Kelvin Bird Bath AUS
“On a 44-degree day a wren can find a bug. What it can’t find is a drink.” — Why a 74-year-old Adelaide Hills panel beater is selling his last copper bird baths at a special price.
Kelvin Treloar has kept the same thermometer on the same shed door since 1986, and every summer he pencils the worst day onto the frame beside it. 1994: 43. 2009: 45. 2019: 46 and a half. The newest mark is from Australia Day this year, when Adelaide set a record at 44.7 and the tin-roofed shed read 46. Under the number he wrote two words he had never written before.
No wrens.
The superb fairy-wrens had been in the bottlebrush by the tank stand every morning for four years. On the hottest day of the summer they were gone. It was ten days before Kelvin saw one again, and he only saw two. There had been seven.
The Night Is the Problem, Not the Day
Everyone remembers the 44.7. Fewer people noticed the number after it: that night Adelaide never fell below 34.1°C, the warmest night ever recorded in the city. For a bird, that is the dangerous figure. A fairy-wren weighs about as much as two ten-cent coins. It cannot sweat. All day it pants and loses water with every breath, and it survives that because the night gives it back. When the night is 34 degrees, there is no giving back. On day four or five of a heatwave the bird simply does not wake up.
Creeks in the Hills that normally hold a trickle through summer were cracked clay. Every natural place a small bird drinks from was gone at once, and the birds were in trouble long before that: a twenty-year survey across 151 sites in the Ranges has found woodland bird numbers down 45 per cent, the superb fairy-wren and the New Holland honeyeater among them.
Then in April came the study that made the national news. ANU researchers, who have followed one population of superb fairy-wrens since 1988, reported it could be gone within thirty years. Not habitat loss. Hot summers: after each one, fewer adults survived to spring. BirdLife Australia’s plea, repeated every hot spell, is one line: put a shallow dish of water out in the shade, out of reach of cats. It can save a bird’s life.
Seven in the morning, the only cool hour. A New Holland honeyeater and a silvereye, two of the species the Hills are losing fastest.
Nobody in the Hills needs more seed in summer. What is missing, on the days it matters, is a cupful of clean water in the shade that a bird the size of a coin can reach without being eaten.
Why You Hang It in Spring, Not in the Heatwave
There is a reason Kelvin wants these hanging in backyards now, in the last weeks of spring, and not on the afternoon the forecast says 43. The wrens that are around your place in November are the ones that will still be there when the first 40-degree day hits. They are feeding fledglings right now, they are working out the patch they will hold through summer, and whatever water is inside that patch is what they will know about when the heat comes. A bath that appears on the hot day itself is a bath a frightened bird has never seen.
“Put it out when it’s pleasant,” Kelvin says. “They find it when they’re curious, not when they’re desperate. Then on the bad day they go straight to it. I’ve watched them do it. They come in low under the gum like they’ve got an appointment.”
In the Hills the first 40-degree day often arrives before Christmas.
It Started With a Hubcap
Kelvin beat panels for a living. He started at the Holden plant in Elizabeth in 1968 as a sixteen-year-old apprentice and was still there the day it closed in October 2017, by which point he was the bloke the younger ones brought a bent guard to when the machine couldn’t fix it. He has shaped sheet metal with a hammer and a dolly for most of his life. His wife Marg kept the garden, and the birds were hers.
The bird bath was never designed. The summer after Marg died, Kelvin wired an old Commodore hubcap to the fence to stop it blowing around, and forgot about it. The sprinkler filled it. Three fairy-wrens found it. He watched them bathe in a hubcap at the end of a 40-degree day, splashing like kids in a paddling pool, and then he watched the neighbour’s cat find it too.
“That was the lesson,” he says. “Shallow, they loved. Metal, they didn’t care. On a fence post, the cat loved. So it had to hang. And a hubcap gets too hot to touch by ten o’clock, so it had to be in the shade and it had to be a metal that doesn’t cook. Copper. I had an offcut in the shed from a range hood.”
He hammered the first one that week. It is still on the gum by the tank stand, gone the colour of an old penny.
What a Panel Beater Does Differently
A man who spent forty-nine years making steel the exact shape it needed to be has opinions about a bird bath. This one is twenty-two centimetres across and twenty-eight to the top of the hook, and almost every detail of it is there because of something Kelvin watched go wrong in his own backyard.
Each bowl is worked up from flat sheet on a stake with a planishing hammer, the same way a mudguard was reshaped before robots did it. The hook is bent hot.
Four things he got right because the hubcap got them wrong:
- Shallow, with a sloping floor. Two centimetres at the rim, five in the middle, like a creek edge. A wren drinks from the edge, a honeyeater bathes in the centre, a magpie stands in it. Nothing drowns, nothing is too deep for a fledgling.
- Copper over iron, hammered. The iron gives it weight so it hangs still in a northerly. The copper is the part that matters in summer: it stays cooler than steel, it is naturally hostile to the algae and bacteria that turn a concrete bath green in three days, and the hammered surface gives wet claws a grip.
- Hung, in the shade, from a hand-curled hook. The rod ends in a tight spiral that loops over a gum branch, a verandah beam or a bracket. Nothing climbs down to it. Cats and possums go without, the water stays out of the sun, and the birds have a clear view of everything underneath them, which is the thing a small bird wants most.
- Catches its own rain and empties in a second. It is an umbrella the wrong way up, so every shower tops it up. When it needs changing, you unhook it, tip it, blast it with the hose and hang it back. Fresh water in the time it takes to say so.
The wrens are working out their summer patch now. Give them a reason to put your backyard in it.
