"Going to the birds", "eat like a bird", "birdbrain", "birds of a feather". How about the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "The Birds?"
This is my life now. Birds. I have had FOUR birds fly down my chimney and get stuck in my wood stove in the last couple of months. And, yes, I know we need to put wire around the top of the chimney, but we have a two story chimney! I'm not climbing up there. I fall across flower borders, so I'm not about to take my chances on a ladder to the clouds.
Yesterday, after a tiring day of shopping, I just wanted to come home and sit down and not get up until absolutely necessary. Like if I need a snack or something. So, I'm sitting there on the couch, just enjoying the complete quiet (except for the men that are using chainsaws to cut wood outside my house). Other than that, it's quiet. Well, except for the washer and dryer running....and the tv on. Okay, people, so it wasn't quiet, but I was sitting on the couch.
Anyway, I was sitting on the couch and I heard this scurrying sound coming out of my woodstove. I've heard this sound before and it involves birds. So, I go open the front and side doors, grab a very long pole, the kind you change lightbulbs with when you have a twenty foot ceiling, carefully open the stove door and......nothing. Must be losing my mind.
I sit back down on the couch in the quiet house, except for the washer, dryer, tv, and chainsaws and resume resting. Another scurrying sound,,,,open doors, grab pole, and gently open stove.
Whoosh! Out went the bird, straight for the door and into freedom! Yay! I'm such a hero.
Shut doors, back to the couch, washer...dryer....tv....chainsaws...scurrying sound. What? Really?
Open doors, grab pole, open stove....nothing. So I get braver and stick the pole in and jiggle it around a little and out pops another bird. Only this bird is freaked out. It doesn't head for the door, it flies straight into our high windows on our very high wall under our high ceilings. Well, for heaven's sake.
So, I get the long pole and nudge it a little to try and get it headed in the right direction, but it has direction sense sort of like me and heads for our balcony. I run upstairs, nudge, and it flies to our ceiling fan on our twenty foot ceiling and perches. Back downstairs, nudge....back upstairs, nudge.
This goes on for about twenty minutes, I'm dehydrated and the bird is freaking out. It finally lands on top of the bookcase upstairs, so I slowly creep back upstairs. Not because I don't want to freak the bird out, but because I'm exhausted and can't breath. So, when I get up there, it's sitting there, very still, with it's mouth hanging open . I can relate.
This time I have a sheet to throw over it, so I can grab it and take it outside myself, since it so stubbornly refuses to go on it's own. But then I stopped and just watched it and could tell it was so frightened. It wasn't even trying to get away from me at this point. I just began quietly talking to it (well, what else do you do with a direction challenged bird) and walking toward it. It flew down beside the bookcase and I covered it with the sheet. I could hear it's tiny peeps but it didn't try to get away. I scooped it up and just held it there in the sheet for a minute to let it see I wasn't going to hurt it.
I walked outside, opened up the sheet, and let it gently fly away.
It flew north. Oh, well.
