When will this madness end?

This has been an ongoing drama for the past two weeks...

We feed stray and feral cats in our neighbourhood. We have a small food bowl set up on the back porch where it is accessible to cats passing through. As of last count, we have 6 cats consistently eating from it, only one of which do we have any "relationship" with, the others are simply to skittish to approach. This one cat allows us to pet her, she comes and sits in our laps when we're in the gazebo, she drinks from our water ponds, she suns on our driveway... she can hang around for hours at a time. Sometimes in the middle of a rain storm I'll glance out the window and see her hunkered down on our back porch, other days (rain or shine) she'll be passed out in one of the lawn chairs we have set up in the gazebo. In short, she has become a fixture of sorts, and we are very attached to her! : )
But other critters are eating from the bowl as well, which was not a problem at first. Squirrels, birds, slugs, snails, reptiles etc. The birds have progressively (slowly, but progressively nonetheless) started causing trouble. The mourning doves and Everett birds (not sure what they're real name is, we always call them Everett birds... but that's another story for another time...) weren't so bad at first, they nibbled a little, usually taking only one piece at a time. But the finches were a huge pain in the neck... bitty birds equals bitty food, right? Their solution? To take all of the food out of the bowl, piece by piece, and fling it across the porch until they find a piece small enough. My every morning began with picking all the food off the porch and putting it back in the bowl for the cats.
And then the grackles showed up. They are absolute pigs, they come swaggering up onto the porch, cramming 5-7 pieces of food in their beaks, and fly off. Sometimes the same grackle will come back repeatedly. As you can imagine, we began going through food much quicker. Our solution was to move the food bowl into the gazebo for a few days until the grackles gave up... in the gazebo, all of the cats would be able to find it, but the birds would be less likely to go to the trouble of finding the passage through the mosquito netting (we leave a small section of the netting unzipped). Sooooo, the next morning I come out and there's a bird stuck in there. I unzipped the netting, let it out, and refilled the bowl. Less than an hour later, I pass by the window, glance out, and there is another bird in there!
After the third bird, I tried liberally sprinkling bird seed in a large mound near the gate, away from the gazebo. After the fourth bird, I put a small pile of bird seed in front of the gazebo. After the fifth bird, I placed a large boulder in front of the gazebo. After the sixth bird, I pushed the boulder closer to the gazebo, and pulled the zipper further down.
The next day, we were out of ideas, and just kept letting birds out. On the third day, we simply could not take it any longer, and one of the feral cats was unable to locate the food bowl, so we put it back on the porch. A few days ago, we began leaving an oversized plastic lid upside-down on top of the bowl, where the cats could easily push it off, but the birds were not smart enough. Unfortunately, this confused the cats too much, but fortunately this seemed to have discouraged the birds, and after we'd taken it off they'd been leaving the bowl alone... until today.
This Morning , I step outside to visit with the cat, and there are a bunch of Everett birds dive-bombing her!!! >: [ Apparently they have reverted to territorialism (yes, I know this is not a real word). I spent the greater part of the morning spraying them with a squirt-bottle. They finally quit caring, and so I put out a saucer full of birdseed. But now, apparently they don't want any stinking bird seed, they want catfood! I repeat: When will this madness end?