My wife and I were on a birding trip to Costa Rica many years ago, and our guide pointed out a Keel-Billed Toucan that he heard calling. I couldn't see it but he said it was in a tree about two-miles away. He put his spotting scope on it and sure enough, there was a Keel-Billed Toucan. Magnificent bird. Click the link and you will see what it actually looks like.

On our most recent trip to Alaska, I saw a chainsaw sculpture carved into the shape of a bear. I thought that was pretty cool so I decided to try something like that.

I have a backyard birdfeeding area dedicated to critters that like to visit. Naturally, with birds come squirrels. I used to despise them because of all the birdseed thay ate but I have gradually grown to love seeing them come to the feeders as much as the birds. Some have become friendly enough over the years to eat peanuts out of my hand. I had to create a sculpture dedicated to my little furry friends.

Since I grow a lot of plants in my yard, I thought I would try to grow Audrey II (from Little Shop of Horrors) to get rid of unwelcome solicitors.

We've taken three safari trips to Africa (and an additional vacation in Egypt) and one animal you will see on most safaris is an elephant. Naturally, my menagerie would not be complete without my version of a safari to my yard.

I had a strange project in mind several years ago where I would develop a location in the yard to make a sculpture and then tear it down to make a different one each year. It didn't exactly turn out that way but maybe someday it still will. This is the first sculpture I made for this location.

This is an example of a very rare animal we didn't see in Africa on any of our trips there. It is a crossbreed of a giraffe and a zebra and is called a girebra. It is not known if these are now extinct or not. This is my favorite piece of all that I have created, and to my knowledge, it is the only one in the world.

This MIGHT not be exactly true of course.

I wish I could take credit for this piece of art, but I can't. We hired a professional chainsaw sculpture (3 Timber Studio) to do this piece. We told him what pieces to carve out and he designed and created it along with his wife. These are all critters that have we have seen from our backyard except for a Blue Morpho Butterfly (we saw that in Costa Rica though and had to add it).

I was strolling through an outdoor art display a few years ago and saw a giant Spider. It was about 10 feet tall and the legs were at a diameter of around 20 feet. I knew I had to have something like this some day. Their piece was probably valued in the hundreds of thousands and mine has about fifty bucks in parts and maybe 30 hours labor including planning, design, construction (plus de-construction and re-construction for some parts), and installation in the final location.

My Spidey measures around 6 feet tall, 16 feet long and 7 feet wide. I live on the corner of a cul-de-sac and this piece sits on the entry of the area between the sidewalk and the street over the top of one of my gardens. Some neighbors use it as a landmark when giving directions to their house.

There are no construction pictures for Moni, the Monarch Butterfly. It has a wingspan of two feet and is mounted on a black oak tree. It has five parts including the body and two pairs of wings. The covering is cloth that is hot-glued over wire bent into the shape of the wings. Then painted.

I actually didn't think this would last very long in the outside elements with the cloth and the paint but it is about five years old now and looks as good as the day I installed it.

Like Moni, there are no construction pictures for Esther, the Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly. She is the same size, in the same tree and made the same way as Moni.

For it's size, the Lincoln Children's Zoo is very famous. It has a great reputation of breeding rare species that might disappear without programs such as this. They recently acquired a troupe of spider monkeys, and while not rare, are a great addition to the zoo. I decided I needed to dedicate one of my critters to the zoo so here is Lincoln, the spider monkey. As you can see, he is modest so is wearing red polka dot shorts.

I've always enjoyed fantasizing about dinosaurs so it seemed only natural that I should have one in my yard. Here is Pterry, the Pterodactyl, with a wingspan of about 20 feet.

I could never get grass to grow under this maple tree so I finally gave up trying and just mulched it all. Then I decided that something had to go in this long space. Little did I know a cousin of the Loch Ness Monster would surprisingly appear one day.

This one was not intended to last long. It is Casper, the Snow Ghost. This picture was taken on a dark and dreary day, so not much contast.

This crab apple tree was planted around 1975 and stayed gorgeous for many years. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the life span of this tree is around 40-60 years. This picture was taken in May of 2010 so is 35 years old. Age gradually started to catch up to it these past 10+ years.

