Whenever a bird falls down the stovepipe into the small wood burning stove in the kitchen, we have a protocol for getting the bird out of the house. We close off all the windows and doors except the front door which we prop open. Then we open the door to the stove, and the bird flies out and directly toward the light coming through the open front door. It works every time, until it didn’t.

By the sound it made in the stovepipe, we could tell that the bird that fell a couple of weeks ago was slightly larger than the wrens that usually fall through.  We followed the normal protocol to get the bird out, but when I opened the stove door, instead of flying in a straight line out the front door, the bird flew in circles in the dining room and then flew into the room at the far back of house.  That room was once a back porch that has been enclosed. It never dawned on me that a bird would go in that direction, so we hadn’t closed it off from the rest of the house.  It does, however, have a door to the outside back deck, so we opened that and tried to coax the bird out.

We don’t see many bluebirds here and were surprised to see that this was a beautiful bluebird. It took an hour to get it out of the house.  The back room has nine windows, and the poor bird flew from window to window but never flew out the door even though we kept the door open for an entire hour.

Finally, the bird flew out of the back room and through the house toward the front door but stopped and sat just inside the door, refusing to go out.  Our cat, sound asleep and completely deaf to the world, never noticed.  It took a while longer, but eventually the poor little bird flew out of the door and away.

Next time a bird falls down the stovepipe, we’ll close off that back room. And we obviously need to get someone to fix the cap on the stovepipe.