By Janet Whitlock · Goulais River, Ontario

“Folks fill the feeder all winter and forget the water. At minus 30, a chickadee isn’t hungry. It’s thirsty.” — Why a 72-year-old steelworker from Sault Ste. Marie is selling his last 47 bronze bird baths at a special price, before the ice comes in on Lake Superior.

Cast in solid bronze, aged through one Lake Superior winter. On a minus 30 morning, a kettle of warm water in its bowl draws every chickadee in the bush.

Five winters ago, the thermometer on Gord Ferrier’s porch read minus 34. The creek behind his house had been frozen solid since before Christmas. When he looked out the kitchen window, the chickadees were eating snow off his deck rail.

His bird feeder was full. Sunflower seed, suet, everything a small bird could want. The chickadees ignored it. They pecked at the frost on the window ledge instead.

Most people think winter birds struggle because food runs short. So they fill the feeder and feel they have done their part. But in a Canadian winter, food is often not the problem. Water is. Every pond, every puddle and every creek is ice. A bird that cannot find water has to eat snow. And to melt that snow, it has to use its own body heat. On a minus 30 night, that is heat it badly needs to keep warm.

The Driest Place a Bird Can Be Is a Frozen Backyard

A full feeder and a frozen bowl. On a January morning, this is what most Canadian backyards look like.

Up here, on the shore of Lake Superior, the snow comes by the metre. From December to April there is hardly a drop of open water in the bush. The creeks freeze. The ponds freeze. Even the dripping tap by the back door is shut off for the winter.

And the bird baths? Most people put them away in October. Concrete and ceramic soak up water. When that water freezes, it splits them. So the one bowl of water a chickadee might have found is sitting in the garage until May.

He Saw It Before Anyone Else Did

Gord Ferrier in his workshop, his family’s old maple sugar shack in the bush north of Sault Ste. Marie.

Gord Ferrier was born in Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo. His father worked on the big freighters that still pass through the locks on the St. Marys River. At eighteen, Gord started in the foundry at the steel plant on the river. For thirty-eight years he poured molten metal there. In February the shop doors froze shut on the outside, while the men inside worked in their undershirts.

When he retired in 2008, Gord did not stop pouring metal. Half an hour up the highway in Goulais River, his family’s old sugar shack stood empty at the back of the bush lot. Where the maple syrup used to boil, he put a small furnace. And he began to make the one thing the steel plant never let him make: something for the birds.

On that minus 34 morning, he did the only thing he could think of. He boiled the kettle, carried it out and poured warm water into the bowl of the first figure he had ever cast. Steam rose off it. Inside a minute, a chickadee was on the rim. Then six more. Then a red-breasted nuthatch, hanging upside down from the bronze leaves. Then two blue jays, pushing everyone else aside.

“They weren’t hungry,” he says, without looking up from the bench. “They were thirsty. That’s the day the dress became a bowl.”

What he casts looks nothing like a plastic bird bath from the hardware store. It is a girl sitting in a dress made of bronze leaves. She lifts the hem of her dress into a shallow bowl. It is low enough for a chickadee, steady enough for a blue jay, and lovely enough to stand in any garden. But the birds come.

Why Bronze Survives What Concrete Can’t

No chemicals: the green patina grows by itself through one winter outdoors.

Gord will tell you that a resin bird bath and a bronze one are not the same thing at two prices. They only look alike. Here is what thirty-eight years at the furnace put into every piece:

• “The Single-Pour Bronze.” Each figure comes out of one pour of solid bronze. No hollow resin, no glued halves. At just over three kilos, it does not blow over in a November gale or tip under a load of snow.
• “The Frost-Proof Body.” Concrete and ceramic soak up water and crack when it freezes. Bronze soaks up nothing. If the bowl freezes over, the ice simply lifts out. The figure can stay outside all year, in January and in July.
• “The Shallow-Sip Bowl.” The bowl is shallow on purpose. Chickadees and juncos can drink and bathe safely without slipping into deep water. And a shallow bowl takes a kettle of warm water in seconds.
• “The One-Winter Patina.” Gord does not paint on the green. Every figure sits out on his woodpile for one full Lake Superior winter. Snow and ice grow the soft green finish on their own. No two look exactly alike.

