human-bird friendships

Once some birds notice your bird bath or water bowl, they'll spread the word very quickly and other birds will also try it out. 

There are a few things you must do to keep them coming:

1. Clean the bird bath and refresh the water daily: if you can, if not, then every second day.  A bristle brush is ideal to scrub the sides, followed by a rinse with fresh water.  This is a necessary step, or else water will get stagnant, even mouldy, certainly filthy and eventually become a source of disease.

if you have placed a big stone or rock in the middle of the bowl to stop it from tipping over, you may find that this will get mouldy over time.  When that happens its best to have a couple of stones, and use them alternately, that gives each one the chance to dry out before being used again.

If the bird bath is not cleaned and refreshed regularly, the birds will stop coming as this will no longer be a viable drinking spot for them.

2. Observe Your Visitors:  Make a note of which birds have started to visit your place.  Are they able to drink comfortably? 

The first step in making friends with the wild birds - is to create the opportunities to see them often.

Not all of us have garden or are lucky enough to live at the edge of a rainforest or a green belt.  Fortunately, birds are all around us whether we live in the city in a multi-storied apartment block or we live in the suburbs or countryside surrounded by nice lawns, shrubs and trees. The first thing you need to is to give the birds an incentive to come to your home, close enough to enable you to start forming a friendship.

Wild Birds love communicating with each other, with birds from other species, with other animals and they absolutely love talking to humans.  They may fly off in a flurry at the very start because they may not be sure of your intentions, or they may befeeling particularly shy or self-conscious.  But once they realise that you are sincerely interested in them, they begin to respond and take an interest in you.

Once one bird gets the idea and starts

Thornbills (or yellow bottoms as they are fondly called) are barely 5 cms (2 inches) long. The picture on the left was taken with a 300mm zoom. Then the image was digitally enlarged.  You get the idea of how small these birds really are against objects in their natural environment.

They first attracted our attention when we were trying to photograph some peewees in a paddock. What appeared to be leaves rolling

Our birds have rescued us from snakes on many occasions.  Magpies, butcherbirds (both the pied and grey species), noisy-miners and others have all played a part at one time or another in keeping us safe.  Most of the time we do not have a camera in hand to capture a photographic record of the event.  But on a few occasions we have been lucky enough to be able to do so.