August/September 2010 Daisies photo by Rhonda Lee
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Vol 26 No 6
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Butte’s Lou Parrett Builds Birdhouses with Style Article and photos by Craig & Liz Larcom You may have seen the birdhouses bursting with personality that lined the shelves at Lou Parrett’s booth at the National Folk Festival in Butte a couple of years ago. 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, 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 components. He scours the countryside looking for natural materials. “The most popular (Continued on page 71)