I need advice. Please be gentle and know that every decision I’ve made along the way to this predicament was because I wanted to help struggling urban wildlife.

I live in a two story apartment building in a fairly big city. I have a very small patio situation, which I dont really use besides for feeding birds and giving them water via a bird bath. Many birds live here year-long and visit my patio throughout the day. I see lots of migrating birds too at certain times of year. Autumn and winter especially are popular seasons, but I see plenty of baby birds during the spring too.

These past few weeks, when I open my door to restock the feeder, birds literally come greet me!

Well, squirrels come here too, and very rarely have I been able to prevent them from raiding the feeder. Often I just accept that there’s nothing to do about it, especially since there are ground feeding birds that can’t eat from my feeder. It’s gotten to the point however, that the ground feeding birds are forced to not only compete with the squirrels, but ultimately must relinquish the lion’s share to them.

But it’s worse than that—the squirrels now definitely associate me with the delicious seeds that I dispense every day. They crowd by the door and climb along the windows, looking for me. Now they’ve even located my second-story bedroom window and climb around on the window screen, loudly. It’s very loud and disturbing.

I’m distraught and I can’t even feed the birds now, because the squirrels just wait around. I feel bad for the birds, I feel bad for the squirrels.

I’ve already tried fancy squirrel-proof feeders, but the narrowness of my patio means they can jump from the neighbors’ tree and wrestle with the feeder until it dumps even just one seed on the ground, which is also a noisy and disruptive struggle. Plus it's not like I don't want the squirrels to eat.

I feel terrible, all I wanted was to help wildlife out. I'm afraid to just abruptly stop, because then what would happen to them all?

I know I've made mistakes - but what do I do now??