Hand-Carved Wood Spirit Birdhouses
“I’d rather a pardalote raised a family in it than a rich bloke looked at it.” Why a 72-year-old Otways wood carver is letting his last hand-carved birdhouses go far under gallery price — before the feeling in his fingertips is gone for good.
One of Clem Hollis’s carved wood spirits, hung where it belongs — outdoors, waiting for a tenant.
Every spring, in backyards from Perth to the Hunter, thousands of pardalotes, tree martins and treecreepers go looking for somewhere to raise their young — and find nothing. The old hollow-bearing gums are gone. The dead limbs have been cut and carted off. And the flat-pack birdhouse from the big green shed split along its glued seam in its first wet week.
Here is the number most people never hear: a tree hollow big enough for a small bird takes between ninety and a hundred and ten years to form. Not a season. Not a decade. A century. Only about one tree in eight ever carries one. More than three hundred native species — birds, gliders, microbats, possums — depend on those hollows completely, and roughly one in seven of every land animal in this country cannot breed without one.
They are being cleared faster than they can possibly be replaced. And into every hollow that is left comes a bird that arrived here from somewhere else.
The faces that once watched over every timber town
In the Otway Ranges, behind Apollo Bay, the Cornish and English timber-getters who felled these forests from the 1880s onward left something behind besides stumps. They cut faces into the wood — hooded old faces with a beard of carved leaves, set into a stump or a fence post to look over the land. Part folk art, part superstition, wholly beautiful. Their grandfathers had cut the same faces into oak in Cornwall, and they brought the habit out with them on the boat.
Almost nobody carves them any more. The men who knew how are gone. Except for one old dairy shed outside Forrest, where a 72-year-old man has been carving them by hand for 44 years.
The man who finds faces in fallen blackwood
The shed outside Forrest. Blackwood seasons two years before he touches it — then he waits for the grain to show him the face.
Clem Hollis has carved more than 3,000 of them. Every single one from a single block of timber — no glue, no seams, no two alike. His workshop is the old dairy shed behind the house, maybe twelve metres on the long side, dark but for one north window and a clip lamp over the bench. Blackwood and myrtle beech lean in the corner, cut and stacked to season two full years before he’ll touch them. The floor is fifty millimetres deep in shavings. The whole place smells like a pencil sharpener.
He works with his glasses down his nose, turning a block under the lamp, waiting. He doesn’t sketch first. He doesn’t measure a face. “I don’t decide the face,” he says, not looking up from the wood. “The grain tells me where the nose goes. I just take away what isn’t him.”
What comes out of the block is a birdhouse. The open mouth is the entrance. The hooded brow is a rain shelter. And unlike the flat-pack off the rack at the big green shed, one of Clem’s carved birdhouses is built to outlive the man who made it.
“A birdhouse that never holds a bird is just a dead face on a wall.”
Forty millimetres decides who raises a family in your backyard
Ask Clem why a pardalote picks one house over another and he won’t talk about how it looks. He’ll talk about a measurement. The mouth on every birdhouse he carves is cut to roughly forty millimetres — and that single number is the difference between a nest and a raid.
A striated pardalote fits through forty millimetres. So does a tree martin, and a feathertail glider. A common myna does not. Neither does a starling. Both of those birds were brought to Australia and both of them take hollows by force: mynas evict whatever is inside, kill the eggs and chicks, then claim the neighbouring hollows as decoys. In the bushland of eastern Australia they have cut the breeding success of native hollow-nesters by as much as eighty per cent.
“People put up a box with a big hole in it and think they’ve done a good thing,” Clem says. “All they’ve done is build a myna a house. Forty millimetres. That’s the whole argument.”
After 44 years of watching what moves in and what gets driven out, he builds to six rules a factory never will.
What sets a Hollis birdhouse apart
- The Single-Block Build. Carved from one solid piece of timber. No glued seam to swell, crack and let go in a wet week — the way flat-pack plywood does, usually with a nest still inside.
- The Forty-Millimetre Mouth. The open mouth is cut to roughly 40 mm — wide enough for pardalotes, tree martins and feathertail gliders, too small for mynas, starlings and the raiders that empty a nest.
- The Hooded Rain-Brow. The deep-carved hood overhangs the entrance like a verandah. Rain sheds down the face and off the chin — it never runs into the nest.
- The Hidden Drain-Vent. That second small hole below the beard isn’t decoration. It drains any water that gets in and lets heat escape when the afternoon turns.
