It took a while for us to realize that the sounds we were hearing were not coming from the ice maker in the refrigerator.  They were coming from inside the woodstove in the kitchen. Then it took a little longer to figure out it was a bird that had fallen down the stove pipe.

We have a sweet little wood-burning stove in the kitchen that we thought was only decorative when we first bought this house.

However, it is fully functional,  and because we do sometimes use it in the winter, it still has some wood ash in it.  As the poor little bird that was caught in there tried desperately to get out, wood ash sifted through the openings in the stove and made a mess in the kitchen. I could just imagine the bird being covered with wood ash and frightened nearly to death.  I had to rescue it.

How to get the bird out?  I watched several short videos online of people using pet carriers, plastic grocery bags, or plastic garbage bags placed over the open doors of wood stoves to catch birds trapped inside.  A pet carrier seemed the best idea, and the one we have fits exactly over the opening to the stove. But first, I wanted to actually see the bird for myself.  My husband suggested opening one of the woodstove burner plates and insisted that the bird would not fly out through the opening and into the house.

So I opened the front burner plate and out flew the bird, through the kitchen and into the living room.  It perched on top of one of the sofa pillows right where the cat was sleeping.

Bless his heart, our cat is 20 years old and completely deaf.  He had no clue a bird had just flown over his head and was sitting on the pillow.  Of course, I was unable to photograph any of this.  As soon as the bird flew out of the woodstove, I had run to open the front door, hoping the bird would fly on out. My poor husband, who has had a stroke, was just watching all of the proceedings.

While I was holding the door open and trying to figure out how to get the bird off the sofa pillow, it flew on out and settled on a tree limb outside.

In all the commotion I was not even able to identify the bird, but I’m sure it was a sparrow of some sort.  It looked similar to this one that I photographed some time ago on our porch railing. (A wren.  It was a wren.)

“A forest bird never wants a cage.”  (Henrik Ibsen)