Providing Water for Birds

a specialpublication from

B i l l T h o m p s o n , i i i

AProviding

Water for BirdsAll birds need water for drinking, and most birds also need it for bathing. It’s important for birds to bathe because this keeps their feathers clean and functional for both flight and protection from the elements. All of us have seen birds accessing water in a variety of places. Swallows may swoop down to the surface of a pond, lake, or river to get a drink. Robins may bathe in a puddle in the lawn after a rain shower. Starlings often access water in clogged gutters or in roadside puddles.

Providing water for birds can attract species that aren’t interest-ed in seeds, suet, nectar, or even mealworms. Some backyard bird watchers have built or installed elaborate water features with moving water and lots of places for birds to get easy and safe access. Provid-ing water for your backyard birds can be relatively easy and inex-pensive, but there are some important things to keep in mind to get the best possible results.

This e-guide is intended to help you with the initial steps for pro-viding water to birds. The content comes from our team of back-yard birders at Watching Backyard Birds. We want to help you make the most of your backyard offerings—including water—for the birds we all love.

I hope you enjoy this guide and that you’ll put the advice to good use. To further enhance your backyard birding enjoyment, consider subscribing to Watching Backyard Birds, the only magazine in the world devoted exclusively to backyard birds and bird watchers.

Sincerely,

Bill Thompson, IIIPublisher

Feeling SafeA bird that lives its life in

the treetops needs to gather its courage to venture to the ground to visit a source of water. Danger is all around a small songbird, such as war-bler. It is small enough to be captured, killed, and eaten by almost anything, including opportunistic bird eaters such as the blue jay and common grackle. It’s much more vulner-able to attack by snakes, house cats, and wild mammals such as weasels and raccoons when it is on the ground. A nearby sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk might just be quick enough to catch it before it can burst into an escape flight. So

the place it chooses to drop down to a water source, such as a pool along a stream, needs to have open sight lines around it so approaching danger can be detected. It also needs to have nearby cover into which the bird can escape.

Drinking is one thing. A warbler can nip down, scoop up a few bills full of water, tilt its head back to drink it down and be gone. Bathing is anoth-er thing altogether. When a bird bathes fully, it gets most of its feathers soaked. Most songbirds accomplish this, not by sitting down in water up to their necks as we humans often do, but by wading into the water up to their bellies and

An female eastern bluebird enjoys a refreshing splash.

ducking down to splash the wa-ter over the rest of their bodies. This makes their bathing a rath-er splashy, active affair. Once fully soaked, and looking fairly bedraggled, a bird will move off a short distance to a safe perch. There it will shake off the excess water and begin to preen its feathers back into place, cleaned and freshly reconditioned.

When a wild bird finds a reli-able and safe bathing and drink-ing spot and uses it successfully, the spot will become a regular part of the bird’s routine.

Basic Bird BathHere’s what not to do. Don’t

run down to your local big box store and buy a beautiful ceram-ic bird bath with a deep bowl and a lovely, shiny finish on it for just $11.97. I’m not arguing with the price, mind you. It’s the deep bowl and the slick finish. Unless

you just want a piece of lawn decoration that will never be used (or pooped on) by a bird, avoid the products that put form over function.

The deep bowl, when filled with water, will be too deep for birds to use comfortably. Most birds prefer fewer than two inches of water for safe bathing.

The slick bottom of a ce-ramic (or metal, or plastic) bird bath bowl is very unattractive to birds. If they perch on the edge of the bowl and feel the slippery surface, they may never venture any closer to the water. Slick footing makes it difficult to splash around while bathing, and can make it hard-er to take off in a flash if dan-ger approaches. Both scenarios will make a bird feel less safe, which means your bath won’t become a part of their daily or regular routine.

They rarely visit seed feeders, but scarlet

tanagers, such as this male, will use birdbaths—especially

those with moving water.

