Lyall Bird Bath NZ
“A waxeye fledgling can’t fly to the river. Come the first nor’wester, it goes thirsty.” — Why a 74-year-old Hawke’s Bay roofer is selling the last copper bird baths at a special price.
There are three nests in Lyall Ruddock’s back garden this week, and he can tell you what is in each of them. Three waxeye chicks in the feijoa hedge. A pair of fantails, pīwakawaka, in the lemon tree by the washing line, chattering at anyone who goes near the pegs. A blackbird family under the woodshed with one fledgling that still can’t get off the ground. It is the busiest fortnight of the year in a New Zealand garden, and the most dangerous one.
“People think the killer is the drought in February,” he says. “It isn’t. By February the ones that were going to make it have made it. The ones that don’t make it die in November, the week they leave the nest, on the first nor’wester that pushes the glass past twenty-eight.”
Lyall knows the date. On 12 November last year, the first proper nor’wester of the season, his grandson Nikau found a waxeye fledgling under the feijoas. No cat, no wound. Just dry. The Waipawa River at the bottom of town had been a braid of shingle and warm puddles since October. The fledgling could fly perhaps ten metres. The nearest water it could reach was four hundred.
The Bath the Small Birds Won’t Go Near
A chick in the nest is fed and watered by its parents. A fledgling is on its own. A waxeye leaves the nest about ten days after it hatches, barely able to fly, unable to keep its own temperature steady, and it has never found water by itself. A grown tauhou weighs about thirteen grams, less than four ten-cent coins. A fledgling weighs less. On a hot, dry nor’west afternoon it pants, loses water with every breath, and needs to replace it before dark. If the only water within reach is a river that has turned to shingle, or a concrete bath in the middle of the lawn where the neighbour’s cat sits, it doesn’t.
Left: shallow water through the warm months, changed every morning. Right: in July, half an orange and a slice of apple, and the waxeyes come for that instead.
Most gardens already have a bird bath. It is concrete, on a pedestal, in the middle of the lawn, and the small birds will not go near it. From a fledgling’s point of view it is deep enough to drown in, too hot to stand in by eleven, and sitting in the one place in the garden where a cat can watch it from three sides. Nearly half of New Zealand households own a cat, one of the highest rates in the world, and a University of Otago study in Dunedin found that fantails only hung on in town because birds from the bush kept replacing the ones the cats took. The advice from bird groups for exactly this moment is short: shallow water, changed daily, in the shade, somewhere a cat can’t sit beside it. Almost nothing you can buy does all four.
Nobody needs to feed a garden in spring. What every nest in it needs, from the day the chicks leave, is a drink they can reach without being eaten.
What Comes After the Chicks
The fledglings that find water in November are the birds that are still in your garden in February, when the real dry comes. Two springs ago, Whakatu, forty minutes up State Highway 2 from Lyall’s place, recorded a quarter of its normal spring rain, the lowest since records began, and by the end of November NIWA had coastal Hawke’s Bay in drought. Lyall counted nineteen birds through one bowl between five and six on the hottest evening of that summer. Every one of them had learned where it was in spring.
And the numbers were already going the wrong way. When Manaaki Whenua looked back over the first ten years of the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey, the waxeye, the most common native bird in our gardens, had fallen by 44 per cent nationally. A bird that common doesn’t vanish all at once. It vanishes a fledgling at a time.
It Started With Lois’s Umbrella
Lyall was a roofing plumber. He started as a sixteen-year-old apprentice in Napier in 1968 and spent the next forty-eight years on roofs from Wairoa to Dannevirke: corrugated iron on farmhouses, lead and copper flashings on the old villas, and more copper spouting on the Art Deco buildings in town than he can remember. His wife Lois has kept the garden for forty-four years. The roofs were his; the birds are hers.
The bird bath was never designed. One October a nor’wester caught Lois’s old green umbrella, which she had left leaning by the back door, turned it inside out and dropped it on the lawn. Neither of them got round to picking it up. The sprinkler filled it. Two days later a family of waxeyes found it, the parents and three fluffy fledglings, and the two of them stood at the kitchen window and watched them bathe in it like kids in a paddling pool. Then they watched the neighbour’s cat find it too.
“That was the lesson,” he says. “Shallow, they loved. A bit of metal, they didn’t care. On the ground, the cat loved. So it had to hang. And it had to be in the shade, in a metal that doesn’t cook by ten in the morning. Copper. I’d spent forty-eight years bending the stuff. I had offcuts of it in the shed.”
He hammered the first one that week. It still hangs in the kōwhai by the back door, gone the colour of an old penny.
What a Roofing Plumber Does Differently
A man who spent forty-eight years making copper carry water exactly where it was meant to go 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 is there because of something Lyall watched go wrong in his own garden.
Each bowl is worked up from flat sheet on a stake, thousands of light hammer blows, the way he used to shape a spouting end by hand. The hook is bent hot.
Four things he got right because the umbrella got them wrong:
- Shallow, with a sloping floor. Two centimetres at the rim, five in the middle, like the edge of a stream. A fledgling drinks from the edge without going in, a waxeye bathes in the centre, a blackbird stands in it. Nothing drowns.
- Copper over iron, hammered. The iron gives it weight so it hangs still in a nor’wester. The copper stays cooler than steel, is naturally hostile to the algae that turn a concrete bath green in three days, and the hammered surface gives wet feet a grip.
