Winter Water for Birds

How do birds get water when it's freezing outside? My birdbath is a miniature ice skating rink. I just don't see how the birds survive. — Minnie P., Minox ND

Birds need water every day, even when all the water is frozen. They can get it from snow or from food.

The bodies of insects contain some water, and many birds get water by eating them. Wild fruits that hang on the trees into the winter also provide some water.

Birds eat snow, too. The red-bellied woodpecker in the photo above is eating snow collected in a broken tree branch.

But it takes a lot of energy to melt snow inside a bird's body. That's energy the bird would otherwise use to stay warm through a freezing night.

Open water is precious to birds in freezing weather. They will seek it out if it's available. And that's an opportunity for backyard bird watchers.

Find a way to offer open water, and you'll have plenty of birds visiting your yard all winter long.

The blue jays in the picture above visited my birdbath after the first freeze of the fall. A skin of ice formed on the water. Only a small spot at the deep end was open. The blue jays went straight for it.

Then I got a bath with a built-in heating element. (It looks sort of like a heating pad, cemented to the under side of the bath.) This bath is the same as the one above, except that it has the heating element and a copper dripper tube. We use the dripper in summer. In winter it doesn't drip, but many birds like to land on it before coming down to the water. The bath was the focal point of our yard throughout the winter.

Even when snow buried the yard, the bath stayed unfrozen. Mourning doves, finches, woodpeckers, sparrows, and of course blue jays came all the time.

Probably the most convenient heated birdbath is the kind that already has a heater built in. But you can keep water open in any birdbath by adding a de-icer, an element that sits in the bottom of bath. The best ones are thermostatically controlled, so the heat is on only when necessary to keep the water from freezing.

— Copyright 2006 Diane Porter

— Pictures copyright 1999-2006 Michael and Diane Porter