All are welded together out of salvaged bits of iron and steel. All were made by Benson.
“I don't have the patience for larger stuff or anything particularly complicated,” says Benson. “I don't go for anything that'll take me longer than an hour to make.”
Considering that Benson, a 70-year-old former road construction worker, only picked up a welding torch for the first time two years ago, it's evident that the trim man with the gray mustache does not sit with idle hands for long.
The way he sees it, these bizarre birds help keep the bottle at bay.
“I quit drinking 30 years ago now,” he says. “I realized long ago I needed something to do with my time so that I don't revert to type and start to hang out in those air-conditioned bars.”
Born in Plentywood to a father whom he figures was an alcoholic, Benson says he never would have imagined himself falling for the bottle. But somewhere along the way, drinking changed from something he controlled to something that controlled him.
“You get an instant relief from the burdens of self when you drink,” he says. “You'd think I would have learned my lesson, growing up with my dad, but I didn't. I had to learn it myself.”
When he stopped drinking, Benson first started carving antlers, making belt buckles and selling them at craft fairs around the region. He did that for years.
Then, simply on a whim, he bought some welding tools about two years ago and began taking continuing education courses at Hellgate High School. The first thing he made was a bird. He was hooked.
“I don't know why I made a bird,” he says. “But once I did it, I kept making them, I guess because of my diminished attention span. I've got this down, I know how to do it now, so I just keep doing it.”
To feed his interest, Benson visits farm auctions, rummage sales and secondhand stores, where he picks up bits and pieces of metal that catch his eye: parts off of old combines and hay mowers, spider-gears from four-wheel-drive vehicles, the teeth of a spring-toothed harrow, augers and springs and oddball things.
“I bet you'll never guess what that is,” he says with a grin, pointing to the base of a birdbath and then answering his own challenge: “Those are the kickers out of a manure spreader.”
“When I see a deal,” he notes, “I just buy a bunch of it and worry about what I'll do with it later.”
Whatever items he can't store in bins in his yard, he stashes on 20 acres he owns up in Hot Springs, until he figures out a use for them.
Benson has as little patience for artists who charge high prices for their work as he has for projects that take much time to complete. Most of his birds sell for $150 to $200. He doesn't go out of his way to market them, although several of them are now featured in Caras Nursery's annual Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition.
“I never did think much about selling them, but then this girlfriend said I was going to run out of space in the yard if I didn't get rid of some of them,” he says. “She told me to talk to (George) Ybarra (curator of the Caras exhibition), and so I did. He took a few of them for the show, and they sold pretty good so I've just kept taking him more of them.”
Other than that, Benson just hangs around the house, making his birds, fielding inquiries from curious visitors.
“Once in a while someone'll stop by and ask me about them, and I'll mull it over and usually give them a good deal on something. I wish I had a bigger yard for all of this, but oh well.”
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