- Hung in the shade from a hand-curled hook. The rod ends in a tight spiral that loops over a branch, a pergola beam or a bracket on the verandah. There is nowhere beside it for a cat to sit, and a nervous young bird can see everything underneath it, which is the thing it wants most.
- Water bowl or feeder, same piece of copper. In the warm months it holds water and catches its own rain. In winter, or as a second bowl in spring, it takes a halved mandarin or a slice of apple for the waxeyes and tūī. Unhook, tip, hose, hang back. Fresh in the time it takes to say so.
The chicks are leaving the nest this month. Give them somewhere to drink before the first nor’wester.
NZ$84 NZ$59
One for Water, One for Fruit
The arrangement most of Lyall’s customers end up with: one bowl of water in the open shade, a second one tucked into the hedge with a bit of fruit for the small birds.
The second bowl was the customers’ idea, not Lyall’s. In a New Zealand garden anything out in the open gets taken over. A pair of mynas or a bossy blackbird will sit on a water bowl and see off everything smaller, and a tūī will chase the waxeyes out of a whole tree if it has decided the tree is his.
So hang two. One in the open shade with water, where the big birds can hold court. One pushed deep into a hedge or a feijoa, where a myna won’t bother, with water on the hot days and half a mandarin in the mornings while the waxeyes are feeding young. “Not bread,” Lyall says. “Bread brings the sparrows and the mynas and does the little ones no good at all. A bit of fruit, gone by lunch. Then it’s a water bowl again.” Two bowls, no fights, and a garden with twice as much in it.
Two Goes With the Hose
In spring the bowls get filled once, before the first cuppa. Lyall walks down to the kōwhai with the hose and gives each one two goes: one to tip the old water out, one to fill it. When the nor’wester blows he adds a second trip at five. In February it is three a day. He has done it every day for eight years.
“It’s not a big thing,” he says. “Thirty seconds. But the waxeyes are back every twenty minutes right now, because they’ve got chicks in the hedge that can’t fly yet. That bowl is looking after three nests I’ll never see. That’s not an ornament. That’s the only water for half a kilometre.”
“I’m Not Selling Copper. I’m Selling a Fledgling’s First Week.”
His granddaughter Kenzie, 23, set up the little online shop and did the sums before the price went live. Copper sheet, iron rod, the copper bird, a box, courier to Invercargill. She told him NZ$59 left almost nothing. He told her that was fine. “I’m not selling copper,” he said. “I’m selling a fledgling’s first week. A young waxeye finding a drink on the first hot afternoon of its life. You can’t charge a hundred and twenty for that and expect it in a hundred gardens.”
Nikau asked him, the afternoon he found the waxeye under the feijoas, whether the others would die too if they forgot the water. Lyall told him the truth, which is that some of them would, and that this is why you don’t forget. Nikau has done the five o’clock refill ever since. He is five and he uses the small watering can.
“That’s the business plan,” Lyall says. “A kid who checks the bowl before his tea. If I get eighty-four more of those going before I pack it in, that’ll do me.”
Eighty-Four Bowls, Already Shaped
Shaping copper is slow work. 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. An hour on the stake is an hour of a hand closed tight round the hammer.
These days his left hand aches after that hour, and in July he decided it had done enough. He finished the bowl he was on and hung the hammer back on its nail.
What he has is a shelf of bowls he worked up through autumn and winter: eighty-four of them, waiting for hooks, birds and finishing. 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, though Kenzie will keep sending them out until the last one is gone.
“Forty-eight years on the roofs and eight out here,” he says. “That’s a fair innings. I’d just like the last eighty-four to be hanging somewhere a young bird can find them this November.”
A reader in Havelock North, the afternoon hers arrived. She emailed the next morning: two waxeyes, a fantail and “a blackbird who thinks he owns it.”
Eighty-four bird baths from the last bowls Lyall shaped. When they’re gone, the shed closes.
NZ$84 NZ$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 hedge and there were waxeyes in it the same afternoon, two of them still with that fluffy baby look. They were here all along. They just wouldn’t go near the pedestal.”
“Bought two. Water in one, a bit of mandarin in the other like he suggests, and the tūī that used to just fly over has stayed. The water never goes green either, which the old one managed in two days.”
Three Questions Kenzie Answers Every Day
Can I put food in it, or is it water only?
Both. It is a water bowl first, and in the warm months that is what the birds need most. But it works just as well as a feeder: half a mandarin or a slice of apple in the mornings for the waxeyes and tūī, or a bit of fat over winter when the waxeyes come into town. Lyall’s rule is a little, early, gone by lunch, and never bread, which only brings the sparrows and mynas. Most customers hang two: one water, one fruit.
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 out on the lawn. A pebble in the bowl gives the bees a step out.
What happens when the eighty-four are gone?
That is the end of them. Lyall is not shaping any more bowls and they are not sold anywhere else, not Bunnings, not Mitre 10, not Trade Me. If one arrives and it is not what you expected, email within 30 days and Kenzie refunds it in full. Nobody has asked yet.
Two More From the Post
“Third-floor flat in Te Aro, one balcony, one potted lemon. Hooked it over the railing. I now have a waxeye who visits at seven every morning and two more who argue about it. My neighbours think I’ve lost it. Best NZ$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.”
This month’s fledglings are the birds in your garden next summer. Give them a drink they can reach.
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DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Which birds visit depends on your area, the season and where the bath is hung; keep the water fresh and change it daily. Images are for illustration; the final product may vary.
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