Tony Dills photograph by Grace Dickinson/GraceD Photography

“You work with a lot of animals, you kind of know what they’re going to do before they do it,” Tony Dills says in a low Appalachian twang. In his almost three decades as an assistant animal curator at Asheville’s Western North Carolina Nature Center, he learned that squirrel monkeys bite errant fingers and that an elephant will move for an orange.

Now retired, Dills has turned his attention toward the birds outside his Weaverville home. He watches them gather at the feeders from his kitchen table, where he whittles blocks of northern basswood into an aviary using little more than patience and a carbon-steel Case pocketknife. Since 2012, the Buncombe County native has shared mountain heritage carving through the Southern Highland Craft Guild, carrying on the legacy of his teacher and dear friend Edsel Martin.

Delicate shavings curl from a cardinal as Dills draws the short blade along its belly, scalloping the surface in confident strokes. Cutting with the wood’s tight grain, he leaves the sculpture silky smooth, as if it were covered in actual feathers, before applying bright acrylic paint and perching it on driftwood often harvested from North Carolina lakes, sometimes by his wife, Patricia.

“A lot of these guys that carve birds, they get out their calipers and measure all the feathers — I just eyeball mine,” Dills says with a chuckle. But his keen natural eye imbues his work with an irresistible vitality, as if the wood could at any moment burst into cheerful song.

Visit southernhighlandguild.org/artist/tonydills to learn more about Tony Dills’s work. For more about Southern Highland Craft Guild, click here to read the story from the October 2024 issue.