One honest word from Gord: the bowl is not heated. “On the coldest mornings, a kettle of warm water gives them an hour,” he says. “An hour is a lot when there’s nothing else for ten kilometres.” From spring to fall, it is simply a bird bath that fills with rain.

Before His Own Coffee

Every winter morning starts the same way: the birds first, then the coffee.

Every winter morning, before he makes his own coffee, Gord carries the kettle out to the figure by the back steps. For four winters, one chickadee came to that bowl before any other bird. It had a small white nick in its black cap. Gord never gave it a name. He knew it by the nick.

“Everybody thinks casting is the pour,” he says, packing sand into a mould with the heel of his hand. “The pour is ten seconds. The sand is the whole job.”

From packing the sand to filing the last leaf, every figure takes him about eleven hours. The pour itself is the shortest part.

That is the part no factory can copy: seventy-two winters of watching one patch of bush, poured into a bowl the size of your two hands.

“You Can’t Pour Bronze by Guessing”

The last of the bronze. Forty-seven figures, and then the furnace goes cold.

Gord reads a pour by its colour. For thirty-eight years he judged molten metal by eye. Too orange, and it is too cold. A bright straw yellow, and it is ready.

Last winter, an eye specialist in Sudbury gave him the news. Macular degeneration, in both eyes. The centre of his sight is fading. The edges are fine. But the middle, the part you use to look into a crucible, has turned into a grey smudge. It will not come back.

“You can’t pour bronze by guessing,” he says. “If I can’t see the colour of the melt, I’ve got no business standing over it.”

He can still finish the moulds that are already packed, with his grandson watching the furnace for him. He cannot start new ones. So he is pouring the last of them. Forty-seven figures. When the ice comes in on Goulais Bay this winter, the furnace goes cold for good. There will be no second batch.

He does not complain about it. “Thirty-eight years at the plant and eight in the shack,” he says. “That’s a good run for one pair of eyes.”

“They Belong Where the Chickadees Are”

Gord could charge far more. He has chosen not to.

Cast bronze like this sells for hundreds of dollars at garden shows in Toronto. Gord charges a fraction of that. When his granddaughter Brianne, a paramedic in Sudbury, saw the price, she told him he was giving them away. He poured anyway.

“I’ve got my pension and I’ve got the place,” he says. “What I haven’t got is forty-seven more winters. If forty-seven backyards have a drink for a chickadee on a minus 30 morning, that’s what I’d trade it for.”

He does not want his bird baths in a china cabinet. He wants water standing in backyards in Thunder Bay, in Saskatoon, in Moncton, in the suburbs of Edmonton, wherever a bird runs out of water this winter. The low price is not a sale. It is the whole point.

“The Chickadees Found It the First Cold Morning” — What Readers Say About Gord’s Bird Baths

Sent in by a reader in Barrie: “Five chickadees at once, every cold morning.”

• ★★★★★

  “The weight is the first thing you notice. This is real metal, not like the concrete one that cracked in its first winter. I put it by the back steps in November and the chickadees found it the next morning.”

  Diane K., Barrie
• ★★★★★

  “I bought it because it’s beautiful. I keep filling it because the birds won’t leave it alone. On cold mornings I pour in warm water and the nuthatches are there before I’m back inside.”

  Brian H., Thunder Bay
• ★★★★★

  “A Christmas present for my mother. She calls it her little lady and sends me a photo of every bird that visits. Best present I’ve given in years.”

  Karen W., Kingston

Before You Order — The Three Things People Ask Gord Most

More From the Backyards They Landed In

• ★★★★★

  “Heavier and finer than the photos suggest. Under the old maple it looks like it has always been there.”

  Ron P., Peterborough
• ★★★★★

  “Our old bird bath was too deep and the little ones never used it. This one has juncos in it every morning now.”

  Sandra L., Red Deer
• ★★★★★

  “You can tell a person made this, not a machine. Worth far more than I paid.”

  Gary M., Brandon