Cover Story
Butte’s Lou Parrett Builds Birdhouses with StyleArticle and photos by Craig & Liz Larcom
The birdhouses lining the shelves at Lou Parrett’s booth at the National Folk Festival in Butte burst with personality.
Take the eye-catching one with a face that is dominated by a white doorknob nose and a pair of rosy sunglasses. The tongue from an old shoe hangs out of its mouth, and together with four wooden snaggleteeth, gives the character a seedy cast. Curling strands of moss form green hair, sideburns, and perhaps that is scum at the top of the tongue. Look closer yet and you see that the box itself and the tall roof are composed of weathered wood. A fragment of a decaying tree trunk, carefully placed so that its own larger knothole frames the box’s nesting hole, gives the face a 3-D effect by making cheeks for the face. Welcome to the creative world of Lou Parrett, maker of approximately 2,500 birdhouses in the past 12 or 13 years.
Recycled materials and whimsical designs are the hallmark of this 61-year-old from Butte, who retired from teaching elementary school at the ripe of old age of 46, and discovered his unusual hobby about three years later.
This man does not think inside the box.
A barn-shaped birdhouse with shedding paint in some shade between pink and red bears the inscription “Barn to be wild,” accented with tiny musical notes. In addition to double doors and a couple windows outlined with bits of wood, 40 pebbles decorate the bottom part of the barn’s wall.
Beside it, a house with what appears to be a tyrannosaurus head, capitalizes on an oddly shaped piece of wood that includes a knothole.
Nearby a birdhouse decorated with an old table fork sits cradled by a pair of fork horn deer antlers.
The varied houses he displays clearly delight the shoppers who come by, though Parrett says he also gets his share of looks that say, “You’ve got to be out of your head.” He shrugs these off. He is having far too much fun to mind.
Almost all the birdhouses can be described as rustic folk art, with a few more falling into the shabby chic category. These few use doorknobs, faucets, or other hardware gizmos. Parrett often adds a neatly lettered, comic phrase to either kind of box. The sign on a birdhouse designed with boot parts might say, “Made in Boot, Montana,” for example.
Half the fun of building these is looking for the materials. He scours the countryside looking for natural materials.
“The most popular houses are the ones with natural stuff on them. It’s what I call the knothole approach. If you find a rotten tree with a knothole, build around it,” he explains. He has taken to putting rock on about 90 percent of the houses, using pebbles he found in the Flathead area and locally.
But not all the materials he uses are natural.
“I shop the Walkerville dump and other dumps where I can find rusty things,” he says.
Parrett has used rusted beer cans, license plates, barbed wire, discarded parts from cars, old saw blades, weeds, old shoes and boots, and even parts from an old rocking chair. This last was from the bottom part of the rocker, where the ruptured springs were. “I didn’t recognize it for what it was at first,” Parrett comments.
“I found a bed that had to have come across on a covered wagon, but I never used it. I just keep it for show,” he adds.
Some days of the hunt for supplies particularly stand out in Parrett’s memory.
“Gathering materials for building proved quite exciting when I reached over a log to retrieve a piece of bark only to find a rattlesnake laying claim to the treasure. I lurched back and had to grab my pooch by the tail and drag him away from the log,” Parrett says.
“On another adventure I was driving down a dirt road to a favorite fishing hole when I spied a gnarled log in the stream along the road. Slamming on the brakes, I leaped out of the van, jumped the fence, and waded into the creek to get the log. I manhandled the find over the fence with a grin that only a hunter with a prize trophy would have. My pardner only shook his head and muttered, ‘Louie... you're nuts!’”
Rattlesnakes aside, the whole project suits Parrett to a T. Roaming the hills looking for materials speaks to his lifelong love of fishing and the outdoors. He often carries a fishing rod. His creative side surfaced long ago, too. When he taught elementary art for a few years, he was known for his wild and crazy projects, such as having the students paint his car.
Still, building birdhouses was a hobby he fell into.
“The whole thing started with the wife picking up a two-dollar bird feeder at a discount store,” he explains. Later, when he ran across a hand-built birdhouse at a Saturday market in Portland, Oregon, it inspired him. He could make his wife a birdhouse. At first, the challenge was simply that - to build a birdhouse. But one thing led to another and the next thing you know he and his wife took on an entire new lifestyle, creating a fancy landscape for the yard.
They started with merely a lawn, but now their home has a curved stone walkway, a pond with running water, five flowerbeds, nine occupied birdhouses in the trees, and a large “buffet” for the birds. Their efforts were rewarded a few years ago when they made the top three for the Yard of the Year in Butte.
From all this activity, the birdhouses somehow emerged.
“What surprises me is how much enjoyment I get out of my hobby,” he says. “The original challenge was just to build a birdhouse, but there’s just so much you can do with it.”
With a newly arrived grandchild on the scene, Parrett may let up a bit on the birdhouses, but do not expect him to be giving up his hobby anytime soon. Perhaps building another couple thousand bird boxes will start to staunch the flow of fresh ideas.
Readers who are interested in birdhouses may find Parrett at a few area arts and crafts shows each year, or they can call him at 406-491-4760.