By Kate Harland · Little River, Banks Peninsula

“I’d rather a rifleman raised a family in it than some rich fella looked at my birdhouse over his dinner.” — Why a 74-year-old Banks Peninsula fencer is selling his last hand-carved birdhouses at a special price, before his eyes take the knife out of his hand for good.

One of Dougal Fyfe’s carved faces, hung where it belongs: outside, with a tenant at the door.

The rifleman is the smallest bird in New Zealand. It weighs about six grams, less than a two-dollar coin. And every spring, it goes looking for something that is very hard to find now: a safe hole to raise its chicks in.

A rifleman can’t make its own hole. It needs one that is already there. A crack in an old tree. A rotten branch. A gap behind loose bark. For thousands of years, the bush was full of them.

Then the bush came down. On Banks Peninsula, the sawmillers cleared almost all of the old forest by 1900. The old trees went, and the holes went with them. In the few that are left, the rats, stoats and possums often get there first.

Most New Zealanders have never even seen a rifleman. Many have no idea it is in trouble.

The Bird That Needs a Hole It Can’t Make

The hills above Little River. Once thick bush, now mostly pasture. The old trees with holes in them are few and far between.

People who love birds do a lot for them. They put out sugar water for the tūī. They plant flax and kōwhai. All of that helps. But it doesn’t help the rifleman, because the rifleman isn’t short of food. It is short of a home.

In 2022, the Christchurch City Council and local volunteers began putting up nest boxes for riflemen on the peninsula. It was a small step, and a sign of how bad things had got.

A cheap pine birdhouse from the hardware shop doesn’t solve it either. The thin boards split after a couple of summers in the wind and sun. Water gets in. The glue lets go. And a nest box that falls apart in its second year is no home at all.

One man on Banks Peninsula has been carving something better for 44 years.

The Man Who Finds Faces in Old Fence Posts

The old shearing shed above Little River. The floorboards are still dark from seventy years of wool.

Dougal Fyfe is 74. For thirty years he built fences on the sheep farms of Banks Peninsula. When the farms put in new fences, he took the old tōtara posts home. Some of them had been in the ground for a hundred years.

“Tōtara doesn’t rot,” he says. “My great-grandfather split some of these posts. I’m just giving them a second go.”

He carves wood spirits from them. These are old hooded faces with a beard of carved leaves. His great-grandfather came out from Scotland to work the sawmills at Little River. When the men cut down a tree, they carved a face into the stump. So the bush would remember it, they said.

Dougal has carved more than 3,000 of these faces. Each one comes from a single block of wood. No glue. No joins. No two the same. Each face takes him about ten hours.

He works in the old shearing shed behind his house. The bench is covered in his father’s tools, the handles worn smooth. Shavings pile up around his gumboots. He doesn’t draw the face first. “I don’t decide the face,” he says, without looking up. “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 front door. The hood keeps the rain off. And it is built to last longer than the man who made it.

From an Old Fence Post to a Face: Ten Hours, One Block, No Glue

Dougal doesn’t use a machine for any of it. No router, no lathe, no template. Every birdhouse goes through the same four steps, by hand, in the same old shearing shed.

“If I used a machine, every face would come out the same,” he says. “This way the wood decides. That’s why no two of them look alike.”

Why a Solid Carved Birdhouse Outlasts a Pine Box

After 44 years of watching which birdhouses last and which fall apart, Dougal builds every one the same way.

• “The Single-Block Build.” Every birdhouse is carved from one solid block of seasoned wood. There is no glued seam to swell, crack and come apart in a hard Canterbury frost.
• “The Hooded Rain-Brow.” The carved hood hangs out over the mouth like a verandah. When a southerly brings the rain sideways, the water runs off the face, not into the nest.
• “The Hidden Drain-Vent.” The small second hole under the beard isn’t just for looks. It lets any water drain out and lets fresh air in on a hot nor’west day.
• “The Solid-Wood Thermal Mass.” Thick solid walls work like a thermos. They hold the warmth in on a frosty spring night and keep the heat out when the nor’wester hits thirty degrees.

