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Waterfall begets windfall Photo by Dean Way Lesser finches vie for choice drinking positions at Dean and Arlene Way's homemade waterfall in the back yard of their east Medford home. The birds were an added bonus to the Ways' use of an 1890s pump made in Ashland. Medford couple discover their back yard is a bird sanctuary By BILL VARBLE Dean Way was having trouble sleeping after he retired from the phone company. He often used the unexpected wakeup time to brainstorm a little waterfall he wanted to put in the back yard. He could never see it just right in his mind. There's water out in back at Dean and Arlene Way's east Medford home now, but it's been overshadowed by what it brought in its wake: wild birds. "We got a bonus," says Way, 66. "I didn't realize birds had such personality." The Ways learned what lots of bird feeders will tell you: Water draws birds. These days, they sit out back and watch little finches vie for the choice drinking positions as patient mourning doves (they of the ooh-OOO-ooh-ooh call) wait at the bottom for the water trickling merrily down redwood sluice boxes. "There is nothing, including feeders, that attracts birds in summer better than an inviting pool of water, particularly one where a trickle or spray splashes invitingly into it," writes naturalist Bob Waldon. It all started with an old pump. The Ways got the thing many years ago from Arlene's grandparents' farm near Salem. "F.E. Myer and Bro.," it says in raised letters, "Ashland, O." Dean thought the 1890s-vintage thing was made in Ohio but discovered the Myer Brothers were based in Ashland, as in our Ashland. "It's come home," Arlene says. The waterfall design finally clicked into place for Dean after he visited the old mill at Butte Falls, where he saw old, handmade water flutes that stuck in his mind. He just woke up one morning last summer with the design in mind. He promptly picked up rocks from where a contractor was working with a dump truck. He got a 50-gallon tank and a 250-gallon-per-hour pump. "That's the right ratio to get that sound," he explains. He built the sluice boxes stair-step style with redwood, added some plants and low-volume sprinklers and a small garden bench. "It's got character now," he says. "It was built by a character," she says. Soon some bird-feeding neighbors told Dean "their" birds were coming to his house to drink. Next, a mourning dove nested in their yard. Soon gangs of lesser finches - cousins to the American goldfinches people mistakenly call "canaries" - were showing up at the waterfall. "They look at me and peck at each other and drink," he says. After some accidental finch drownings, he built a chicken wire safety net in the old wooden bucket into which water splashes from the pump. Dean was so distracted by the birds when trying to watch a baseball game on TV that he finally gave up and focused a camera with a 500-millimeter lens and a doubler on the birds and started photographing them. "About the time the shadows get to the pond they really start getting thick," Arlene says. They sit out back now and watch birds drink and splash as hummingbirds come to their butterfly bush and the setting sun turns Roxy Ann pink in the east. The only problem has been the raiding raccoons that ate some goldfish. An ultra-sound zapper seems to deter them without bothering the birds. "One will knock another one off, and it'll fly away and go around and come right back and knock the other one off," Dean says. "I swear they're talking to each other." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.