You can go to a park or out in the woods or woodlot with some sunflowers. Hang a can on a twig or put sunflower seeds on a picnic table that doesn't get used often. Next day, go to where the seeds are and just stand quietly with your hand out (with seeds in it) where the 'feeder' was the day before. It usually only takes a few minutes for chickadees to land on your hand. The pictures you see were taken after only a few minutes of waiting for the birds to get used to me. I removed my feeder, then stood, leaning against the tree where the feeder was. I put some seeds on my hat and just stood still. After a few minutes of birds taking seeds off my hat, I shook those seeds off and held them in my hand. It only took a few minutes and I had several eating from my hand. A neat picture is: pinch a sunflower seed between your lips and hold your hand flat, like a platform, under your chin. The chickadees will land on your hand and take a sunflower seed from your lips. Looks like the birds are kissing you - so a neat picture. I also enjoy pinching a seed tightly so the bird has to peal away the hull and eat it while on your hand. It's interesting to see how they do it and how proficient they are at it. Al

I feed em and bathe em. Took a while to find the right place for the feeder. I hang mine off a tall skinny metal pole and there is a horizontal 5 foot piece of skinny bamboo that is stuck on there for a landing perch. You want a place where they can sneak up on the feeder through branches and cover and where such branches and cover are so thick down low that it makes it nearly impossible for a cat to get at them. And you want a place where any fallen seed cannot germinate. Seeds fall onto shaded ground with lots of overhead competition. A bath you can put anywhere. My favorite is just a 12 inch plant saucer that sits on a bench and is visible from the TV room. You can watch them fly down and jump in and out, especially when it gets hot outside. Pool party!

If there is a balcony below you, you will run into problems with cast off seeds, poop, but if it's open below, you can probably get away with just feeding if you a few. Why not just try it and see if you can manage to keep it under control. I wouldn't encourage nesting.

It took the birds 6 months to find my nyjer feeder when I first put it out. When they finally found it, the goldfinches attracted other birds to my other feeders. I had them hanging off the bottom of our seldom-used 2nd story deck, so they were semi-shaded. I also made a "bird bath" out of a boot tray - it was less than an inch deep and a good 2' long and about 16" wide. It was black, so I wouldn't put something like that out in the sun. I changed the water and scrubbed it out every day, and "sterilized" with vinegar (and rinsed and scrubbed again) about once a week. I sterilized the scrub brush in a bucket of bleach water overnight before sterilizing the "bird bath" the next day, so that the brush was fresh and clean for the post-vinegar-bath scrubbing. So - the night before, on cleaning day - I dump and scrub the bird bath; then fill it with vinegar; put the brush in the bleach water. Next morning, dump the bleach water and the vinegar thoroughly rinse the brush and let it dry in the sun (helps drive off any remaining chlorine). scrub out with the sterilized brush Thoroughly rinse the bird bath; start over again This winter I hope to make a large ceramic platter (I'm an amateur potter) with a glazed interior that will tolerate being sterilized with a bleach solution. I plan to bury that to it's lip in one of my raised beds and keep it filled with water via a dripper line. I'll make something similar for use as a butterfly puddler. Having a water feature can only help in attracting birds, but patience will help as well. One thing I would suggest is to get rid of the "songbird mix" and feed only black oil sunflower seed, safflower seed, and nyjer (in a tube feeder), in the way of seed. Every "songbird mix" I've ever seen has a high proportion of "junk" seed in it which attracts house sparrows, to your peril. At my former residence, they weren't much of a problem, but here they have mobbed my feeder to the point where I had to stop using it. They even scared my hummers away, as well as the mountain jays, mountain blue birds, and quail. Sadly, their seed scattering ways seemed to actually ATTRACT pigeons, LOL! I'm going to try to put the sunflower seed (which has to be hulled due to the former owner of this place having put in Astroturf - impossible to clean sunflower hulls out of) in a mesh feeder that only clingers can use and see if that helps. Otherwise, it's hummingbird feeders and the quail block, and the nyjer mesh feeders I have, and that's all I'll be able to put out here. Maybe an upside-down tube feeder. But nothing for the house sparrows!