HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-02-05, Page 20PAGE 20. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2009.Animal Planet to feature man’s ‘extreme’ designs
A Cranbrook man will be featured
on The Discovery Channel in the
coming months after his “extreme
birdhouses” caught the attention of
Animal Planet producers for the
program The Most Extreme.
Last week a film crew from Sharp
Entertainment in New York travelled
to Cranbrook to capture John Looser
and his creations as part of a six-part
segment on extreme animal homes.
Looser makes elaborate
birdhouses with anywhere from six
to over 100 rooms in them. This
began as a hobby, but it has
developed into a seriously creative
habit that has been attracting a lot of
interest. Rachel Lengel, the show’s
producer, said they found Looser on-
line and said his creations definitely
fit the theme of the show.
The crew spent approximately 45
minutes in a sit-down interview with
Looser, then he showed them around
his shop.
The later parts of the show were
filmed in front of his lot where
several of his larger, more
extravagant houses sit.
Looser said the company
contacted him about a month ago.
Right now the air date for the
segment is unclear, but Lengel said it
can be expected to air in the next
three or four months.
Looser’s segment will consist of
approximately six minutes of airtime
and will be the second in a six-part
series.
The crew stayed in Cranbrook for
almost nine hours and filmed
approximately six or seven hours of
footage in temperatures well below
freezing. There were, however,
frequent breaks taken to warm up.
Looser said the crew didn’t knowwhat to expect and arrived in Canadawith no winter clothes.Looser began making elaboratebirdhouses and bird mansions threeyears ago. Initially the process began
innocently enough with Looser
saying that he lives in the middle of
nowhere and that if he wanted
people to see them, he’d have to
build them larger than usual.
He began working with wood
when he was 14 years old, learning
about carpentry from his father, a
carpenter. As he grew up, Looser
began to take to the business of
building and became involved with
residential construction, but was
eventually forced into retirement due
to a car accident that led to
fibromyalgia.
He found the best form of self-
medication to be working on these
birdhouses.
“After the accident, I had to find
something to do with myself,” he
said. “I always had an eye for
proportion and I found it was easy
for me to just scale these houses
down to create birdhouses.”
He said that even when he was
young, he had an image of building
a house in the sky. It wasn’t until he
began building birdhouses that
Looser found what he had been
looking at in that image all those
years.
He has made his birdhouses out of
reclaimed wood and the inside of the
houses with plywood, which makes
cleaning the inside of the houses
very easy.Over the years Looser has madebirdhouses in all sorts of sizes andstyles. Two of his biggest birdhouseswere modeled after buildings in hishometown of Guelph.One, which contains over 100
rooms, is modeled after an old
schoolhouse in Guelph, while
another one, with just under 100
rooms is based on a Guelph-area
hotel.
These are a far cry from the first
birdhouse Looser ever made, which
was just over a foot square with only
six apartments. The apartments are
ideal for sparrows, swallows and
purple martins.
Looser says he has spent
thousands of hours working on his
extreme birdhouses. He will sell
them, but that’s not why he makes
them, he says it’s to help deal with
the pain he experiences daily. His
smaller houses cost in the $400 to
$500 neighbourhood, but some of
the larger ones can cost well over
$2,000.
Looser has been working on his
plans with his son, Jamie, in order to
provide those who are willing to
build the houses with ready-made
designs.
“All of this attention has been
really unexpected, but having the
film crew here has been great,” he
said. “Eventually I’d like to see my
plans go worldwide. Physically, I
don’t know how much longer I can
build these, but I’m working on
plans now, so my designs can live
on.”
The big screen
Cranbrook’s own John Looser is set to be featured on Animal Planet on The Discovery
Channel, catching the eye of producer Rachel Lengel with Sharp Entertainment for his
extreme birdhouse creations. He filmed a sit-down interview, then spent time in his shop and
then showed the film crew around the birdhouses out front of his home. (Shawn Loughlin photo)
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By Shawn Loughlin
The Citizen
A four-year collective agreement
between the Avon Maitland District
School Board and the local chapter
of the Ontario Secondary School
Teachers Federation (OSSTF) has
been ratified by both sides. Teachers
will receive three per cent raises in
each of the four years, running
through Aug. 30, 2012.
But on the elementary side,
negotiations have only just resumed,
a single day ahead of a Jan. 31
deadline that provincial union
president David Clegg warned
would have left members of the
Elementary Teachers’ Federation of
Ontario (EFTO) with “no option but
to initiate strike votes, which will be
the precursor to job actions.”
“Local school boards . . . have
been stalling because they have been
waiting for a provincial agreement,”
Clegg said in a Jan. 8 news release,
referring to an earlier Nov. 30
deadline defined by the Education
ministry, aimed at securing so-
called Provincial Discussion Tables
(PDTs) as templates for local deals.
ETFO was alone among Ontario
teachers’ unions (public and
Catholic; secondary and
elementary) in rejecting all PDT
offers.
“Now that a provincial agreement
is off the table, we will not accept
any more foot dragging by the
boards. Meaningful and constructive
contract negotiations must take
place at the local level.”
At a regular board meeting
Tuesday, Jan. 27, Avon Maitland
trustees ratified the local OSSTF
deal. In keeping with the PDT, the
deal will provide three per cent
raises each year.
But it wasn’t until Jan. 30 that
board negotiators got back to the
table with ETFO. And, in keeping
with the Education Ministry’s
warnings about failure to agree to a
PDT, they’ve been informed that
there will only be enough funding
made available for deals of two
years in duration, and with annual
raises of just two per cent.
“We know that the province has
told (the boards) that there will be
fewer resources to work with, and
that’s not going to cut it. That’s not
going to satisfy us,” said local ETFO
president Merlin Leis, contacted at
the local chapter’s Seaforth offices.
Leis confirmed that the local
chapter is in support of the
provincial union’s warnings about
job action. He stressed, however,
that he hadn’t yet seen what the
local board will offer, and asked to
reserve judgment.
“We haven’t yet seen what they
want to bring forward, and once we
do, we’ll have to determine where to
go from there.”
OSSTF, board ratify
collective agreement
By Stew Slater
Special to The Citizen