An Unwelcome Visitor

Yesterday, my fourth grader told me that she heard a strange noise coming from the chimney pipe in the front room. I brushed her off at the time. The wind was blowing another rain storm in, and so I thought she was just hearing the wind in the stove pipe.

Later that evening we all heard the visitor. Scritch, scratch, screech.

Aack – something really was in the stove pipe. Hamsters don’t make those kinds of noises.

We texted our landlords: “There’s something in the stove pipe with claws. What do you advise?”

That started a conversation about what we thought it was, how big we thought it was, etc. I ended up admitting that I cannot see through things like stove pipes, and that all we really knew was that we could hear something skittering around in the stove pipe.  We thought it could be a bird, or a raccoon. It sounded too large to be a squirrel, or other small rodent.  We also decided that the roof of our home was pitched too steeply to climb without a ladder.

Shortly after the conversation and decision to send over someone with a powerful flashlight and a ladder, the noises stopped.  We didn’t hear anything more the rest of the night, so the search party was called off.

We figured whatever it was had just figured out a way to get back up. (This is possible, if the thing in the pipe is a raccoon.)

This morning, my preschooler had been “playing” that she could see something black and white in the fireplace. She even had a flashlight, and was opening the stove’s door to “check” for the animal. I thought she was just mimicking what she had seen us do yesterday.

After lunch, I just about jumped out of my skin when I heard the noise again. I was taken completely by surprise. I was reading to my Kindergartener and Preschooler when I heard the noise, looked up and saw a face in the glass of the stove fireplace. Well, at least I thought it looked like a face, for a brief moment.  I had actually seen a wing.

Yep, we had a bird stuck in our fireplace. It looked like a bigger bird to me, the kind that eats small mammals. I told this to my fourth grader, who then proceeded to tell me I couldn’t use the hamsters as bait. We tried apple slices instead.

Just as I was trying to get the bird out with storage totes as the net, my husband came home from work. I was very relieved to give this job over to him. He set about getting the bird out of the fireplace in a very straightforward fashion. He opened the fireplace door, and the door to the garage, and let the bird fly out. We thought we had a young hawk, or maybe an owl. We also thought it could be a small crow.

 

It was covered in soot, so the bird looked all black, so we really aren’t sure what species of bird it was. Can you identify it?  We shooed it out of the house, out of the garage, and back into the wild. We were finally able to get rid of our unwelcome visitor.