Faerie Homes: Week 2 Update

I spent this week studying other animal architects, finding resources, and collecting materials. Animals I am drawing inspiration from are Caddisflies, Red Oven Birds, and Vogelkop Bowerbirds.

Caddisflies live in water during their larva and pupal stages. To protect themselves, they weave a silk casing around their bodies and attach rocks, shells, leaves, etc. to this casing to make it stronger. They are the ultimate home-building foragers and are masters at using what nature provides. The casings that Caddisflies make are often beautiful, and artist Hubert Duprat took advantage of this by providing sample pupae with gold and pearls to make their casings with. As humans, we often consider ourselves the only species with aesthetic preferences, or the ability to create art, but these little flies are a testimony to how creative nature is.

Red Ovenbirds are small songbirds from Northern & Central America. They mold their houses out of mud, clay, plants, and twigs. What makes their homes spectacular however is their shape: they look like little ovens! They also construct walls in their homes to confuse predators and stabilize the structures on branches. These nests mirror methods used in not only pottery but human homes as well, showing how much we have in common with the constriction techniques of other animals.

Vogelkop Bowerbirds are small brown birds that live exclusively in New Guinea and Australia. They create their homes by weaving sticks around a small tree, then they lay a bed of moss in and around their home. If that wasn't already the coziest sounding space ever, these birds then gather hundreds of berries, flowers, nuts, shiny bugs, and even stolen trinkets and arrange them into neat piles on their lawn! This collection’s main purpose is to attract lots of potential mates, as Vogelkops are polygynous. I like this display particularly because I often see little trinkets and food collected in faerie homes, and I like to think by making a nice one I could be creating a safe place for another being, faerie or not.

With these animals’ homes in mind, I sat down and did some sketches of the general shape, layout, and materials I wanted to make my faerie house into. I like the idea of a sort of raindrop or mushroom-shaped structure, and I live near a beach so I was able to collect a bag of beach rocks that I’m going to build the walls with. I originally considered buying concrete to mortar the wall with, but I have leftover clay from my ceramics class last semester and I feel like using that is more “found” than buying cement. I plan to carve a door out of a branch that I found in Evans Way Park, and I am going to experiment with laying broken glass in glue to make a stained glass window. I also have larger pieces of broken glass that I will make windows from. Ideally, I would like to harvest moss from my house and plant it on the roof of the faerie home, but if that does not work I have some faux moss/turf that I will use. I am very excited to keep working on this project, and to see what kind of faerie home I can create! :)