Wild birds in the house

My salamander story from the last blog made me remember some other strange occurrences.

We had a fireplace in our living room that only had some metal curtain things in front of the fire. This was a real fireplace that used firewood. On occasion, birds would fly down the chimney (just like Santa Claus) and come out the fireplace. Now, you can imagine what it must have been like for those birds. Then take into consideration that we have some very tall windows. And thus it became a dangerous situation for those birds, as they tried to fly out our windows. I think we would open all doors and hope they would make it out the right way, but it took them some time. Those birds would leave evidence in our house of their presence.

Around 1998 (I think), we got a gas line into the fireplace, and we had little glass windows that sat in front of the fireplace instead of just the little metal curtains. If I recall correctly, occasionally birds would fly down into this fireplace and be stuck. Apparently they couldn't go up, but they couldn't get past the glass, so we would have to open up the fireplace door and let them fly out, after attempting to take precautions to get them out soon.

I would estimate that birds flew in through our chimney about five times, but I really don't know. Such an occurrence hasn't happened for years and years, and I don't even know if it can happen, now that we have a new fireplace. As far as I know, no birds died in our house, but repeatedly flying into the windows can't have been good for them.

As annoying (and sad and scary) as it can be to have a bird flying around the house, it can be a little amusing.