Birdhouse creations are flights of fancy

By Chris Rosenblum

David Pryde builds homes, and business is good.

CDT/Nabil K. Mark

David Pryde stands in front of his home where he builds and sells his birdhouses along the road December 20, 2007. Pryde makes a wide variety of birdhouses from many different materials in his own unique style. CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Click here for the David Pryde Birdhouse photo gallery

Neither the subprime lending crisis nor a real estate bubble has hurt his trade. He just keeps selling homes, and occupants keep flocking to them.

For 13 years, David has been turning salvaged antiques and wood into whimsical birdhouses. At regional craft shows and from a stand in front of his Rush Township home, he offers several models for his avian friends.

Some birds move into churches with stained-glass windows and bells in the steeples. Others reside in schoolhouses, miniature flight schools and lighthouses. One design combines a feeder resembling an old-time general store with a country house.

“I always tell kids it’s for the lazy birds,” David says.

Step into his garage studio off state Route 504, and the room suggests Santa’s workshop — if the elves had forsaken kids for songbirds and become kleptomaniacs.

Amid assorted saws, planes and tools, old granite pot lids fill one box; vintage pie plates and teapots are piled in others. A red, enamel coffee pot waits for David to drill a hole and attach a perch. Completed wren houses stand neatly stacked near piles of spare steeples and roofs.

Jumbled in one cubby are battered, metal lunch buckets, the kind a construction worker might reach into for a sandwich. Now, they’re future birdhouses.

“I strive to make something different. I’ve made a birdhouse out of an old riding helmet,” David says, and indeed, he keeps a few worn helmets squirreled away for later inspiration.

For one of his favorite creations, a custom house for Benner Township gardener Dixie Witt, David used granite lids she inherited from her mother, a pressed tin ceiling panel for the roof and barn wood.

Dixie, a wildlife gardening expert, owns several of David’s houses. She says birds readily take to them because they prefer aged wood to chemically treated lumber. “They’re just the best kind of birdhouses. You don’t have to have those birdhouses for a couple of days before birds come to them.”

To understand why a 67-year-old retired contractor assembles distinctive dwellings out of scavenged items, look no further than his own home. What’s good for the birds is good for him.

River stone he gathered from waste piles covers the exterior and forms a front wall and gateway arch, giving the property a fairy-tale appearance.

Inside is a pastiche of rescued treasures. The ornate pressed-tin panels that compose his living room ceiling came from a Clearfield department store. Children in a St. Marys school once scampered over the chestnut floorboards in his kitchen and walked through the oak doors elsewhere in the house.

The restored 1930s white enamel kitchen sink? It belonged to a local CCC camp and was being thrown out by a neighbor. The beautiful six-door china cabinet? David built it from a pile of discarded cherry planks. The stained-glass window illuminating his bedroom? Saved when the childhood church of his wife, Sandy, was torn down.

Milk glass door knobs, light fixtures, a banister: All found new life in David’s skilled hands.

“It’s all recycled, this house,” Sandy says.

Auctions and sales take David to points near and far, and he’s always got a project — exactly how he decided to live long ago. Raised across the road in the house in which his mother still lives, he served as an inspector in the Navy before working a similar civilian job. It wasn’t hard, but sitting behind a desk was.

“I was always looking out the window, so I quit,” he says.

After a few years of servicing power lines, he went into construction and masonry. With Sandy, he also managed the boat-rental service at nearby Black Moshannon State Park.

Much of his time today goes to his birdhouses, for which he can thank a relative’s short attention span.

While visiting from Florida in 1995, his brother-in-law came up with the idea of “bird shacks” and enlisted David’s help, but then lost interest and returned home. Intrigued, David took over, coming up with almost two dozen designs.

He and Sandy took an assortment to a Lewisburg flea market — and sold nothing until a man wandered by toward the end of the day, bought three houses and threw in some kind words. “Hang in there,” he said. “They’re pretty nice.”

People at Ag Progress Days the next year agreed, emptying the Prydes’ display shelves, and the birdhouses have made annual appearances at craft festivals ever since. Most of the 35 or so models cost less than $50, an irresistible bargain to one woman, David recalls, who memorably scooped up $800 worth of homes.

Mostly, though, he’s content to sell enough to help pay his local taxes — not chicken feed but less than he might fetch in an urban shop.

“It’s not big money for what you put into them, but if you raise the price, you take [the birdhouses] home,” he says. One way to avoid the problem is keep them at home. Year-round, motorists can pull over and peruse a variety displayed in front of his double garage. It’s strictly an honor system: Payments go into a pail.

David doesn’t think anyone’s ever stiffed him, but if they have, it’s not going to ruffle his feathers.

“I always say I have a theory: What I don’t know won’t hurt me. If somebody steals a couple of birdhouses, I can live without them. I can make more.”