Free Bird

I intended to finish my "Burning Down the House" essay tonight on blogging, honesty and oversharing, but I'm just too tired tonight to wrangle those particular brain cells. Instead here's the rest of the Bird in the House story.

You may recall that sometime Wednesday afternoon, a house sparrow somehow found its way into Casa Blocher (a.k.a. the Museum of the Weird). Unfortunately, the poor thing blundered into our storage room and stayed there overnight. This was a problem because a) the room is too full to allow access to the window to let the bird out, and b) any mess the bird made may affect clothes or collectibles, and we won't be able to do anything about it until we get some serious work done on fixing up the house.

There wasn't much we could do overnight, but in the morning when I walked into the bathroom, the house sparrow was flapping wildly between the medicine chest mirror and the closed window over the bathtub. I tried to close the door in time to trap the bird in the bathroom, but it escaped back into the storage room. I opened the bathroom window anyway, hoping it might find its way out while I was at work. That was Thursday morning.

The female house sparrow perches in my office closet - for about two seconds.

Thursday afternoon, when I came home for lunch, the sparrow was in the den, at the opposite end of the house from the storage room. When I walked in there, it - or rather she - flew around in a panic, first in the den and then into my office next to the den. I managed to get a couple of pictures of her in between flights, but overall, having her in my office was totally unhelpful for the wellbeing of the sparrow. The presence of the air conditioner in my office window meant that I couldn't open a window to let her out.

The sparrow takes momentary refuge next to my homemade vinyl wizard's hat, circa 1977. The pointed part of the hat came from a Syracuse Stage rummage sale, and I made the brim myself. The red cloth is to keep the hat's shape.

The den, though, has big sliding glass doors. I opened the curtains and then the door, allowing in a lot of obvious fresh air and sunshine to entice the bird. The sparrow failed to notice, however. She flew back and forth between my office and the den, the den and the kitchen, the kitchen and the front room.

This open doorway should have provided a big target for a smallish bird.

Finally she blundered into the laundry room. Hooray! All I had to do was keep her in there long enough to get the back door open, the one by the doggie door.

Before I got to that door, however, the bird found her own way out. I never before noticed the two inch gap at the top of the other back door, the one by the lawnmower that leads out to the pool area. But the sparrow found it. Good for her!

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I'm not at all sure Tuffy knew the bird was there. She mostly knew that I was walking from room to room with the camera, talking and not giving her dog biscuits.

The gap through which the bird escaped may also have been her entry point. Who knows?

Now I can stop worrying about that bird. Yes, I was truly worried. See, thirty years ago, when my dad had moved out, I'd moved into dorm housing and my mom was often out of state on job interviews, the house in Manlius was sometimes uninhabited for a week at a time. One night my boyfriend Bob and I stopped by, and found a dead grackle on the living room floor. It had probably flown down the chimney five feet away, and gotten its claws tangled in the shag carpeting.

I don't want any more birds to die inside my home. The death of Gray Mousie was traumatic enough, thanks.

Karen

P.S. I added a poll thingy to the awards entry below. If you want to vote for Best Quirky Actor, and don't like to leave comments, feel free to vote anonymously in the poll instead. What I can't figure is why I couldn't find a way to display the poll on the blog itself. PLEASE VOTE! - K.