Watched my neighbor go through this exact thing with a blue jay two summers ago. He tried the paper trick first, then moved to those window decals shaped like maple leaves, and the jay still rang his bell twice more that month. What finally did it was when his wife hung a set of those beaded curtains in front of the slider, the noisy wooden kind, and the birds just started bouncing off the beads instead of the glass. She hated how it looked for about a week, then got used to it, and honestly it made the deck feel like a tiki bar. The birds see the beads moving and pull up before they commit. My only worry with that setup in Boise is whether the wind out there whips the beads hard enough to drive you nuts at night. Have you checked whether your slider has one of those screens you could just close all day?

The "too short to count" rule makes more sense than people want to admit, because a full discussion slot costs everyone the same thing no matter how long the book is. If you get one slot a month, you have maybe 10 to 12 slots a year, and blowing one on a book people read in a single sitting means somebody else's 400 page pick gets pushed to next year or dropped. The 600 page book that fell flat is a bad example too, because that is a problem with the pick, not the page count. Short books also make it easy to show up having skimmed, and then the talk turns into a 20 minute chat instead of a real meeting. Most clubs that stay alive for years run on some kind of limit like this, even if nobody says it out loud.