Build Your Own Birdhouses and Feeders: From Simple, Natural Designs to Spectacular, Customized Houses and Feeders

Designs range from simple wooden boxes to magnificent bird mansions suitable for all outdoor spaces, from large gardens to the smallest balcony. There are plans and projects for birdhouses, nesting boxes and feeders with a list of the best materials and notes about where to locate the finished project for best results.

Build Your Own Birdhouses and Feeders includes:

- Clear step-by-step illustrations for each stage of building
- Exploded and technical diagrams in color for each project
- A wide range of projects and designs from the very easy to the ambitious

The 25 designs include:
- Pagoda dovecote
- Old fashioned clapboard house
- Victorian townhouse
- Hollow log birdhouse
- Thatched cottage
- Sailboat
- Miami style art deco
- Wild west saloon

Each project includes color photos of the completed house or feeder - these are not just the figments of a writer's imagination. There are detailed, measured, exploded color drawings of each house. His designs include several different methods of access for cleaning out the houses after each nesting period. I particularly like the "slide" designs - no tools or dropped screws to worry about.

Some of these houses are so pretty, I don't know if I would want to put them out in the yard. I suppose with a little imagination, you could scale his designs to meet the needs of a variety of species. He has a breif, one page chart showing entrance sizes for some birds. He also show "slot" as well as round entrance options on some of his designs. I still keep referring back to Scott D. Campbell's "The Complete Book of Birdhouse Construction for Woodworkers" as a more complete technical reference. (See that review on Amazon.)

Overall, this is a very good book on birdhouses, very inspirational for the imaginative bird "landlord." This book is profusely illustrated with color photos and drawings; it could be a "coffee table" book if you don't get it filled with sawdust!