Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 19, 1992 TAG: 9203190400
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RANDY WALKER SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Development has damaged their habitats. Sparrows and starlings, introduced here long ago, have invaded their nesting sites. Pesticides and herbicides have poisoned their food supply and caused fatal birth defects.
The plight of the bluebird was dramatized in a 1969 issue of National Geographic. The article told how to build houses to attract the increasingly rare songbirds.
Paul Plaster read the article carefully. Plaster, a barber on Grandin Road, built about 10 bluebird houses that year, giving them to customers to place in their yards and meadows.
Since then, the 6-foot-2 Plaster has become a mighty friend of the little bird. He has built about 200 bluebird boxes. One summer, he visited all his bluebird families and counted some 500 eggs.
Plaster, 67, has been interested in wild creatures ever since his boyhood on a Henry County farm.
"I've always liked birds," he says. "Being on a farm, naturally you would."
Growing up on a farm during the Depression, Plaster and his 12 brothers and sisters had no money for luxuries. But the pleasures of a country childhood were all around them.
"In the summer, when we wasn't working, we was out in the woods swinging on grape vines," he says. "We'd dam up the creek, and that was the swimming hole for the whole neighborhood."
He and his father gathered wild honey and built crude beehives out of hollow tree stumps.
"We knew all about nature," he says. "As kids we knew every tree, every plant, every wildflower."
World War II opened his eyes to the possibilities of life away from the farm. Shortly after returning from Europe - where he fought from D-Day to the linkup with the Russians - Plaster moved to Roanoke and bought a barbershop next to the Grandin Theatre.
Barbering was a profession well-suited to Plaster's genial nature. He soon attracted a steady stream of customers. When he started building birdhouses, it was easy to find people to take them.
Plaster retired in 1986, but he works as a volunteer at a florist shop run by friends. "I like meeting people and delivering flowers," he says.
Plaster's wife, Thelma, who grew up on a farm three miles from Plaster's, also helps out at the florist.
When he's not delivering flowers, Plaster can usually be found in the back yard of his Salem house, on a bluff overlooking Virginia 419. Here, above the tumult of the four-lane highway, Plaster has created a little bit of country. He grows beets, peas, onions, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines, blackberries and strawberries.
He cultivates grapes from which he makes wine. He keeps bees in hives that are rather more sophisticated that the hollow trees of his Henry County boyhood.
And of course, he makes sure the bluebirds have somewhere to live.
It takes him about 30 minutes to build a birdhouse in his backyard shop. The houses have removable tops for a special reason. The bluebird pair will raise two or three broods each season, building a new nest each time.
The nests pile up on top of each other, raising the eggs dangerously close to the hole. A sparrow might poke its head in the hole and peck the eggs. After each brood has left the birdhouse, a human keeper needs to throw out the old nest.
For that reason, Plaster doesn't give the boxes to just anyone. The keeper must be willing to check the box every week or two.
For a long time, Plaster financed his box-building program out of his own pocket. In recent years, though, a friend who works for Viking Fences has been providing him with scraps of treated lumber, and he also receives scraps from carpenter friends.
Also, his sister-in-law, Myrtle Plybon, has been selling the houses to cover costs. Plybon, bluebird chairman of the Blue Ridge District of Garden Clubs, also speaks on bluebirds to garden clubs from Bedford to Blacksburg.
Plaster's bluebird houses cost $5, and "as long as I can find somebody to put 'em out there, I keep building 'em," he says.
interested in a bluebird house and in maintaining it should call Paul Plaster at 986-0157 or Myrtle Plybon at 389-6165.
by CNB