For Farmer, Art’s the Last Straw : Alabama: Folk art or ‘found art,’ passersby get a kick out of Jim Bird’s hay sculptures. If the materials cost more than $5, he doesn’t build it.

Rounding a curve on U.S. 43, a pirate’s sneer is one of the first things motorists see. Complete with eye patch and earring, the snaggletoothed raider sits by a leisurely, reclining turtle with its reading glasses on.

Nearby, a bullfighter waves a red cape at a charging bull.

No, they’re not real. They’re made entirely of hay, wood and other materials by landowner Jim Bird. His creations have delighted passersby from across the nation--and beyond--for years.

“It breaks [up] the trip for people,” said Bird, 72, who has been making the sculptures using his spare hay for several years at his Greene County home in rural west Alabama.

Bird said he used to leave a blank pad outside so motorists could leave comments about the sculptures.

“My brother and I are Marines on leave from Arizona and California,” one note said. “We are driving cross-country back out to Phoenix, and this is the only thing so far that we’ve bothered to stop and take a picture of. Y’all are a riot.”

Visitors from England, Canada and Ecuador also have come by, and a Japanese television crew once stopped and interviewed Bird after passing the sculptures. They sent Bird and his wife, Lib, a tape of the segment, but it was entirely in Japanese.

“I never got anybody to tell us what they said,” Bird said. “They probably said, ‘This crazy fool.’ ”

Sometimes motorists even stop and help Bird work on the sculptures. “He’s always looking for volunteers to help,” said Lib, 74.

Bird said most of the honkers and wavers are truck drivers. “I guess it breaks the monotony of going up and down the road,” he said.

He got the idea for the sculptures one day when his hay baler was turning out misshapen bales. He put them aside, he said, thinking he’d find something to do with them. “That’s when I made a caterpillar and a spider,” he said. When his supply runs short, sometimes he has to sacrifice his art to feed his cattle.

Each of the sculptures costs less than $5 to create; if it’s more than that, Bird won’t build it. “It makes it more of a challenge,” he said.

Besides natural materials like hay and wood, he uses such equipment as buckets, old tires and discarded containers. One sculpture uses the body of a car propped up on four huge hay tires. Bird uses a machine to help him lift the bales, which weigh about 1,200 pounds each.

He said his favorite is Kilroy, who is peeking above the ground with a nose made of a 55-gallon drum and hands made of firewood.

The Birds call the creations “environmental art.” But what the hay is it, really?

“In the strictest sense, we’d have to say he was a folk artist,” said Alan Atkinson, assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “I think his own title is a perfectly good one. None of those things are made into something else. Someday they’re all going to go back to being oil cans and oil drums and bales of hay.”

But, Atkinson said, Bird likely isn’t trying to carve a place for himself in the art world. “What are the critics saying? He could probably care less. He’s kind of taking found objects and converting them playfully into sculpture.”

The creations demonstrate the Birds’ irreverence--after all, this is the couple who has an old toilet next to their mailbox painted with the words “junk mail.”

Probably unconsciously, Bird has joined an artistic movement--making everyday objects into art by designating them as something else, Atkinson said.

“There’s a whole resurgence of the found object,” he said. “It creates something new in your mind. . . . It’s still a Coke bottle, or a bale of hay or whatever.”