“A birdhouse that never holds a bird is just a dead face on a wall.”DOUGAL FYFE, LITTLE RIVER

3,000 Pencil Marks on a Shed Door

One pencil mark for every face he has finished since 1982.

The door frame of the shed is covered in pencil marks. They come in bundles of five, from the floor to as high as Dougal can reach. He makes one mark for every face he finishes. The first one went on in 1982.

“Some blokes keep a diary,” he says. “I’ve got the door.”

Visitors always want to count them. He never has. But he knows there is only room left for about fifty more.

“It’s the One Bit I Can’t See”

The fifty small cuts around each eye. This is the part he can no longer do.

Two winters ago, Dougal’s eye specialist in Christchurch gave it a name. Macular degeneration. The middle of whatever he looks at has gone soft and blurry, like a thumbprint on a lens. It will not come back.

His hands are still strong. He can still rough out a block. What he can’t do is the fine work. The lines at the corner of an eye. The small cuts that turn a lump of wood into a face that looks back at you.

“The hands are fine. It’s the eyes,” he says. “I look straight at the eyelid I’m cutting, and that’s the one bit I can’t see.”

He doesn’t complain about it. He just puts the knife down when he has to. There are 53 finished birdhouses left on the rack in his shed. When they are gone, there will be no more.

He Could Ask $300. He Won’t.

What Dougal wants for every one of them: a tenant at the door, this summer.

The galleries in Akaroa and Christchurch would pay Dougal about $300 for one of his carved faces. Collectors hang them on a wall inside the house, where no bird will ever use them. That is the one thing he can’t stand.

So he has priced his last 53 birdhouses far below the gallery price. On purpose. He only asks for one thing in return, even though he can’t check it: that they go outside, into a real garden. And that this summer, something small and native raises a family inside one of his carved faces.

“Everyone reckons I’m mad,” he says. “But I’ve never done this for the money. I want them out there, holding birds, while I can still see them do it.”

Nesting season runs from spring through to January. A birdhouse hung now still has the whole summer ahead of it.

Dougal has never owned a computer. His granddaughter Abby, who teaches carpentry in Christchurch, took photos of the rack on her phone one Sunday and set up this page for him. He still doesn’t quite believe the orders are real until she reads him the towns out loud. Whangārei. Taupō. Gore.

“It Looks Like It Grew Out of the Tree” — What People Say About Dougal’s Birdhouses

• ★★★★★

  “It’s heavier than I expected. You can feel it’s one solid piece of wood, not a box. We’re right on the edge of the bush, and a pair of riflemen were in and out of the mouth by November. I never thought I’d see that in our own garden.”

  Trish K. · Nelson
• ★★★★★

  “I’d had two pine birdhouses from the hardware shop and both split in the first winter. This is a different thing entirely. You can still see the knife marks. It looks like it grew out of the tree.”

  Grant M. · Timaru
• ★★★★★

  “Bought one for Dad’s eightieth. He read the story twice, then went straight out to find the right branch for it. A real person made it, and it’ll still be hanging there long after the rest of us.”

  Shona D. · Invercargill

Before You Order — The Three Things People Ask Most

• ★★★★★

  “The face has this calm, wise look about it. The neighbours keep stopping at the fence to ask about it. Knowing it’s one of the last ones he’ll ever carve makes it feel like more than a birdhouse.”

  Lynette & Rob P. · Taupō
• ★★★★★

  “We had a cold, wet spring and the inside stayed dry the whole time. The hood really does keep the rain off. Worth every cent, and it’s going to outlast the fence it’s hanging next to.”

  Helen W. · Whangārei

Where Dougal Hopes Every One of Them Ends Up

Outside, in a real garden, holding birds.