Imagine yourself a talented creator of furniture, wood furniture made mainly of pine and cedar. Beautiful benches, chests, cupboards and armoires furnish your home.
You end up with smaller pieces of wood, left-overs from those bigger items.
If you’re Jean Long, you use these pieces to make birdhouses and feeders.
An astonishing variety of birdhouses and bird feeders – most of them whimsical, each of them well-made, each unique in some way.
Although I’ve known Jean for years, and have been lucky enough to own a Jean Long birdhouse, I start to smile the moment he opens his studio door for the latest tour: I never know what to expect, but I know it will be fun – a journey of discovery!
Over the years, Jean has built hundreds of birdhouses.
Roughly half of them were given to friends or donated to organizations for fundraising purposes.
Many are scattered over his 10-acre property.
A former educator in a demanding leadership role, Jean found building birdhouses a form of stress relief. Retired now, he still has birdhouses on the brain.
Since each creation is an original, the challenge (and joy) is to keep creating new designs.
Some ideas come to Jean in his dreams. Some come from the sheer drive to find out how many objects he can use in his birdhouse designs.
“I use old rubber boots, watering cans, old lamps parts, hub caps, old metal roofing , scrap metal, old nails, old frames, old windows, barn wood, etc…. to build my birdhouses,“ Jean says.
Today, Jean is working on his 867th birdhouse. It’s a large, very complex one that takes much time and patience – he calls this kind his ‘’Xtreme Birdhouses’’.
And they’re stunning, even when in progress. I can hardly wait for this one to be completed.
For more information, to see or to acquire a birdhouse, please contact Jean at: jenjes@mac.com
Cynthia Reyes 