The Last Bird Baths
“Every summer there are fewer birds — and every summer gets hotter.” Why a 74-year-old sheet-metal worker from central Victoria is letting go of his last handmade bird baths before he closes the shed for good.
Ray Kellett is not an ornithologist. Not a biologist. Not a conservationist with letters after his name. He is a tradesman. For more than forty years the 74-year-old has been shaping things out of metal for the birds around his place at Axedale, east of Bendigo. Now he is finishing up — and letting go of the last bird baths he will ever make. Just in time before the summer hits.
Axedale, Victoria, September. The shed is corrugated iron and smells of flux. Sheets of copper lean against the back wall in the order he will use them. Out the roller door, past the tank stand, the ground already has that pale look it gets before Christmas.
Ray has worked in this shed since 1983. Gutters, downpipes, flashings, rainwater tanks — Bendigo and every goldfields town within an hour of it. The copper was never decorative. It was just the material he had.
What changed was what he could hear from the doorway.
Fewer birds in Australian gardens every year — and the part that keeps Ray awake
The numbers are not in dispute. Australia’s threatened and near-threatened bird populations fell by an average of 60 per cent between 1985 and 2020. More than 200 Australian bird species and subspecies are now listed as threatened with extinction — in the mid-1990s that figure was 134.
Habitat gets cleared. Paddocks get subdivided. Old hollow-bearing gums come down because a branch might drop on a shed.
Ray has watched it happen from a roller door for four decades. And it eats at him.
“Twenty years ago this place was noisy. Wrens in the woodpile, wattlebirds going off in the grevillea, rosellas in the pear tree. Some mornings now I walk out and there is nothing. Dead quiet. That frightens me more than anything.”
Then there is the other problem, the one almost nobody talks about. The summers keep getting hotter. Heatwaves, dry spells, weeks without a drop. The water birds used to rely on — creek pools, soaks, dam edges, a wet patch under a leaking tap — is simply not there any more.
Ray watched it go during the Millennium Drought. Lake Eppalock, the storage he can see from his own gate, dropped to around ten per cent by the start of 2009. The Campaspe ran dry in stretches. And in January this year the water authority reported groundwater around Bendigo back at millennium-drought levels.
“People assume the hard season for birds is winter. In this country it is the opposite. What comes through our door in January is heat stress and dehydration, and a great deal of it is preventable. A shallow dish of clean water in a suburban garden is not a gesture. On a forty-two degree day it is the difference.”
Dr Marion Petrie, Ph.D. Avian Ecologist · Goldfields Wildlife Rescue, Bendigo, VIC“In winter people put seed out. In spring they hang a nest box,” Ray says. “Come January, when it is forty-two degrees and every puddle in the shire has gone, nobody thinks about water. And that is the one that kills them.”
On the worst days he has counted fourteen different species at his own bath inside an hour. Red wattlebirds, eastern rosellas, a pair of magpies, fairy-wrens working the edge, silvereyes, a crested pigeon standing in the middle of it.
“They come because there is nothing else left out there,” he says. “Not because they fancy it.”
Ray built his first bath out of offcuts in 1984. He has been improving the same design ever since — and the last of them are still available.
See Ray’s Bird Bath →“Most bird baths sold in this country are built wrong”
Ray does not soften it. “People buy a pretty bowl, stick it in the garden and think they have done something decent. Half of them were never designed with a bird in mind at all. Some of them cause real harm.”
What forty years of watching has taught him:
- Surfaces that are too smooth — glazed ceramic, plastic, polished stone. “A bird cannot get a grip on it. The feet slide. Either they will not use it at all, or they go in and cannot get back out.”
- Too deep, no graduated edge — “A fledgling wren needs two centimetres of water, not eight. If the bowl is the same depth right across, the small ones go in and they do not come out. I have seen it.”
- No way out for insects — “Blue-banded bees drink. Hoverflies drink. Butterflies drink. They land on a slick rim, they slip in, and that is the end of it. I have tipped out baths with two dozen dead bees floating in them.”
