybody's copied it since. The bird scientists at Cornell don't hold with distance rules anymore." What does hold up is to hang it right by the glass, within about three feet, where a startled bird can't build up speed, or well out in the yard, and to put decals on the window either way. "In between is where they hit," he says. "Three feet or a long way off. And put stickers on the glass. It costs nothing."
"Do it before anything else," Gene says, "because a feeder that's killing birds at the window is worse than no feeder at all, and I have no interest in selling those."
The second free thing is what goes in the bowls. Use black-oil sunflower seed, not the cheap mixed bag: a 1980 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service study found that the milo, wheat and cracked filler in bargain blends mostly go uneaten when better seed is around, and end up as mess on the ground. Not bread. Fresh water every day or two. And for the first few days, scatter a handful of seed on the ground underneath. It is the quickest way to get a new feeder noticed.
What People Write Back After a Winter
"I'd honestly never thought about where they go at night. We have a lawn, a deck and a vinyl fence, and after reading this I realized there wasn't one place in our yard a bird could have spent a winter. Gene's went up on the maple by the kitchen window at the end of September. By Thanksgiving there were chickadees ducking in and out of the back room at dusk. My husband cried, which he will deny."
"What I did not expect was that it would be the nicest-looking thing in the yard. Every other feeder I looked at was either plastic you were meant to hide or one of those cute resin cottages that cracks by spring. This hangs on the oak where I can see it from the sink, which, as Gene points out, is pretty much the whole idea."
The Questions That Come Up Most
"Most common question there is, and the answer is nearly always yes. You don't see them because they don't know you've got anything yet. They don't have to live in your yard. They have to pass through it and find one place that has everything. Give it a few days, scatter a little seed underneath, and give it a full season. I've had people write to me the second winter, not the first."
"Late September into October is the best time of the whole year, not the worst. That's when they're settling where they'll spend the winter and working out which yards are worth the trip. Put it up in May and you've missed the hard months, when it matters most."
"They'll try. Nothing made of wood is squirrel-proof, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something. Fill it small in the morning, so there's nothing left to fight over by noon. In thirty-eight years I've had plenty of people call me about squirrels. Not one of them took the house down."
A Trade Ends This Winter, and So Does the Supply
After 38 winters at the bench, Gene has come to a decision that nobody imposed on him but that his hands have made unavoidable. It is an essential tremor, a shake in both hands that has been getting worse for five years. He can still saw. He can still stack and sort and season. But the fine work is gone: fitting the back room so it sits square, setting the roof so it runs true, seating the bowls so they lift out clean every time.
"The sawing's all right," he says. "It's the close work. I can't hold a chisel square anymore, and if I can't do it right I won't do it at all. My father would have had something to say about a sloppy joint."
His son Mike runs a snowplow business in Marquette and has no interest in any of it. There is no apprentice. When Gene stops, 38 winters of accumulated knowledge go quiet with him: the notebooks, the morning counts, the sense of which board will move and which won't.
What remains are the last houses on the cabin shelves, 94 of them when we visited in August. They are the final ones that will ever come out of that cabin.
"The Money Was Never the Reason. It Still Isn't."
Gene could ask more, and anyone who has held one would understand why. He has kept the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.
I don't want the money. I want them on trees. I want somebody standing at her kitchen window in January going, 'They're back.' That's worth a good deal more to me than a price on a tag.
His granddaughter Emily, 27, runs the online side through Cedar & Tin Co., a small shop she set up in her spare bedroom when the orders got past what a landline could handle. "It turns out there are thousands of people who've been looking for exactly this," she says. "Something made by somebody who actually went back and checked."
Gene's Feeding House, in Brief
Built by one pair of hands: every house is made by Gene Richardson in his father's cabin in Ishpeming, Michigan. Not a factory, not a production line. Each one carries 38 winters and more than 4,000 notebook entries behind it.
The Old Pine Principle: food, water and shelter in one place, because a bird doesn't stay for a meal. He stays for a place.
Sized for the birds: 6.3 × 5.5 × 6.7 inches, with two lift-out stainless steel bowls (one for seed, one for water), a sheltered back room for roosting and nesting, a long roof and a trunk mount. No plastic tube, no wire cage, no app, no subscription.
Strictly the last run: 94 houses remained when this article went to press. This is the final winter's build from Gene's cabin. No restock, no successor, no second batch.
Where They Are Sold
Gene's Feeding House is sold through Cedar & Tin Co., the small online shop his granddaughter Emily runs. It isn't in big-box stores and it isn't on any marketplace, for the simple reason that one man in a cabin in Michigan can't supply them.
This Fall Only. Then the Cabin Door Closes for Good.
The season has already started. All across the country, the birds that will winter in your neighborhood are working out right now which yards are worth the trip, and in a cold snap that matters. In a long-running Wisconsin study, chickadees with access to feeders survived the harshest winter months at nearly twice the rate of those without: 69 percent against 37. They will cross yard after yard after yard and find, in most of them, nothing at all. And the shelves in Ishpeming are emptier every week. The run before this one sold through in nine days.
I want every last one of them on a tree. That's all I'm after. A spot you can see from the kitchen, a handful of sunflower in one bowl, fresh water in the other. He'll do the rest himself.
Back
Nothing about a bird happens quickly, so the guarantee isn't tied to a clock. Hang it up. If you're not entirely satisfied with the house itself (the wood, the roof, the bowls, the weight of the thing), send it back for a full refund. No conditions, no deadline, no forms. Gene stands behind every house that leaves his cabin, and so does Cedar & Tin Co.
More From the Yards They Went To
"I volunteer at a wildlife rehab center and I've seen what comes in after a bad winter. Birds worn down to nothing, chickadees with their feet caught in wire cages, finches sick from moldy seed. The things Gene has thought about, the water, bowls you can actually clean, a dry place out of the wind, are exactly the things we see go wrong. It's the only one I recommend."
"We put stickers on the kitchen window first, like he says, and felt a little silly doing it. Ordered in October, had it up on the maple by the end of the month, and by the first snow there was a pair of cardinals coming every morning. We hadn't seen a cardinal in this yard since my mother passed in 2015. I stood at the sink with my coffee going cold just to be sure I hadn't imagined it."
"I'd always assumed the pretty ones were decorations and the useful ones were ugly, and that you had to pick. Turns out that was just what everybody was selling. This is both, and I slightly resent how long it took me to find it."
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