Build Your Own Birdhouses and Feeders

This book is absolutely fun. Full color photos, exploded construction drawings and woodworking tips lead the reader through 25 designs, from simple boxes and feeding shelves to very ambitious, imaginative birdhouses. A wide variety of projects is included, from sticking an old pitchfork into the ground and supporting an unusual feeding tray off the handle, to building a peaked witch's house with compound miters, or a three-story hexagonal dovecot. There is a lakeside duck house with a ladder-ramp the ducks can waddle up, and a louvered roof so they can see out while sitting on their nests.

Perkins presents a pagoda bird feeder, a clock tower feeder with a clock in it for the yard, and a three-tier platform feeder on a high post. Birdhouses are designed as country cottage, beach hut, medieval tournament tent, clay flower pots, triangular boxes and in southwest mission style. One is called a 'lamp' house, and is constructed of two pyramidal forms inverted on each other and supported on a steel tube -- very chic.

For some fun, quick projects and lots of ideas to share with children or beginning woodworkers, this is one of the best of the many birdhouse books available.