If I could prove the birds knew it was New Year's Day, I'd say their arrival was an omen, but this is almost certainly not true, at least not from the birds' point-of-view. Birds don't know or care about human holidays.

It would be great if I could say the birds came because I'd made the feeder more appealing. I worked hard at that. Last year, T., my bird guru, said I shouldn't let the seeds get wet, or blow away. "Birds don’t like wet, moldy food, Jen. You've got to be consistent. They've got to know there will be good food there every time they come." So I tried to be more diligent, without success. I felt horribly inadequate. Who knew this would be so hard? Other people had birdfeeders that birds actually came to. What made them so great?

Every morning, Gretchen would see me muttering over my coffee, regarding the birdfeeder disconsolately. "No birds, yet, huh?" and I’d grumble, "No." As if it were my fault. I decided maybe I didn’t have good bird karma, that perhaps I just wasn’t a bird person.

Then, this year I decided to stop relying on friendly advice and do some research. Turns out the library has many books and even several videos (!?) about backyard birdwatching, although none on second-floor-apartment-window birdwatching. Nonetheless better educated, I upgraded to sunflower seeds, supposedly a failsafe, one-size-fits-all choice. Then, when this didn't produce results, I reverted back to "wild bird mix," thinking variety might be more suitable for sophisticated urban birds. Perhaps they appreciated having millet and cracked corn, wheat as well as sunflower seeds. Like a restaurant, my birdfeeder would offer entrees and vegetables as well as dessert.

I constructed a bigger, more stable feeding platform with some stuff I had around: a shallow plastic plant-carrying tray from the nursery, some plexiglass, and a bungee cord. The resulting apparatus significantly expanded the virtues of the original feeder, a hanging disk only big enough to hold one bird at a time. I begged twigs from a neighbor and decorated the new addition, making it look more "natural," and providing the illusion of camouflage. After Christmas, I added sprigs of evergreen from our holiday decorations. From the street, if you don't look too closely, you could mistake it for a windowbox. I imagined birds passing by, thinking, "Wow, look at that! There's some kind of weird tree growing out of the side of that house. Let's check it out!" But they still didn't come.

more …