Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

Attracting birds to your backyard is as simple as adding water…to a birdbath.

05— They’ll use that birdbath year-round. They’ll use it for drinking. They’ll use it for bathing…

Cliff Shackelford is a non-game ornithologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife. Decorative ceramic birdbaths often make better art than they do watering stations for birds.

09—The simpler the better. What I found, is the basin needs to be a little rough and not smooth. It needs to have a gradual dip to it.

Concrete pedestal birdbaths can be too deep for birds, and the porous material encourages algae and sediment buildup. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology says a good birdbath mimics shallow puddles, which are nature’s birdbaths. They suggest digging a shallow hole in the ground, lining it with plastic to make it watertight, and then putting sand in the bottom so birds can get their footing. Place a few plants around the perimeter, and you have a bird spa.

The only thing that could make it better is dripping water, says Cliff Shackelford.

12— Bird drips are really good; you can hang a milk jug up with a little pin prick hole in it. Just the sound of the water dripping could be attractive to birds. And also, they may like to get under that drip a little bit.

Find more birding information on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015 at 12:00 am and is filed under Birding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.