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“I’d sooner a chickadee spent the winter in it than a collector set it on a shelf.” Why a 77-year-old Kansas carpenter is letting his last four birdhouse designs go for far under craft-fair price — before his eyes give out for good.

By The Prairie Craft Journal · Council Grove, Kansas

Every fall, in backyards all across the country, millions of chickadees, wrens, titmice and cardinals get ready for the hardest months of their year — and find almost nothing. The old barns are coming down. The dead trees have been cleared. And the cheap birdhouse from the big-box store split at the seams in its first hard winter.

The songbirds that keep our gardens free of caterpillars and beetles need three things to make it to spring: a dry, sheltered place to spend a freezing night, food when the ground is frozen, and water when every puddle has turned to ice. What most of us hang for them instead — a $12 box of stapled particleboard — warps, fades and falls apart before the second season.

The old Main Streets that used to stand in every prairie town

Drive through the small towns of the Kansas prairie and you can still see a few of them: the tall wooden false fronts of the old feed stores, the front porches with their carved brackets, the little cottages behind white picket fences. For a hundred years they were the heart of every town on the trail. One by one, they are being torn down.

Almost nobody builds them the old way anymore. The carpenters who knew how are gone. Except for one converted livery stable behind a house in Council Grove, Kansas, where a 77-year-old man has spent the last seventeen years building the whole town again — in miniature, for the birds.

The man who rebuilds a town, one birdhouse at a time

Orval Kittredge was a finish carpenter for 41 years. He restored storefronts up and down Main Street, rehung porch doors, recut brackets that had rotted through. In 2009, the year he put his tools away, the town tore down the old feed store his grandfather had opened. Orval saved a stack of its boards and built a birdhouse that looked exactly like it. A pair of wrens moved in that May. He never stopped.

Since then he has built more than 2,600 houses in four designs, each one from his own life. The Feed Store is his grandfather’s shop, false front and porch included. June’s Cottage is the little house he shared with his wife June for 48 years, flower window, picket fence and all. The Supper Table is the old diner on the corner — a long seed tray with two steel cups, because, as Orval puts it, “nobody stays where there’s nothing to eat or drink.” And The Christmas House is the twin-roofed house where the whole family gathered every December, snowflakes on the roof.

His workshop is the old stable, maybe 30 feet on the long side, lit by one tall window and a lamp over the bench. Pine boards lean against the wall, stacked to dry. A little wood stove ticks in the corner. The whole place smells like a lumberyard after rain. He works slowly, glasses pushed up on his forehead, every house cut, fitted and nailed by hand. “I don’t build them to look at,” he says, tapping a brad into a porch roof. “I build them so a bird walks in like it lives there.”

And he does not build all four the same way. Each design gets its own wood finish, chosen for the birds it was made for: bare, unpainted pine on the Feed Store, so the wrens have nothing but clean wood around the nest; a pale, light finish on June’s Cottage that reflects the summer sun for the chickadees and titmice; sealed, honey-stained wood on the Supper Table that takes wet seed and spilled water every single day; and dark, flame-darkened wood on the Christmas House that soaks up the low winter sun on a cold morning.

What leaves that bench is not a decoration. The porch is a landing ledge. The roof is a rain shelter. The walls are real wood. And unlike the box at the big-box store, one of Orval’s houses is built to hold up through the Kansas weather that tears everything else apart.

“A birdhouse nobody lives in is just a toy on a stick.”

Why the birds actually choose his houses

Ask Orval why a wren picks one house over another and he won’t talk about how pretty it is. He’ll talk about how it’s built. After seventeen years of watching birds move in and out of his little town, he knows exactly what keeps them coming back — and it comes down to six things he does that a factory never will.

Put one of his houses next to the kind most of us buy and you don’t need anyone to explain the difference. One looks like it came off a truck. The other looks like it came off a porch on Main Street, a hundred years ago.

The coldest weeks are when they need it most

A black-capped chickadee weighs about as much as two quarters. On a single freezing night it can burn through roughly a tenth of its body weight just to stay warm. That is why chickadees, wrens and titmice slip into sheltered cavities when the temperature drops — a dry box with solid walls and a roof that keeps the snow out can be the difference between a bird that sees the morning and one that doesn’t.

And when the morning comes, they need to eat and drink right away. The ground is frozen. The puddles are ice. That is what the Supper Table was built for. “My wife used to carry a kettle out every morning in January,” Orval says. “A cup of warm water, and you’d have a line of cardinals waiting before she got back to the door.”

The one thing a carpenter can’t work without

Two winters ago, Orval’s right eye started going gray in the middle. Macular degeneration, his doctor said. He can still cut a board straight. What he can’t do anymore is the fine work: the window panes, the little porch brackets, the scalloped ring around the cottage door — the dozens of small cuts that turn a box into a house.

“My hands are fine. It’s the seeing,” he says. “I go to cut the window and the line just isn’t there anymore.” His doctor told him plainly that it does not come back.

There are 73 finished houses left on the shelf in the old stable, spread across all four designs. That shelf used to hold two hundred at a time. When these 73 are gone, there will not be more.

“Seventeen years of building a town, and I’m down to the last few houses on the street.”

Why he priced them so low it makes his granddaughter wince

At the craft fairs in Wichita and Kansas City, people pay Orval $140 apiece. Collectors buy his little storefronts to set on a mantel or a bookshelf, where no bird will ever use them. That is the one thing he can’t stand.

So he priced these last 73 well under the craft-fair rate, on purpose, on one condition he can’t enforce but hopes for anyway: that they go outside, into a real yard, and that this winter a chickadee spends the cold nights on his Main Street.

“I could’ve asked more. Everybody told me to,” he says. “But money was never the point. I want them outside, full of birds, before I stop.” He is not selling off a life’s work. He is handing it to people who will actually use it.

What people are saying

The people who took one of Orval’s houses home

Good to know

The questions people ask before the last ones sell

Note: This article is a sponsored post and contains advertising. The products featured were carefully selected. Prices may vary. Individual results may differ; as each house is built from natural wood, small variations in grain, color and detail are part of what makes every one unique.