simont | (no subject)

Oh, and there's a bird stuck in my loft.

I heard some disturbingly loud thumping noises yesterday morning and for a moment I was convinced there was a burglar prowling round the flat in broad daylight; there wasn't, of course, and the noises turned out to be coming from the loft. A minute or two later came an unmistakable noise of wings flapping; it turned out - when I opened the hatch and shone a torch in there - some sort of smallish bird was sitting on a rafter and looking a bit nonplussed.

After failing to think of any particularly good ways to get it out of there, I rang the RSPCA who said I should just shut it back in the loft and it would eventually work out how to leave the same way it got in, and that this really was the most sensible thing to do and wasn't horribly cruel or anything. Unfortunately, they said, this might take anything up to a week; and sure enough, I could still hear it up there this morning. I suppose I should be thankful that it could still tell day from night and didn't scrabble around all night keeping me awake... I do hope it gets its act in gear soon.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

probably the best idea. If you try to tempt it down with some food or water, all you'll end up with is it flying around your house and crapping in the carpet. It's probably gone into the loft because it's warm in there, and will go out as soon as it gets hungry enough.

Of course, if it doesn't get out in a week, it'll be long dead...

Yes, that worries me too. If it dies up there and starts to rot, I won't be able to tell from the smell, so the next visitor I have will be horrified; and also I don't much fancy climbing up into the loft to retrieve the corpse...

If it's smallish, and the loft is reasonably ventilated (which if it's got in it must be) it's unlikely you'll be able to smell it - most accessible lofts seem to have at least some number of small dead wildlife-things in them...

> If it dies up there and starts to rot, I won't be able to tell from the smell

Do you too have no sense of smell? I've not had any to speak of since I was about 8, I don't know why but it just seemed to fade out around then. Occasionally I get a burst of being able to smell things clearly for a few seconds, and I have to say on the whole I'm usually glad when it fades away again :)

> Do you too have no sense of smell?

That'd be the one: none at all. In fact I think I have even less than you - you say yours appears occasionally, but I've never had one, to the extent that I don't even know what it would feel like to smell something.

> and I have to say on the whole I'm usually glad when it fades away again :)

Yes, at school I tended to think I had the best of the bargain: the number of times I heard someone sniff and say "Mmmm, that smells lovely" I could count on the fingers of one hand, but the number of times per week I heard "Faugh, who's farted?" would have taken more than one hand most weeks :-) Mind you, these days I hear more of the former and less of the latter, so I'm no longer so sure.

The only serious problem it causes me these days is that it makes me very paranoid about gas ovens, because I know I don't have most people's early warning of gas leaks...

<madness>Lots of girls and lots of boys
Lots of smells and lots of noise..</madness>

I heard a thing on the radio a while back suggesting that loss of sense of smell can sometimes be viral - apparently it can be reversible and there's a support group somewhere on the web. Damned if Google knows where it is though :(

If it hasn't found its way out by tomorrow, I would go up in the loft and find where the ventilation space is that it got in through - it's probably under the eaves (? bit of roof that overhangs). Then I would place bird food type things (bread?) near this bit of the loft, to tempt the bird to consider that area more carefully.

Don't go too near the bird, and make sure you keep the loft hatch closed behind you, or it might try to get into the house to escape you. They're kind of tense about enclosed spaces, unsurprisingly for something that usually has miles of open sky around it.

The potential downside of this plan is the bird might think your loft with added breadcrumbs is a four-star bird hotel for the coming winter... your call :)

Regards,
Denny