A Texas teenager named Aamir Tinwala has built and installed more than 750 nesting boxes across eight Texas counties, giving 16 or more native bird species places to raise young.

More than 750 nesting boxes now hang on fence lines, park edges, schoolyard posts and backyard trees across eight Texas counties, and every one of them was cut, assembled and put up by the same pair of hands. The builder is Aamir Tinwala, of Coppell, a Dallas suburb wedged between the airport and the prairie remnants of the Elm Fork. The boxes are plain untreated wood — no stain, no sealant, nothing that would off-gas into a chamber where an animal the weight of a few paper clips will spend its first two weeks alive.