Some sit individually in trees while are clustered in sets, branching out like leaves on a building facade or hung like ivy off the sides of structures, but all of these diverse birdhouses share something in common: a single creative mind that has been working on them for years.

Street artist and designer Thomas Dambo’s Happy City Birds project is an ongoing ode to both cities and their avian inhabitants. He specializes in recycled artworks for humans as well as animals, ranging from small interventions like these to huge climbable sculptures.

Started in 2006, “the idea for Happy City Birds sprung from Thomas being a former graffiti artist, and was looking for a way to do street art in a positive way, that everyone can understand.” As with his other projects, these “birdhouses are made from recycled materials and scrap wood.”

His artist statements, like his kid-friendly creations, are not without a sense of childlike wonder and good humor. “One day Thomas felt that he wanted to know how it was to be a bird, so he built a giant birdhouse that he could hang out in. The house he build solely using recycled materials and put it up near Dronning Louises bridge in Copenhagen.”

A lot of these birdhouses are located in Arken, Denmark but they are also spread across other cities including Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Horsens, Beirut and Berlin.

Istanbul takes bird houses very seriously, and always has – seriously enough to attach palatial digs for feathered residents to their own human-sized buildings. In fact, the oldest known bird house in Istanbul can still be spotted on the side of the Büyükçekmece Bridge, dating back to the 16th century. The charters for new mosques often included provisions for feeding the birds, and sometimes even allocated huge amounts of gold to look after them. The practice was thought to attract good luck.

Today, you can wander through the cities of Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne and gaze up at the historic structures to find intriguing miniatures mounted to their facades, looking far fancier than anything you’ll ever live in yourself. Each one is designed to complement the building to which it’s affixed, or even act as a scale model of it.

They’re designed to shelter any birds that might hang out around the buildings, including sparrows, pigeons, swallows, storks and wisecracks. According to Daily Sabah, the birdhouses had a practical purpose for humans, too, helping to keep the birds from hanging out on the roofs and spilling their droppings all over everything, eventually corroding the walls of mosques, inns and other structures.

But setting up programs to shelter, feed and protect animals is a longstanding tradition in the area (that remains in place today – check out the adorable film ‘Kedi’ about Istanbul’s street cats for a great example.) The Ottomans also helped street dogs find food, set out saucers of water for any animals that needed it, fed wolves and gave medical care to injured storks.

During the Ottoman era, these miniature palaces were painstakingly crafted using elaborate techniques, crowning each one with its very own vaulted or domed roof. Some are three or more stories tall and feature minarets and other architectural details that were popular around the time they were built.

Check out Daily Sabah’s feature article on Ottoman bird houses for lots more details about this endearing tradition.

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Applying architectural logic to a bird’s eye view, these natural-material dwellings utilize fallen trees to create familiar and eco-friendly habitats for your feathered friends.

With concept and design development by Moger Mehrhof Architects, log quarter-sawing by Brandywine Woodworks, metal from John Madarasz and photos by Barney Leonard, this was a collaborative project taking into account the skills and abilities of all parties.

As with so many great designs, the end product is surprisingly simple – it recalls traditional pie-shaped birdhouses and uses a minimal amount of materials and effort to achieve its results.

And though birds may not make the same requests as human clients demanding unique abodes, the resulting semi-organic structures are necessarily unique, following the form of the logs from which they are cut. Log cabins for birds, if you will.

Another great aspect of the result: the plans and sections are relatively simple and the materials readily available, making for great do-it-yourself inspiration for anyone with a cabin in the woods.

As with human homes, these spaces are also designed to weather various conditions – the roofs are sloped and will shed excess weight as well.