“By February the silvereyes were drinking from the dog’s bowl. It was the only water left in Waikari.” — Why a seventy-one-year-old North Canterbury metalwork teacher is letting her last 96 copper bird baths go at a special price, before the nor’wester dries out another summer.

Last February the nor’wester blew for nine days straight. By the end of it, every puddle in Waikari was gone. The creek at the bottom of the hill was dry stones.

That was the week Lesley Tasker found five silvereyes sitting on the rim of her dog’s water bowl, taking turns to drink.

The week the birds came to the back step

“In winter everyone puts out fat balls,” Lesley says. “In spring they hang a nest box. Come February, when the nor’wester has been blowing for a week, nobody thinks about water. That’s when the little ones are in trouble.”

The timing could not be worse. Fantails and tūī raise their chicks right through December and January. The young birds leave the nest in the hottest, driest weeks of the year. And a bird can go days without food. It cannot go long without water.

New Zealand’s birds are already under pressure. Nearly eight in ten of our native land bird species are now threatened or at risk. In the national Garden Bird Survey, the number of kererū seen in gardens has dropped by more than a fifth in five years. Goldfinches are down by more than a third.

Most bird baths in this country are built wrong

Lesley has looked at a lot of bird baths. Most of them, she says, are made for people, not for birds.

• “The swimming pool.” Too deep. “A silvereye needs about two centimetres of water,” Lesley says. “Put it at the edge of a deep basin and it can’t reach.”
• “The green soup.” Concrete and plastic grow algae fast in summer heat. After a few days the water smells, and the birds stop coming.
• “The slide.” A smooth, steep edge with nothing to hold on to. Small feet slip, and bees that fall in can’t climb out.
• “The cat trap.” A bowl on the ground or tucked against a hedge. A cat can sit two metres away and never be seen.
• “The ornament.” Bought to look nice, then left dry. “A bird bath without water is a garden gnome,” she says.

Two thousand copper bowls, and one that went wrong

For thirty-four years Lesley taught metalwork at a college in Rangiora. Every year, every Year 10 class did the same job: take a flat copper disc and hammer it into a bowl. Around two thousand students. Around two thousand bowls.

In 1991 one of them came out too flat and too wide. Nobody wanted it. Lesley took it home, filled it with water and put it on a fence post. The next morning three silvereyes were sitting in it.

“That flat, wide shape was exactly what they liked,” she says. “The kids had made it wrong for a fruit bowl. They’d made it right for a bird.”

A small tin shed and three thousand hammer blows

Since then she has made bird baths in the small corrugated-iron shed behind her house. Hammers hang on a board. Copper discs lean against the wall. The radio on the windowsill is always on.

Each bowl takes around three thousand hammer blows. She doesn’t look up while she works. “You listen to it,” she says. “When the copper sounds right, the shape is right.”

What a bird bath actually has to do

• “The Copper Bowl.” Copper slows down algae and germs in the water. The water stays clean for longer, even in January.
• “The Shallow Edge.” The bowl curves gently down to the middle. Silvereyes and grey warblers stand at the shallow rim. Blackbirds bathe in the middle.
• “The Rolled Lip.” The rim is rolled over, not cut. Small feet can grip it, and a bee that falls in can climb out. “Put a flat stone in the middle too,” Lesley says.
• “The Cat-Height Stake.” It stands up on its own stake, out in the open. The birds can see all around while they drink. No hedge for a cat to hide behind.

Where her bird baths end up

Lesley still gets photos. A woman in Timaru counted eleven silvereyes on the rim at once. A man in Nelson saw his first bellbird in the garden in twenty years. “Nobody sends me a photo of the bird bath,” Lesley says. “They send me photos of the birds.”

“My shoulder won’t take another hammer”

Last winter Lesley lifted a full water tank she shouldn’t have lifted. Something in her right shoulder tore. The surgeon in Christchurch fixed what he could. Then he told her plainly: no more hammering.

She can still cut the discs. She can still polish. But three thousand hammer blows a bowl is exactly what the shoulder can’t do anymore.

She doesn’t complain. Her grandson Toby set up the website. Her husband Bernie drives the parcels to the post shop in Amberley. On the shelves are 96 bird baths. When they are gone, the shed door shuts.

Why she priced them the way she did

In September a garden centre in Christchurch rang. They wanted all 96 for their Christmas display. Lesley said no.

She kept the price low on purpose. “On a shelf at the garden centre it’s an ornament,” she says. “In a garden in February, it’s the only water for half a kilometre.”

What she wants is simple. Ninety-six more gardens with clean water before the hot weather comes. Anyone who gets one of these last bird baths is carrying on thirty-five summers of her work.

What gardeners say about Lesley’s bird baths

• ★★★★★

  I had a concrete bird bath for six years and saw maybe two birds in it. This one had silvereyes in it the first afternoon. Now there is a queue on the rim every evening.

  Gail M. · Timaru
• ★★★★★

  The water really does stay cleaner. I change it every morning with my cup of tea, and I scrub it maybe once a week. My old plastic one went green in three days.

  Russell P. · Hastings
• ★★★★★

  Bought it for Mum for Christmas. She rings me now to tell me which birds came. Last week it was a fantail having a bath. She was over the moon.

  Michelle T. · Rotorua

Questions people ask before ordering

More from people who have one

• ★★★★★

  Pushed it into the garden bed in two minutes. No base, nothing to assemble. The blackbirds took it over first, then the sparrows, then the silvereyes.

  Kevin B. · Ashburton
• ★★★★★

  We have two cats next door. I put the bird bath out in the middle of the lawn like Lesley says, and the birds sit there quite happily. They can see everything coming.

  Annette K. · Whangarei
• ★★★★★

  The copper is lovely in the evening sun. But the best part is watching the tūī drink from it while I have my breakfast. Worth every cent.

  Margaret O. · Napier