But all is not lost. Even the deepest and most slippery bird bath bowls can be changed for the better. The solution is to add a few flat rocks to the middle of the bowl, or a few scoops of pea gravel. The best rocks will be wide, flat ones that will rest just an inch or so below the water’s surface. Add another one that is taller, creating an island in the bowl’s middle. Pile the gravel up the same way, so it leaves just and inch of so of water on top of it.

Both of these solutions cover the water depth and safe footing problems, making your former-ly unappealing bird bath much more appealing to passing birds.

Buying a Good Bird BathIf you are in the market to

purchase a bird bath, look for a wide and shallow bowl made from a material that will give birds’ feet a bit of “grip.” You can certainly buy one of these at most garden centers and nature stores, but be aware that you do not necessarily need to add the pedestal, which holds the bowl of water three or more feet off the ground. I’ve never had much success with raised birdbaths, perhaps because birds are accustomed to finding water on or near the ground so they do not “tune-in” to a bath three and an half feet up.

Northern cardinals and mourning doves don’t mind bathing together.

Concrete—The classic materi-al for a bird bath is concrete molded into a bowl-like shape. Concrete is heavy, which reduc-es tipping problems when large birds, mammals, or family pets inevitably use it. Concrete baths can be so heavy that won’t enjoy tipping the bath out to clean it, something we’ll discuss further in a moment. Baths made from concrete or composite materials have the advantage of being durable and even freeze-proof, meaning if the water in your bath freezes in winter, it may not crack the bowl and ruin it. Another fac-tor with concrete baths is the surface texture. Concrete baths generally offer birds good foot-ing when bathing or drinking, but that same rough surface can be difficult to clean once it gets covered in green algae. This is where having a good hose with a blast-force nozzle and a scrub brush comes in.

Plastic—Plastic baths can be all right if you place them where they won’t tip and augment them with rocks or gravel to give the birds secure footing. Plastic baths are easier to clean than cement baths, but they cannot withstand freezing. Let a plastic bird bath freeze hard once and it will probably crack, making it useless. For use in warm climates and during the warmer months,

plastic baths will work just fine.Composite Material—More durable than plastic and less unwieldy than concrete, the emergence of composite material bird baths is a wel-come trend for backyard bird watchers. Composite materials combine two or more ingredi-ents to enhance strength and durability, such as resin, plastic fiber, wood fiber, and concrete. Composite material can be molded into any shape and this is how some of the most attractive baths are now made. By attractive, I mean attractive to both birds and humans. On our farm we have a couple of composite-material bird baths, both of which are molded to look like natural rock or stone. This bit of visual trickery makes these baths much more appealing to birds, who can-not tell, at a glance, that the water in the baths is actually trickling alluringly over fake stones. It looks natural to the birds, which makes them want to visit the water. Such design also makes our backyard look slightly more natural—emu-lating one of the truly natural water features elsewhere on our farm, far from sight.

Other Factors—When buying a bird bath, consider:

Is this bath well constructed? Is it easy to fill and clean? If I

am a bird, will I be attracted to this bath? This may seem like a silly question, but thinking like a bird has saved me from mak-ing a lot of stupid purchases at the wild bird store.

Where to Place the BathOnce you have your spank-

ing new bird bath, you need to figure out where to put it. Start by looking out at your yard or garden from the window or the location where you spend the most time. Look for a nice, lev-el spot—one that can be easily seen from this vantage point, accessed by you, and is reach-able with your garden hose and, an outdoor electric cord. Found it? OK. Now go outside

and check the site again. If it still meets all of your criteria, you’ve got a good spot. If not, make the necessary adjust-ments.

Ideally, you’ve chosen a spot that offers birds easy flying approaches and exits. The spot should have some shade during the day so direct summer sun does not evaporate all the water too quickly. But it should not be beneath a popular over-hanging perch or the birds will unwittingly poop into the bath regularly. Cover for careful approaching of the bath, post-bath preening, and for instant shelter from predators should also be nearby.