This "thing" fell into the category of "Why Not?"

Overnight in May of 2020, this space ship crash landed in the crab apple tree. I was able to grab a picture of it with little green men pouring out and rappelling down a rope to the ground. Apparently their tractor beam was damaged in the landing. I stopped them before they got to the ground but who knows what havoc they might have caused if they had been able to carry out their nefarious plans.

Not all of the "art?" in the yard are critters. I like to do stained glass work sometimes as well. This is a wind spinner that was in the same crab apple tree when Spacey was visiting. Each individual part is about one inch high and two and a half inches wide. The entire piece, when put together, is about six inches wide and 16 inches high. It is hung with a fishing spinner and heavy wire. I coated the spinner with petroleum jelly to keep dust out of the insides.

This is another stained glass piece I created. This wind spinner was also in the same crab apple tree when Spacey was visiting. It is about two feet high and two feet in diameter and hung with a fishing spinner and heavy wire. I again coated the spinner with petroleum jelly to keep dust out of the insides.

I don't know if this is an alien that escaped from Spacey, the spaceship, but he is apparently all grown up. Alan seems harmless, just sitting in the same crab apple tree with more branches gone. He is pointing up to the skies like he wants to phone home.

It seemed only appropriate that something that has had "art?" living in it for several years, in it's death, it should show life in a different form. This is the same crab apple tree, but all the branches have now died and it is ready to move on to its next phase.

My wife has this thing about penguins. She has travelled to Antarctia, Galapagos Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa and has been able to observe 11 different species in the wild. I've added a couple more on the Kern safari for her. This is Penny.

I told my wife, who lived in Texas for most of her life, that I was going to add a gecko climbing up the wall. She said that's too plain because many people have them where she came from. I said mine is going to be a six-foot gecko with red polka dot shorts. She decided that was a worthy addition to our "Art?"

This isn't actually a construction project. I was walking around the yard and stumbled on to Kermit the frog, drunk, and sitting up against the wall by Geek's tail. I left him alone to sleep it off.

Our fireplace is no longer functioning and has been capped off. Turns out it is a perfect place for eagles to perch in the neighborhood. Iggy has not built a nest yet but I expect that to happen any day now. I'm a little surprised that Kermit is still around. Would be a nice snack for Iggy. You can also see Geek next to the chimney.

This was just a fun little project to encourage people to SMILE. As with other projects, I made the form out of cardboard and filled it with some rebar and concrete.

Another weird but fun project. I picked up a bunch of odd shaped rocks and found that I could stack them in a cylindrical shape, so I painted them various colors and stacked them in my garden next to the chimney.

Like my other butterflies, there are no construction pictures for Beauties, my Butterfly Structure. The butterflies are made of strong wire, cloth, paint, PVC pipe, rebar and alumninum tape. They are mounted in the ground using "Great Stuff" insulating foam.

I've seen a couple other pieces similar to this made out of driftwood and stained glass and installed on a beach but never out of concrete. We don't have a lot of driftwood or ocean beaches in Nebraska, unless you go back about 100 million years ago when the Western Interior Seaway covered most of the state, so I had to settle on a different medium and location. Mine is mostly made out of concrete and stained glass and stands about 40 inches tall.

My daughter is a veterinarian living on a farm in England. She and her family raise, among other things, alpacas. I decided to create one for her here on my "farm".

If I am going to have a Pterodactyl in my yard, then I certainly also need a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He has a dino chain around his neck to keep him from reaching the sidewalk for the safety of passers-by. He's just a baby at two feet high and four feet long, but he still has lethal teeth.

What menagerie would be complete without a Sasquatch lurking in the background.

I didn't build this. I had it done by professionals. If I had done it, it would have been made out of styrofoam, chicken wire and some rebar for strength. I only add it here because many of my creations were built in here and I wanted to show a couple of things that I did create in here that makes it much easier to use.

I was on the way to my shed one day and was startled to see a 14-foot tall giraffe peering over the top of it.

