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Birdhouse builder builds for the birds
By Kalea Hall
CANFIELD
A flock of chirp- ing sparrows fly in unison into their Shields Road home.
The chimney-topped, multi-hole birdhouse stands steady on a pole as sparrow after sparrow enters.
“They are constantly in and out,” said Bo Kana, a birdhouse builder and seller.
The 80-year-old started building houses for the birds about 25 years ago, yet he’s still amazed by the birds and keeps building.
On this muggy Wednesday morning, Kana sits on his porch swing and listens to the constant chirps coming from a dozen or so birdhouses on his porch, in his trees and elsewhere.
“It keeps me calm,” Kana said.
Kana started building houses while he was still working at the General Motors Lordstown Plant in the early 1990s. After he retired in 1994, his birdhouse-building hobby grew.
“I used to be a bowler, but I got tired of smelling the smoke, so I went to building the birdhouses,” Kana said.
He picked up a “how to” book on building birdhouses, and that got him started.
A friend gave him free wood for the houses. He uses a table saw to cut the wood and screws to piece it together. To top it off, Kana puts on a coat of primer and two coats of paint.
“I started making quite a few of them,” Kana said. “I ran out of any place to put them, so I put them out for sale.”
Since he started, he estimates he has made 100 to 150 birdhouses a year ranging from a traditional cottage-style house to more elaborate multi-hole houses.
Do the math, and that means Kana has made more than 2,500 houses.
“If I am sitting around the house, I will make some,” he said.
Today, he no longer gets free wood. Instead, he treks to Lowe’s to get the wood he needs.
On the front lawn of his home at 3920 Shields Road is a table with birdhouses galore. He always has the table out for passers-by who could become his customers.
The birdhouses mostly run $10, but the more elaborate ones are $40.
With pride, he recalls selling a birdhouse to a guy who bought it to give to his mom on her birthday.
Even more of a point of pride for Kana is that the pieces of wood he puts together become homes for the birds.
Birdhouses provide nesting sites and protection from outside predators.
“They like the houses,” he said. “No sooner you are putting them up, and they are moving in. It’s nice to watch when they have the babies and they are feeding.”
Kana’s wife, Marge, enjoys the houses and the bird watching just as much he does.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “We hear the birds all the time. I sit on the back patio and watch them.”
Kana plans to make the houses as long as he is “above the ground.”
His piece of advice: “If you lay around, you get tightened up and you get worse and worse. You have to keep your body and your mind going.”