Animal rescuer

Our house has a wood-fired heater with a chimney that goes straight up from the heater, takes a ninety degree turn to horizontal and heads into the wall to the outside of the house, does a funny dogleg and then shoots straight up to just above the roofline at the back of the house.

At the very top there is a little roof to stop stupid birds from falling down the chimney. Unfortunately it doesn't do its job very well.

What ensues is as follows. First we get the incredibly loud tinny scratching as the bird gets to the bottom of the long drop, but is still in the outside section of the chimney. From there I guess they can still see daylight so they're trying to claw their way up the chimney. Sometimes they squawk a lot, sometimes not.

Then the bird gives up on that brilliant plan and inches its way across the horizontal section into the house. The scratching gets even louder at this point and you can hear it right through the house. Now comes the first big test of bravery for the hapless avian twit.

It can see that its new chimney home has a bit of a drop down to something, but it can't tell what. The chimney is too narrow to fly down, so it's going to have to jump unless it wants to live in this short horizontal section forever. Sometimes it takes several hours for a bird to get up the courage to make this jump. I don't envy them.

Once they make the jump things are a lot easier. The heater has a glass door on the front, so the bird can see out and we can see the bird. This is where the human participation comes in.

First we close all the blinds so that when released the bird won't fly straight into a window. Then we make sure we close the door to the rest of the house, because once Supernerd forgot and the bird flew upstairs. Boy, was that a fun day.

Then we open the door out to the deck and we gently open the door of the heater and eventually the bird flies out of the heater, around the room and quickly establishes the way to freedom.

My good deed is done for the day, and it's only ten in the morning.