Wednesday morning eebs and I were having breakfast. It was a calm sunny morning and we were going to be on time for work. Then we heard a random ruckus. We looked at each other, shrugged and kept eating. It happened again. Was a woodpecker trying to find his breakfast in our chimney?? We heard tweeting in our wall. Apparently a bird was stuck in our chimney. What does one do when a bird is stuck in one's chimney? This was new territory for me.
We put an old sheet down over the ashes in the fireplace then got the Heman sheet and tucked it in the fireplace and held it over the front. What bird wouldn't want to be rescued in the arms of Heman? We opened the flue and.... nothing. Just a sprinkling of soot. We heard the bird flapping and tweeting a few feet up and I thought maybe there was a grill there blocking it from falling. eebs thought maybe the hole of the flue was too small for it to fall through. I thought maybe the chimney was too narrow for it to fly up and that was why it was stuck halfway down. We didn't know what to do.
We turned on the computer and looked up animal rescue places around here and called the most promising one to ask for guidance. About this time, the chimney got ominously silent. The animal rescue guy asked if our chimney was capped. Who knows! I can't see the roof to my place! He asked if we shined a flashlight and looked up the chimney. Gee, hadn't thought of that, but we have no flashlight. Basically he summed it up by saying we could call our landlord or a chimney sweep (sometimes they will do wildlife removal), but there wasn't much his organization could do to help us. If we were too squeamish to reach in and grab the bird, they could send someone to do that for us.
Realizing we have no flashlight, we got a lamp and tried shining it up the chimney. It looked pretty clean and empty. And it turns out our chimney is capped. So our best guess is that the chimney wasn't too narrow for the bird to fly up and the beating we heard was the bird hitting the chimney cap but not figuring out to fly a little sideways and get out. And then it must have gone sideways in its panic and fallen out by sheer luck. Lucky for us, too. I had visions of a dead bird being stuck in our chimney and us smoking it to a sooty crisp with any future fires. Or having to nurse a little bird back to health because he was all panicked and stressed out from being in a chimney too long. Fortunately he got out though and tweeted out his stress to anyone in the world listening.
That was our Wednesday adventure. We were not on time for work.
1 comment:
Such admirable concern for the that birds welfare. Seriously.
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