Henry Bell Essential Water Drinker Feeder

Henry Bell Essential Water Drinker

Birds need water as much as they need food, and rather more urgently. Henry Bell make the point about summer in particular: through a dry spell, puddles and ditches vanish, and a hanging drinker on a feeding station is often the only reliable water in a garden. It matters in hard frost too, when everything open has frozen over.

This is the drinker from the Essential range, built to hang from the same feeding station arm, hook or branch as the seed and peanut feeders, so water sits alongside food rather than in a birdbath at the other end of the garden. Birds use it for drinking and, given the chance, for bathing — plumage in good order is what keeps them warm.

Performance & Benefits

• Puts drinking water at the feeding station, where birds already are.
• Hangs from a station arm, a hook or a tree branch, so it needs no ground space at all.
• Useful year-round: through summer drought and through winter freeze, when open water disappears.
• Small enough to tip out and refill daily, which is how a drinker should be run.
• Part of the Essential range, so it matches the grey Essential seed, peanut and fat ball feeders.

Suitable For

• Any garden bird that visits a feeder — tits, finches, sparrows, robins and dunnocks all drink.
• Balconies, yards and small gardens with no room for a birdbath.
• Feeding stations that already carry seed and suet but no water.
• Hot, dry summers and hard winters alike.
• Not a substitute for a bathing pool — a shallow ground birdbath suits birds that want to bathe properly.

How to Use

• Hang it from a feeding station arm, a hook or a branch, at a similar height to the feeders.
• Fill with clean tap water. Nothing needs to be added to it.
• Empty, rinse and refill daily. Water that sits for days at a busy feeding station is how disease passes between birds.
• Scrub it out weekly with a bird-safe hygiene product, separately from household washing-up.
• In freezing weather, break or tip out the ice and refill with fresh water each morning.

Specification

• Hanging water drinker from the Henry Bell Essential range. Henry Bell product code H040015.
• Henry Bell publish no capacity, height or material for this drinker, so none is stated here.
• Henry Bell give 20cm as the height of the Essential range tube feeders; they do not apply that figure to the drinker.
• The Essential range is finished in grey throughout.
• Descriptions elsewhere claiming this drinker collects rainwater to top itself up are not Henry Bell's; they make no such claim, and it is not repeated here.

Care & Caution

• Never add salt, glycerine or antifreeze to stop the water freezing. All of them harm birds — salt poisons them and the others strip the waterproofing from feathers.
• Standing water at a feeding station spreads trichomonosis and salmonella between birds. Daily emptying and weekly scrubbing are the whole defence.
• If you see a bird that is fluffed up, lethargic and struggling to swallow, take the drinker and the feeders down for two to three weeks and clean everything.
• Do not use household disinfectants or bleach residues; rinse thoroughly after any cleaning product.