- Cheap material — “Plastic sits in a Victorian summer and cooks the water. Thin pressed steel rusts through in a season. Cheap ceramic cracks the first hard frost we get out here.”
- Standing water turns into a problem — “Leave it and you get algae, then mosquito larvae. And most of the ones you buy are shaped so you cannot get a brush into the corners to scrub them out.”
“People mean well,” he says. “But meaning well and doing the job are two different things.”
What a bird bath actually has to do
Ray has spent decades on this. Different metals, different depths, different rim profiles, and a chair by the window.
“You watch the birds. They will tell you exactly what works and what does not. You just have to be patient enough to sit there.”
- The copper skin — copper naturally holds back algae and bacteria in standing water, so the water stays cleaner for longer and there is less scrubbing for you. The slightly worked surface also gives a bird something to grip, which glazed ceramic never will.
- The creek-bank gradient — the bowl curves. Barely a centimetre of water where it meets the lip, deeper through the middle, exactly like the edge of a waterhole. Silvereyes and fairy-wrens stand in the shallows. Wattlebirds and magpies wade into the centre. Every species finds its own depth, and nothing has to go out of its depth to drink.
- The rolled lip — the edge is rolled over rather than cut off square. A landing bird gets solid footing, and an insect that goes in has a shallow slope and a raised edge to climb back out over. “Drop a flat stone in the middle as well,” Ray says. “Costs you nothing and the bees will use it all day.”
- The ground stake — push it into the lawn or a garden bed and it stands firm straight away. The height matters: cats in this country kill birds in the order of a million a day, and an elevated bath with a clear line of sight is far harder to stalk.
- Straightforward to clean — smooth inside, no corners, nowhere for algae to sit. A rinse under the tap once a week is the whole job.
“I cannot build any more. But I can still do this.”
Ray is finishing up. At 74 the arthritis has got into his knuckles, and the work that made the bath what it is — raising the bowl, turning the rim, getting the gradient right — is exactly the work that needs steady hands and fine measurement.
There is nobody to hand the shed on to. His son is an electrician in Geelong and has never wanted it.
But the birds do not let him off the hook. “I see it in my own garden. Fewer every year. And the summers keep getting worse.”
On the shelf along the back wall are the last bird baths he will ever make. When they are gone, that is the end of it. Properly the end of it.
His granddaughter Chloe (24) has taken on selling them online from Bendigo. And Ray is letting them go well under what the work is worth.
“It is not about the money any more. It is about getting a decent bath into as many gardens as I can before the next January. Every single one makes a difference. Forty years of watching taught me that.”
What people are saying about it
🌿“I had a glazed dish out there for two years and not one bird ever touched it. Put Ray’s copper one in the front bed and within a week I had wattlebirds, wrens and a rosella all having a go at it. Chalk and cheese.”
🌿“Through that run of forty-plus days in January this was the only water on the whole street. We counted twelve birds around it at once. My neighbour saw it over the fence and ordered one that afternoon.”
🌿“Bought it for Mum’s birthday. She sits at the kitchen window with her tea every morning now watching them bathe. She told me it is the best present she has had in years, and I believe her.”
Still time before summer
Nesting season is under way right now. Over the next few weeks the fledglings come out, and by December they will be dealing with their first real heat. That is exactly when water in a garden counts — because summers across the country keep getting hotter and drier.
Put a bath out now and the birds have time to find it. Put one out in the middle of a February heatwave and they may not.
Ray’s tip: “Partial shade, close to a shrub so they can duck for cover if a hawk comes through. Change the water every day. Give it a rinse once a week. That is the whole of it.”
It is a small thing to do. For the birds in one garden, it is not a small thing at all.
Ray’s last bird baths are available only through the online shop Chloe runs for him. There are similar-looking bowls on the marketplaces. They have nothing to do with forty years of standing at a window watching what birds actually do.
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Put the bath in your garden and watch what happens. If you are not convinced — by the quality, the material, the workmanship — send it back for a full refund. No questions, no argument.
Ray’s Summer-Survival Copper Bird Bath
Copper-coated bowl · Graduated depth · 24 cm across · Ground stake included · Ships from Victoria
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