BirdingInSpain

Making a pool for birds

“Making a small drinking pool to attract birds to your garden is such an easy thing to do! Just make a hole in the ground, line it with plastic, and fill it with water.”

“Then you can enjoy watching the birds coming down to drink or bathe at your own conveniece – Just imagine: Cirl Buntings, Hawfinches, Nightingales, Rock Sparrows, Blackbirds, Chiffchaffs, Chaffinches, Robins, Dunnocks, and so much more…”

Nightingale

Rock Sparrow

Wait a minute – Cut! Cut! Before we continue with this script from “Brave New World” or whatever, there are some hard realities to take into account when you’re hands-on with a drinking pool. For example:

• Stabilize the banks – you’ve dug out all that earth, on a slope, and you’ve just realized that at the first drop of rain it will become a mudslide collapsing into your beautifully crafted pond.
• Plant plants around the edge, and try to keep them alive despite drought, frost, herbivores, trampling, etc.
• Deal with a leak without giving up. Undo your craftmanship and start all over again.
• Keep the pool topped up, in the heat of the summer when water seems to evaporate almost faster than you can pour it in, and when you go on holiday for a couple of weeks to get away from it all
• Deal with the overflow from the sheep farm at the top of the slope seeping into your pool and turning it all into a foul-smelling sludge.
• Remove leaves and debris from the cold water and between the stones you laid out to make it look nice.
• Combat the mosquitoes that see your little pool as their promised land.
• Keep out unwanted mammals – boars, rats, hunters.
• Aerate the water
• Patiently replenish the water after every visit by a wintering flock of some 2,000 starlings, which have descended on it for a bath, a drink and their social event of the week.

Are you sure you’ve got a good site?

Then and only then might you get Hawfinches, Sparrows, Chaffinches, Black Redstarts, Chiffchaffs, Robins, Blackbirds, and even Starlings. Enjoy! 

Getting started

Almost finished (again). Stones, aerator, water feeder.