Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series focusing on the artists of the Suring area in honor of Suring’s centennial celebration.
Leo Thielke is a craftsman with 30 years of experience and an artist’s desire to design and construct with his own ideas. Building bird houses of all shapes and sizes is the craft that gives Thielke the opportunity to get creative. The houses are built with purple martins and smaller birds in mind.
Purple martin houses are built with 2 1/2-inch diameter holes. Since martins nest in colonies, the houses are built with eight to 20 openings.
Houses with the smaller opening of 1 1/2-inch are built for sparrows, rose-breasted grosbeaks, hairy woodpeckers, red-headed woodpeckers and other birds of similar size. These houses can have as many as 12 openings.
Thielke has never taken a woodworking or design class.
“I play it by ear,” he said with a gleam in his eye.
If construction does not go according to plan, a receptacle stands nearby in which to dispose of the project.
The workshop is a large building, resembling a barn but built for storage, not cows. The tools he uses for constructing the bird houses are several types of saws, including table, skill and chop saws, drills and a router.
Thielke said he builds houses for something to do and not as a business. He does, however, sell the houses to make room for more building.
Entering Thielke’s workshop you see caps and more caps all hung from the ceiling and around the room. It is quite a sight to see. He contends, tongue in cheek, he is not a collector of caps.
“People just keep bringing them to me,” he said.
