Birdhouse/Outhouse: The Semiotics of the Forest

The first outhouse on my family's summer property in the Finnish archipelago was built by my grandfather in the 1950s, with an ingenious manual door handle that turns from green to red to indicate that the outhouse is occupied.

My maternal grandfather was an avid amateur ornithologist and installed many birdhouses on the family property. All of them needed to be cleaned out at the end of every nesting season so that new birds would nest there the following year, and for decades now, this has been a responsibility I’ve taken on. At some point it struck me much an outhouse resembles a birdhouse. I built a tiny replica of the outhouse door handle and installed it on one of the birdhouses, enabling the two structures to signal to each other through a kind of forest semaphore.