Although it's not the best choice for bird feet (that would be natural branches), I use dowels as perches in the Finsterium. In order to provide various widths for the birds to stand on, I use several sizes of dowels. A few days ago, I gave them a clean new perch with a new design.

It's Evil.

This design is different from their other perches in two ways. First, because the dowel is only 1/4 inches in diameter, I had to insert it into short pieces of a thicker dowel in order to attach the fixtures to each end. Second, because it's so narrow, it gives a little when the birds land on it. These differences have made the perch Evil enough that for a day and a half or so, nobody would land on it. Instead, they'd fly toward it, see how Evil it was, turn around in mid-air and land on the other side of the Finsterium.

Entertaining as that was, I hate to make the birds uncomfortable. It surprises me how much they get spooked by new things. I try to keep new, scary things to a minimum, but I suppose that by trying to protect them I could be making them soft, in the end. On the other hand, when I replace a disgusting, poopy nest box with a clean one that is almost exactly the same, in almost exactly the same spot, and they think it's EVIL — well, what's a girl to do? Freak 'em out, I suppose.

A few days later, and the new perch has stopped being quite so Evil. Most of the birds have sat on it at least once, and many seem to be sitting on it for lengths of time willingly. That is, except for Frank, who still thinks it's Evil. EEEEEEVILLLLL. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the (now) thick part at the very end of the Evil perch shown in this photo used to be his favorite spot to sit and nap. Oh well, either he'll get used to it, or it'll get poopy, and I'll change it out with a clean, "normal" perch for awhile.