Some water features look more natural than others.

Resist the urge to place the bird bath right next to your window or door. As I men-tioned earlier, birds are skittish when bathing. Placing the bath to near a lot of visible human activity will only add to their reluctance to use the bath. I normally place our bath about 30 to 40 feet away from our studio-room windows. It is on the way to our feeding station, but safely removed from falling seed hulls and bird droppings. It’s shaded by a medium-sized clump of gray birches. Next to the bath I place a small open brush pile of dead branches. This serves as a way station for birds investigating the bath. Nearly every new species we’ve had visit the bath has followed this same path: Land in the birches, move to the branches near the bath. Drop down onto the brush pile. Hop close to the bath. Flutter over to the edge of the bath for a drink or a quick dip.

Adding MotionBirds love water, but they

find moving water irresistible. There are many ways to add motion to the water in your otherwise motionless bird bath. The easiest way (though not the least expensive) is to pur-chase a bath with a re-circulat-ing pump built into it. Among the many choices available for such a device are the baths that feature a reservoir and a filtered pump. These units can run for days or even a week without needing to be re-filled. There is maintenance involved in keeping not only the basin, but the filter and pump clean. But once running, they pro-vide clean moving water for your birds. Although there are solar-powered bird baths on the market, most recirculating units require electricity to run the pump.

Re-circulating Pumps—Here’s how a filtered-pump

Many birds find moving water to be irresistible.

re-circulating bird bath works: Water is sucked from the reser-voir and filteed as it is pumped up and out into the basin. Over time, all the water in the bath is filtered and re-circulated. The motion prevents insect larvae, including mosquitoes, from surviving in the water. Algae will still occur in the basin, as with any bird bath, and you’ll need to scrape, scrub, and bleach the surface to keep it from taking over. More on cleaning techniques in the next section.

Misters and Drippers—On the other end of the spectrum are the misters and drippers that you connect to your garden hose and place in or above your basic bird bath. The drips or spray from the small-diameter connector hose can be regulat-ed to minimize the amount of water being used. This method of adding motion has one draw-back: it uses a lot of water over time. Most garden centers and wild bird stores sell misters and drippers.

Wigglers and Milk JugsTwo more water-conserving

ways to add motion to your bird bath are easy to imple-ment. One is a do-it-yourself project, the other is a recently introduced product. First, the product: the water wiggler. The water wiggler lives up to its

name: it puts a wiggle in your water—at least for as long as the batteries last. Using the small wire loops, the wiggler, when on, produces constant ripples of water. Place it in the middle of your shallow bird basin and it looks like an unob-trusive half dome. If the price (about $40) feels a bit steep to you, I have two words: milk jug.

Get your hands on an empty two-gallon milk jug and make sure it’s completely rinsed clean of any dairy residue inside. Fill it with water, replace the cap, tie a piece of rope to the jug handle and suspend it above your basic bird basin. Take a pin and poke a couple of holes in the bottom of the jug. Ease open the cap on the milk jug until the water starts dripping from the bottom of the jug. Adjust position and flow as necessary. When the jug is empty, yes, you’ll need to fill it back up.

A plastic jug can be madeinto an affordable dripper.

MaintenanceNow for the fun part: keep-

ing your bird bath clean. A dirty bath is potentially un-healthy for birds. As stewards of our backyard nature, we owe it to our “customers” to pro-vide them with healthy access to our offerings.

Let’s face reality. The second you fill your pristine bird bath basin with water and step away to admire it, that same bit of clear liquid begins its inevita-ble and ongoing slide toward algae-clogged oblivion. Bird poop will soil it, insects will lay their eggs in it, seed hulls and leaves will fall into it, and weird stuff will get in there, too. Many bird bath operators find common grackles will dump their nestlings’ fecal sacs into a bird bath—or backyard swim-ming pool (gross!).

