We've had some friends move in with us. They're loud and smelly.
See these vents?
The one on the left is for my dryer. The one on the right is the stove's vent. (Should I clarify that they're not in the same room?). They seem to both have a cover, but the one on the right seems propped open somehow.
LEFT VENT
RIGHT VENT
We could tell birds had moved in about two months ago. We thought we'd eventually get to it (secretly hoping they'd just move out), but then about three weeks ago we heard lots of little chirping.
Eggs had hatched.
Again we hoped that they'd just find a new home until Friday when the chirping got really, really loud. I felt like an aviary was in the middle of our house. A loud aviary with a hundred hungry chirping beaks.
To fully understand this, our microwave is above our stove so the duct work is in a cupboard above the microwave. I decided to be neighborly and bang on the metal duct work and yell something like, "keep it down in there!", but I saw this....
(Those are feathers!...IN MY CUPBOARD!!!)When I stopped hyperventilating, I texted Steven these three seperate messages:
1) The birds are IN THE HOUSE! (I wanted it to relay the same feeling as "the call is coming from inside the house"...it didn't work.)
(No response from Steven -- I gave him a full 30 seconds to respond, too!)
2) What the H am I supposed to do?!
(Still no response. It had been at least 1 min 17 sec)
3) STOP LAUGHING!
('Cause I just knew....Jerk.)
He FINALLY called (2 minutes later!) and asked me if I knew what kind of bird it was? was it the mama or the babies? were they trying to get out? Since I had only seen a bit of feathers and hadn't dared open the cupboard entirely, I took my best guess and said I thought it might be an dark gray albatross (those exist right?) or a near relation of godzilla.
When he stopped laugh/crying he told me to just wait until he got home and he'd take care of it. Here's is the rest of the story in pictures.
Steven thought the birds might get out of the box (or worse, a cat might get in). He sort of looked at me expectantly and I said, "It's not like I have a birdhouse!"
He looked at me like I was insane and calmly said, "uh, you have 5 in the living room."
Oh ya.
This is a bad picture, but if you look close you can see Mama bird bringing her little ones food still.I'm sure there have been more, but this has been the smelliest, raucous bunch of wildlife we've ever been forced to adopt.
Really smelly.
9 comments:
Mindy, I could not stop laughing. Good luck with your new pets :)
I needed a good laugh today! I forgot how funny you are :) We had birds move into our vent to our oven once, but they didn't actually MOVE IN! Enjoy being parents to a few birds :)
I would have hyperventilated too! I will say though, those birds have quite a cute little birdhouse. :)
Love the pic of the 3 kids standing on the counter watching your husband. What a memory this will be!
I love that the kids are all on the counter! What a crazy adventure!
I must say that the picture with all 3 girls on the bar standing watching their Hero Dad come to the rescue was priceless.
The birds make a nest every year in our eaves above our bedroom.
We haven't tried too hard to get rid of them but have tried replacing the screen. That does not deter them. Oh well, except for the occasional baby bird that falls out of the nest we have left them alone. I am sure I would have to be more aggressive if they were in my cupboard. Ha!
I forgot to mention, there were 5 babies. One for each of us to name:
Steven's - Carlos
Mindy's - Francis
Bradley's - Luke (from Lightning Thief)
Emmy - Tim
Olivia - Penelope (how does she know that name?)
Well, you wanted something to write about. :-) I have already shared it with three friends and DW and I only opened the blog 5 minutes ago. I laughed so hard. It would make a great clip on YouTube. Keep us informed. lv ya MIL
That's crazy that they made it to your cupboards! We just had birds in our old backyard right outside our Master window. I got some great close ups of mama feeding her babies.
http://kristendukephotography.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-turned-into-bird-watcher.html
I like the kids on the counters, too:)
So cute with the kids on the counter. Beware the mom will come back next year to make her nest there again. We delt with the same bird for two years. The pest control guy said to put a fake snake in the spot it kept comming back to. But we solved it a differn't way. (throwing water at it knocking down the nest before it could build one.) and this year we are bird free. YEA.
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