My backyard birdbath is a busy place these hot days, with many birds dropping by for a drink.
My most frequent visitors are cardinals, titmice, Carolina wrens and blue jays, but two black vultures also like to stand in the bath to cool off.
Birds like to drink a lot of water in hot weather. For example, at a comfortable 68 degrees, house finches, if given access to unlimited water, will drink an average of 22 percent of their body weight each day. (For a one-hundred-pound person, that would equate to about three gallons of water.) At 102 degrees, that amount doubled to nearly half their body weight.
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