Pastor Jake was a minister for 45 years, but he had always been fascinated by wood. As a child in Saskatchewan in Canada, he made his own toy trucks. He remodeled parts of churches. Then in 1990, he started carving. First, it was fish, but they didn’t sell too well. Then he found his calling, so to speak: ducks and swans.

“I’ve always taken great interest in wood,” says the 74-year-old woodcarver. “I just love it. It’s the beauty of it.”

Jake says he has worked in 60 different woods including maple; cherry; Russian olive; walnut; Minnesota ironwood; cedar; wood from the bottom of Lake Superior; flaming birch; beechwood (“the biggest and heaviest wood so it is the best”); exotic woods such as purpleheart, beautiful zebrawood, rare ebony, and cocobola (called the musical wood because it is often used in musical instruments); white box elder, which is perfect for Jake’s swans; and bass wood for the loons, which is one of the few birds he paints.

A postman once saw Jake’s artistic and distinctive ducks at a show and offered him some black cherry. He finds lots of red cedar near where he lives in Minnesota. When he travels, he always comes home with wood like that trip to Texas that rendered some driftwood.

“If I see a piece of wood, I see what it’s going to look like when it’s done, the bird it’s going to be. I think, boy, will this be beautiful when it’s done.”

Jake carves 250 to 300 wooden birds per year. “I keep pretty busy. The secret is to know how to do things fast and systemize the process,” Jake says. “I make 20 or 30 birds at a time. But it’s not just a matter of production. Every bird is a little different from all the rest. There are no patterns involved. Everything is original and comes out of my head. And that’s the way life is—there are no two human beings alike. We’re all different, and it’s the same with the birds.”

Most of Jake’s birds—swans, ducks, geese, pintails, mallards, redheads—are left in natural wood receiving at least seven to eight coats of tung oil. About 10 percent of his birds are painted, mostly loons and some wood ducks, swans, and geese. He uses glass eyes in all his birds and makes various sizes ranging from 4 inches to 12 inches long.