A$84 A$59
One for the Little Ones, One for the Bullies
The arrangement most of Kelvin’s customers end up with: one deep in the shrubs for the small birds, one out in the open for everything bigger.
The second bath was the customers’ idea, not Kelvin’s. In an Australian backyard the water gets taken over. Last year’s Aussie Bird Count tells the story in three lines: the three most counted birds in the country were the magpie, the rainbow lorikeet and the noisy miner, and BirdLife’s Sean Dooley said the small bush birds were going the other way. A wattlebird or a noisy miner will sit on a bath and see off everything smaller, and the fairy-wrens, the thornbills and the silvereyes, the birds that are actually disappearing, end up with nothing. Hang one bowl in the open where the big birds can hold court, and a second one tucked into dense shrubs where a magpie won’t go, and the little birds get their own. Two bowls, no fights, and a backyard with twice as much in it.
Two Strokes of the Hose
The thermometer gets looked at once a day. The bath gets filled three times. Kelvin is up before six in summer, and the first thing he does, before the coffee, is walk down to the gum with the hose and give the bowl two strokes: one to tip the old water out, one to fill it. He does it again at lunch and again at five. On the bad days he adds a fourth. He has done it every summer day for seven years.
“It’s not a big thing,” he says. “Thirty seconds. But I’ll tell you what, on the 44 day I counted twenty-two birds through that bowl between five and six in the evening. Honeyeaters, silvereyes, a pair of rosellas, a wattlebird that wouldn’t get out. Twenty-two in an hour, in a bowl you could hold in your two hands. That’s not decoration. That’s the only water for half a kilometre.”
“I’m Not Selling Copper. I’m Selling a Forty-Degree Day.”
His granddaughter Tegan, 24, set up the little online shop and did the sums before the price went live. Copper sheet, iron rod, the copper bird, a box, postage to Perth. She told him A$59 left almost nothing. He told her that was fine. “I’m not selling copper,” he said. “I’m selling a forty-degree day. A wren in a bowl of water at five o’clock when everything else has dried up. You can’t charge a hundred and twenty for that and expect it in a hundred backyards.”
Jack asked him in January, during the heatwave, whether the birds would die if they forgot the water. Kelvin told him the truth, which is that some of them would, and that this is why you don’t forget. Jack has taken the five o’clock refill since. He is four and he uses the small watering can.
“That’s the business plan,” Kelvin says. “A kid who checks the bowl before tea. If I get eighty-four more of those going before I pack it in, that’ll do me.”
Eighty-Four Bowls, Already Shaped
Planishing copper is the one job in a shed you cannot do with a bad grip. The sheet sits on a steel stake and you work round it with a light hammer, thousands of overlapping blows, coaxing the flat into a curve. It is not heavy. It is work that needs a left hand that closes around the hammer and stays closed for an hour at a time.
Kelvin’s stopped doing that in March. The arthritis that has been thickening his knuckles for the best part of a decade got to the point where the hand surgeon at Mount Barker told him, without dressing it up, that the next big session on the stake might be the last thing the hand ever did. He finished the bowl he was on and has not shaped another.
What he has is a shelf of bowls he worked up through autumn and winter while the hand was still good: eighty-four of them, waiting for hooks, birds and finishing. That part he can still do. The hooks are bent hot with tongs, the little copper bird is riveted to the rim, and the bowl is burnished and sealed at the bench. He reckons he will be done by Christmas. After that the shed goes back to being a shed.
“Forty-nine years at Holden and seven out here,” he says. “That’s a fair innings. I’d just like the last eighty-four to be hanging somewhere a wren can get a drink on the first 40-degree day.”
A reader in Mount Barker, the afternoon hers arrived. She emailed the next morning: two wrens, a silvereye and “a willie wagtail who thinks he owns it.”
Eighty-four bird baths from the last bowls Kelvin shaped. When they’re gone, the shed closes.
A$84 A$59
What People Wrote Back
“We’ve had a concrete bath on a pedestal for twenty years and I honestly thought the small birds just didn’t come to our place. Hung this in the grevillea and there were fairy-wrens in it the same afternoon. They were here all along. They just wouldn’t go near the pedestal.”
“What got me was the water staying clean. The old one went green in two days in January. This I tip and refill with the hose on the way past and it’s never been slimy once. Copper, apparently. Who knew.”
Three Questions Tegan Answers Every Day
Won’t metal get too hot in the sun?
Not where it is meant to hang. The hook is made for a branch or a beam in shade, and copper warms far less than steel or concrete anyway. Hang it in the shade, change the water morning and evening on the hot days, and it stays cooler than any pedestal bath in the sun. A pebble in the bowl gives bees and butterflies a step out.
What about cats and possums?
That is the whole reason it hangs. The bowl swings free in the air with nothing to climb down. A cat cannot jump to it and a possum cannot reach it, and the birds can see everything under them while they drink, which is why the nervous ones actually use it.
What happens when the eighty-four are gone?
That is the end of them. Kelvin is not shaping any more bowls and they are not sold anywhere else, not Bunnings, not Amazon, not the markets. If one arrives and it is not what you expected, email within 30 days and Tegan refunds it in full. Nobody has asked yet.
Two More From the Post
“Second-floor unit in Norwood, one balcony, one potted lemon. Hooked it over the railing. I now have a honeyeater who visits at seven every morning and two silvereyes who argue. My neighbours think I’ve lost it. Best A$59 I’ve spent in years.”
“Mum is 86 and doesn’t get out to the garden much now. We hung it off the verandah beam outside her kitchen window. She rings me with the bird count every evening.”
The wrens are choosing their summer patch this month. Give them a reason to choose yours.
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