The giant, muscular wooden lumberjack who greeted visitors to the Albany Timber Carnival for years is now half its original size and full of rot.

In fact, birds fly through a hole in front of his right ear to nest inside.

Because of its poor condition, a replacement lumberjack for this year’s resurrected Timber Carnival is being carved by Bob King of Edgewood, Wash. He starts his project today.

In 2002, Peggy Alex of Tangent obtained the original Paul Bunyan-like figure’s head and torso when the Albany Jaycees were getting rid of items associated with the carnival after it folded following a 57-year run. No one seems to know where his legs are.

The people who delivered the figure to her property placed it in her driveway next to a boulder to which a mailbox and Democrat-Herald delivery box are affixed.

“That’s where they put him down, and he’s stayed there ever since,” she said.

The figure, named Tim Burr, was not the only wooden lumberjack at the Timber Carnival. Another was carved in the 1980s, but many thought that one was not masculine enough, according to Dick Conolly, Albany’s parks and facilities maintenance manager.

He said one of the original Tim Burr’s boots is in a building at Timber-Linn Memorial Park, where the previous carnivals were held and where this year’s will be held as well.

King, who has won numerous national chain saw carving contests, expects it to take about a week to carve the new lumberjack, which will be about 8 feet tall. Starker Forests Inc. of Corvallis donated a western red cedar for the project and did not charge for delivery of the log to King’s carving studio.

“About 95 percent of the work will be done with a chain saw,” he said. “His shirt will be sanded a little bit, and some facial features, the laces on his boots and his fingernails will be done with power tools. I’ll probably do some airbrushing to give it some coloration and apply some stains, but not heavy ones so you can still see the wood grain.”

King, 44, is a self-taught carving artist who has no art education and cannot draw or paint.

“But I can carve anything,” he said.