There are forty summers of pencil marks on the door frame of Kelvin Treloar’s shed, one for every hottest day. The top one says 26 Jan 2026, 46 in the shade, and underneath it, in smaller writing: “no wrens”. — The 74-year-old Adelaide Hills panel beater has spent seven summers making a bird bath that small birds will actually use. He is finishing the last of them now, and selling them for less than they cost him.

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, the way other people mark their kids’ heights. 1994: 43. 2009: 45. 24 Jan 2019: 46 and a half. The marks climb. The newest one is from Australia Day this year, when Adelaide set a record at 44.7 and the shed, which faces west and has a tin roof, 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 single morning for four years. On the hottest day of the summer they were not there, and they were not there the next morning either. 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

Seven in the morning, the only cool hour. A New Holland honeyeater and a silvereye, two of the species the Hills are losing fastest.

Everyone remembers the 44.7. Fewer people noticed the number that came after it. That night the temperature in 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 a couple of ten-cent coins. It cannot sweat. All day it pants and holds its wings out 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. The bird wakes up on day two already behind, and on day four or five of a heatwave it simply does not wake up.

The Bureau called January’s heat the most widespread and intense in South Australia since 2019. Ceduna hit 49.5, a record. The Mount Lofty Ranges sat under a total fire ban for days. 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, with the superb fairy-wren and the New Holland honeyeater both on the list of species going backwards.

Then in April this year came the study that made the national news. Researchers at the ANU, who have followed one population of superb fairy-wrens in Canberra every month since 1988, reported that it could be gone within thirty years. The pattern in the data was not habitat loss. It was hot summers: after each one, fewer adults survived to the next spring. They called the fairy-wren a canary in the coal mine for every small bird in the country. Back in January, in the middle of the heatwave, BirdLife Australia had already put out the one-line plea it now repeats every hot spell: put a shallow dish of water out in the shade, out of reach of cats. This simple action can save a bird’s life.

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 be around in January. 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 Treloar, 74, in the shed behind his place in Lobethal. Forty-nine years beating panels at Holden; seven summers making bird baths. The two in his hands are from the final batch.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 in January.”

“I’m Not Selling Copper. I’m Selling a Forty-Degree Day.”

Kelvin and his grandson Jack, 4, under the gum by the tank stand. Jack is in charge of the five o’clock refill. He has not missed one.

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.”

What People Wrote Back

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.”

Three Questions Tegan Answers Every Day

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