The Bird Whisperer

I won't capture this in it's hilarious entirety, so I'm not even going to try, but yesterday Tim came running up in my office with a stunned, worried look on his face saying something to the degree of, "I have a special project for you, no, really you're going to like it..." To which my mind quickly wandered to filling out a form with carbon triplicate (hard to come by these days) or picking off the clear plastic covers on shiny parts of new electronics or something equally as AWESOME as those things, only to hear him follow it up with, "There's a bird in the house."

"Like a real life effing bird?" I questioned as he shook his head yes. People, I like a lot of stupid, mundane things, but bird wrangling has never been high on the list. However, I did realize that out of the two of us in the house at the time, I was definitely the best person for the job. I only got halfway down the stairs before hearing the unmistakable flapping/chirp/splat sounds of a bird flinging itself against the ceiling. I retreated, a bird in your house is scarier than I thought. Even a teeny tiny little sparrow has great freak out power when it's flapping around your dining room.

In the end, though, I was definitely satisfied with the outcome of project "get the bird out of the house without killing it or injuring myself". I used a towel, my best bird "chirp chirp chirp, cheepy, cheep" impression and got him while he was (very heartbreakingly) throwing himself at the window in a desperate effort to get away from the crazy lady with a towel shouting bird-people sounds at him. Luckily, he slowed down for a bit and I was able to gently surround him with the towel and very softly carry him to the front door where as he was flying away he looked over his shoulder and let out the sweetest, "peep peep" in a grandiose thank you moment. Pwahaahah, that last part is such bullshit, but it would have been a great ending. He did fly off seemingly uninjured and untraumatized by the whole experience.

The best part of this story is we can't figure out how the hell the bird got in the house nor how long it had been in there for. Is it possible this bird's been living it up in the house for hours or days? We do leave our back door open occasionally for the boys but at the time Tim saw the bird hop down the hallway and look at him, the door was closed and had been closed for all intensive purposes since last night.

Now for the weirdest part (and no not that picture), this whole bird episode occurred during our work day while the kids were at school and at no point last night did birds in the house ever come up when the kids were home. However, as I was putting Bridget to bed last night part of our routine is to go potty before night night and she usually walks in there by herself no problem. Well, last night she kept trying to get me to go with her. Upon pressing her on the issue, I swear on my favorite Jimmy Buffett t-shirt, she looked at me and said, "No, mommy, I don't want to go by myself, I think the birdie is going to get me." When I pressed her further, she added, "The little birdie, he will jump up on me and get me."

Okay, I think we need to start keeping our doors closed a little more since apparently we are hosting a bird hotel over here and we didn't even know it...either that or we need to enroll Bridget in psychic school...