No construction images here. I just found a bunch of round rocks, painted them, and then carefully stacked them ... Or ... I might have made a bunch of "rocks" out of hypertufa with holes in the middle, drove a long piece of rebar down into the ground and threaded the rocks over the rebar. I'll let you guess which is correct.

This is a long-term construction process. My wife and I had taken a birding trip to Southeastern Arizona in 2012 and noticed that all of the really successful backyard birding areas had fountains. On the way home, we talked about adding one to our backyard. The day after we returned, I started. Little did she know I was going to tear up nearly all the backyard sod to build it. :)

I decided I would create a fountain that first year and change it every year until I finally got the one I REALLY LOVED. I worked through several variations (a couple of them big-time failures) but finally achieved perfection in June of 2018.

The next series of pictures show the transition from what the back yard started out to be and where it is now.

If you are going to have a fountain, you have to either build up, or dig down. I chose both. This view shows what our backyard used to look like. We live on a cul-de-sac with a fairly large front yard and a relatively small back yard.

The 2012 fountain was my first attempt. It was fun to build but the water didn't flow as well as I wanted. Also, a lot of the water spashed out of the pit so more had to be added occasionally.

For my second attempt, I added lights to give it an eerie look. Just for fun, we give names to each of my designs after they are built. This one we called The Wedding Cake.

We thought this looked sort of like a spiral staircase. It has five levels where the water individually cascades to the pit below. This was not nearly as bulky as the previous iterations, and as you can see, the birds did like it.

This one is The Tray. Just looks like you could be setting something up on top of it. It was certainly sturdy enough to hold anything but I never could get the water to flow the way I really want it to. The foam at the bottom was caused by a new liner I added that is supposed to sort of look like rock. It creates the foam when it first gets wet but does eventually go away.

The Glass Ceiling took a LOT of PVC Pipe, a LOT of special connectors, a LOT of Stained Glass, a LOT of creativity to put it all together.

I don't have any idea how I come up with weird fountain (or others) designs, but it is fun conceiving them, figuring out out to build them, and then actually constructing and installing them. I just like each to be different. This one sort of inspires Spires on the top of buildings.

As mentioned with several of the previous fountains, there was a problem where water was splashed out of the pit. Obviously the problem was that I was creating fountans that were too large for the pit area. I had a choice of either making smaller structures (never going to happen) or increasing the pit size. Naturally, I chose the latter.

The Shell ... Perfection!!!

This is the one I had been working towards for years. We loved this one for several reasons. It creates a great spashing sound that the neighbors love too. With the new larger pit, it can have a LOT of splashing without losing the water. We love the visual appeal where it looks like a shell with the water coming down into a common point. We can see through it from both our patio chairs and dining room to see the hibiscus flowers behind it. It is lightweight because it is made of entirely PVC pipe to make it easy to remove for cleaning the pit and the fountain. It is easy to repaint to a different color each year. While the birds cannot use the fountain directly for drinking and bathing, with the new wider pit, there are plenty of shallow areas around the edge that supplies that need. What's not to love about this design.

Getting towards the End ... For Now. This is nearly the last of the Weird Art?" stuff at this point. It is a small wall of flowers that I made each year for several years for my wife.

I've got 17 different garden areas around our home and this takes a lot of maintenance. Except for the patio area, just about averything has been converted to perennials. The above heart wall took a lot of time to plant each year and I have been cutting back on effort I put into gardening each year. That is one of the items that bit the dust. In it's place, I added this.

To build this, I bought a sheet of four-by-four foot privacy screen to use as a backdrop. I also purchased a bunch of artificial red flowers. I picked off all the flowers heads and hot glued some of them on the screen to form the heart. Then added small metal rods on the back for stability and then mounted it in the ground with three five-foot fence posts.

My wife says, since we live in Lincoln, NE, "if you can see palm trees, you must be on vacation." We're on vacation all year long now.

This is the first "Art?" piece I created. My wife is a big fan of penguins and has visited to various locations where she has seen 11 varieties in the wild. I decided we should have one in our yard because it is sort of in the wild as well.