This disturbing trend toward the icky and gross can be eas-

ily thwarted. First of all, you should make a habit of dump-ing out the bird bath basin at least once a week—more often during periods of heavy use. While the bath is empty, attack it with a scrub brush and garden hose. Dump. Clean and scrub. Refill. That will work for most of the time.

When your bath basin starts to take on an overall tone of algae-green, it’s time to take your cleaning to another level. Don’t worry. You won’t need any heavy-duty equipment. You will, however, need some rubber gloves and a cleaning agent that has some algae-kill-ing bleach in it.

Before the weather gets really warm, a good scrubbing with a light bleach-water solution works just fine to keep things clean. We use nine parts water to one part bleach for this. Fol-low the scrubbing with a good

Clean water is essential for birds.Scrub your birdbathsas necessary.

rinse-off to reduce the risk of bleach-water being left behind.

When the weather gets warmer—from June through September—we need to aug-ment this cleaning technique with some abrasive cleaning product to aid in the scrub-bing. A powdered abrasive like Spic-N-Span or Comet and a short-bristled scrub brush really does the trick. The warmer weather encourages algal growth, which appears on the sides and bottom of the basin. The algae itself is not necessarily harmful to birds. But left unchecked it will make your bath basin a real mess—appealing to neither birds nor you. And when the water evaporates, you’ll get to enjoy the smell of rotting algae!

Before it gets to that stage, give your bath basin a good scrubbing out, with either the bleach-water, the cleaning agent, or both in succession. Then give the bath a good rinsing with clean water and let it dry in the sun.

Cleaning Pumps and Filters—Most submersible pumps for bird baths are simple things and easy to rinse out with a hose. Before you mess with the pump and filter, remember to unplug it from the electricity source. Some pumps can be damaged if they continue to pump when

removed from water.Filters normally need only a

good hosing off to be cleaned. We sometimes have to pick ours clean of grass bits before hosing it off, especially just after the lawn has been mowed. It’s a good idea to have an extra filter or two on hand for your bird bath pump. Under constant use, you might go through a filter in a year.

No VisitorsIf you get a nice new bird ba-

sin and follow all the instructions above about design, placement, and access and STILL you have no visitors, you can do one of two things: be patient and wait for the birds to find the bath; or move the bath to another site—perhaps nearer to cover, where birds can feel safer visiting.

Like your feeders, a bird bath is something you are doing for yourself as much as you are doing it for the birds. Birds can find water somewhere near-by—their flying ability is a great advantage in this search. So they won’t suffer if your yard lacks a functioning water feature. But I have to tell you it’s a mighty satisfying thing to see a bunch of birds gathered around the edge of your bird bath, taking turns bathing and drinking on a hot summer afternoon. It almost makes me thirsty just thinking about it.

If you enjoyed this publication, Watching Backyard Birds is for

you. It focuses on attracting and caring for the birds that are likely to visit your yard. Watching Backyard Birds is published six times per year. As a subscriber you will:

PILEATED WOODPECKER

watchingbackyardbirds.com • Vol. 20 No. 5 • October 2017

UninvitedHouse Guest14

Also:My Backyard:Denver, Colorado

Also:

6

From the publishers of

watchingbackyardbirds.comCall 800-879-2473 to order.

READ about the birds in your back-yard, with useful tips, stories, and colorful photos.WATCH and enjoy anytime, any-where, and on any device! WBB is published both in print and digitally, so you can read it on your computer, tablet, or smart phone, or on paper.

LEARN tips from the experts, and read the experiences of other backyard bird watchers.

CONNECT with other backyard bird watchers on our Facebook page at facebook.com/watchingbackyardbirds.

SHARE photos of your backyard birds and feeding station on our Facebook page and in our online gallery of reader photos. Share yourown stories, experiences, and tips, too!

Only $16.00* (one year/six issues)

*Ohio residents add 7.25% sales tax.

Want More Great Content?

Click Here to Subscribe