September 9, 2005

About Michael Parayno, Berkeley Rustic Birdhouses

Berkeley artist Michael Parayno understood the value, and the necessity, of recycling long before he moved to his environmentally conscious city. As a child growing up in the Philippines, he recalls making sandals out of tire rubber and a kite from bamboo and newspapers, using sticky rice for the paste.

Berkeley artist Michael Parayno will be teaching local villagers in Sri Lanka how to build the birdhouses to create an alternative income source in the tsunami-ravaged village of Madiha.

“I always had to make my own toys,” says Parayno, who moved to the United States when he was 10 years old. As he grew up and went to college, he eventually became a teacher of Asian-American studies at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and San Francisco City College, no longer in need of creating everything from scratch.

Yet it took a task as simple as tearing down a fence to bring him back to his roots. “I didn’t want to waste the wood,” he says. So he decided to create rustic bird houses and planters from the recycled wood to decorate his own yard.

For three years, neighbors asked him if they could buy the bird houses, and finally four years ago, he relented. Since then, he’s created more than 2,000 birdhouses and has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Garden Design magazine, and many other publications, as well as TV programs like Bay Area Backroads and Bay Area Home and Garden.

The result? “I’m 25 orders backlogged,” said Parayno, whose birdhouses were recently featured as part of a street project that included 15 of his birdhouses in Winnipeg, Canada.

Traveling to Sri Lanka for two weeks to train others to build the birdhouses will be a welcome relief.

“It made sense,” says Parayno, who is ready to give back from the abundance that his birdhouses have provided.

For more information about Parayno’s work, go to the Web site www.berkeleyrusticbirdhouses.com.