So last winter we decided to buy a feed station for birds. We have quite a big yard for our country but it's mostly grass since we both hate working on it. We do have a little patch of "wild" land where birds have some more cover.
We bought a feeder for small birds with a little water basin below.

It looks something like this:

                                        
                     -.                 
                   :+-+=                
                 :+-   :*.              
               :+-       +=             
              :--:       :+*            
                =-       -=             
                =-       -=             
              -=====%+=====-            
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
        .:::::::::::#-:::::.      .     
     #+-:.................:------=@:    
      ==============#=============:     
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *.                  
                    *:                  
                    *-                  
                    *:                  
                    #.                  
                    %.                  
   =+++=============@++****************=
  .:******==--::::::::::::::::::::::::. 


Anyway, not much later we started noticing a LOT more birds like Great Tits, Blue Titls, Robins, ...
Since we obviously had a couple of both Blue Tits and Great Tits we decided to also buy a nesting box.
As the nesting season was about to start we feared we were a bit late to the party and would have to wait until next year, but only 2 days after we installed the nesting box we saw the blue tits exploring it.
We went on holidays not really expecting much more action since we were still thinking we were late, but when we got back home we were pretty sure we had a nest! Evenmore so, a few weeks later we heard the high pitching sound of little chicks and saw the parents flying from and to our feeding station a LOT.

Sadly, we missed the chicks leaving the nest as we were again on holiday but we are still thrilled that we could host at least one nest this year. 
We already have plans for getting more nest boxes and maybe making a Nestbox camera with a raspberry pi zero as a DIY project.

We really did not think that we could have this much life in our "green desert" backyard, so we will be trying to do more without it costing us more maintenance time.