- The Solid-Timber Thermal Mass. Thin plywood turns into an oven on a 40 °C day and cooks a brood alive. Thick solid walls hold the heat out and hold warmth in on a cold spring night. Clem calls it “an esky for eggs.”
- The Living Patina. Left untreated, the timber greys to a soft silver over the years and becomes part of the garden — instead of peeling and flaking like a painted box.
The feeling in his fingertips is gone, and it does not come back
Forty-four years of the same fifty small cuts around each eye. That is the part he can no longer do.
Two winters ago the neuropathy reached his fingertips. Nerve damage, the specialist in Geelong called it, and told him plainly that it does not come back. He can still rough out a block — the strength is all still there. What he can’t do any more is the fine work: the wrinkles at the corner of the eye, the fifty small cuts that turn a lump of timber into a face that looks back at you.
“The hands are strong enough. It’s the feeling that’s gone,” he says. “I set the tip down at the eyelid and I can’t tell you how deep it’s sat.” A carver who can’t feel the edge is finished, and he knows it.
There are 57 finished birdhouses left on the seasoning shelf. The shelf used to hold a hundred at a time, filled twice a year. When these 57 are gone, there will not be more.
“Forty-four years of faces, and I’m down to the last of them.”
The shelf that once held a hundred
The shelf once held a hundred. This is one of the last he will study, smooth and set down.
He still walks out to the shed every morning at the same time. He sharpens tools he will not use. On the shelf above the bench sits a dented Arnott’s tin full of broken knife tips — forty-four years of snapped blades, every one of them kept. “That’s not rubbish,” he says. “That’s every face that gave me trouble.” When the hands are having a bad morning, he picks up the tin and it rattles. It is the closest thing he has to a record of the work.
Why he priced them so low it makes his granddaughter wince
The whole point, in one frame: a tenant at the mouth, this spring.
The craft galleries in Melbourne and along the Surf Coast would pay Clem $280 each. Collectors buy his faces to hang indoors, on a wall, where no bird will ever use them. That is the one thing he can’t stand.
So he priced these last 57 well under the gallery rate, on purpose, on one condition he can’t enforce but hopes for anyway: that they go outside, into a real backyard, and that this spring a pardalote raises a brood inside the mouth of one of his carved faces. Nesting season runs from August through to January. The window is open right now.
“I could’ve asked more. Everyone reckoned I should,” he says. “But the money was never the point. I want them outside, holding birds, before I stop.” He is not selling off a life’s work. He is handing it to people who will actually use it.
What people are saying
The people who took one of Clem’s birdhouses home
“It turned up heavier than I expected — you can feel it’s one solid piece of timber, not a flimsy box. Hung it on the lemon gum in September. Six weeks later we had pardalotes going in and out of the mouth all day. My grandkids named him Old Mossy.”
Bronwyn T., Geelong, VIC
“I’d bought three birdhouses from the big green shed and every one of them came apart at the glue. This is a different thing entirely. The carving is unreal — you can still see the tool marks. Looks like it grew out of the tree.”
Grahame S., Bendigo, VIC
“Gave one to Dad for his 80th and he went a bit teary. There’s a story behind it, a real person made it, and it’s going to outlast the lot of us. Best present I’ve given in years.”
Julie M., Toowoomba, QLD
Good to know
The questions people ask before the last ones sell
Where can I get one?
Only here, on this page. Clem’s birdhouses aren’t sold on Amazon, in the shops, or through any marketplace — his granddaughter set up this one page for him, and this is the only place the last 57 are available.
How long will they be available?
Only while they last. There are 57 finished birdhouses left on the shelf, and Clem is no longer able to carve more. When the count reaches zero, that’s the end — there is no next batch.
Can I try one with no risk?
Yes. Every birdhouse comes with a 30-day guarantee and free shipping Australia-wide. If it isn’t everything you hoped, email us and send it back — no questions, no hassle.
57 left, and no more coming. Nesting season is open now — if one is meant for your backyard, this is the moment.
Check Availability Limited quantity — hand-carved, one of a kind“Photos don’t do it justice. The face has this calm, watchful look — the neighbours keep stopping at the fence to have a look at it. And the hole is small enough that the mynas can’t get a foot in, which was the whole reason I bought it.”
Dave K., Newcastle, NSW
“Knowing it’s one of the last ones this man will ever carve makes it feel like more than a birdhouse. It’s a piece of a craft that’s disappearing. We’re glad to have one in the garden.”
Lyn & Peter H., Mount Gambier, SA
Where Clem hopes every one of them ends up
Outside, in a real backyard, holding birds.