Yesterday, I decided I was going to plug in the saw and install our new pet door. Why did I install a pet door on an inside door of my home? It’s sort of a long story. Here’s the short version: we keep the dog’s water and the cat’s liter box in our utility room, which is sort of open to the outdoors and oftentimes inhabited by…COCKROACHES. While roaches don’t (at least not that I have seen) come into the house during the day, if I leave that door open at night, unpleasant things occur. So we close the door at night. The dogs can go overnight without water – hello, they’re asleep – but the cats usually hold in all of their poop for the minute I close that door, and then choose a replacement place – our freaking bathtub – to defecate. Not pretty.
So I was wielding my power saw, bashing in the door, measuring, etc. Then I heard B A M!!!!!!!!!! It was incredibly loud and sounded like it happened right over my shoulder. My first guess? The cats were upset they would no longer have an excuse to poop in the bathtub and were breaking my knick knacks (Don’t put it past them, they’re incredibly moody and vindictive).
And then I saw this. What is this? This is a bird laying on my back patio. Birds don’t usually just lay around on patios where three dogs and two cats also hang out.
And then I looked up a few inches and see this. This is what scared me. It appeared to be guts. And shit. And a very dirty window, which really upset me because I had just finished cleaning my windows, not even an hour prior! So I began to freak out. Apparently, a bird flew into my french doors and hurt itself. After I went outside and inspected the suicidal bird, I saw that its side was actually OPEN and its stomach seemed to be spilling out. *gross* The bird appeared to have been in pain. I felt bad for it and decided that I wanted to put it out of its misery…I began tweeting, asking for help in how to put a bird out of its misery. Some people told me to bash it’s head in, put it in the freezer, break its neck, etc. I decided that I just couldn’t do it. Then I felt badly for allowing it to suffer…so I grabbed a hammer and a plastic bag and headed outside to end this poor bird’s suffering.
And this is what I found. The damn kamikaze pigeon had flown up onto the neighbor’s fence. It seemed to be stable…I wasn’t about to knock it off the fence and murder it in cold blood! So I left it alone and carried on about my business. I went back outside a few hours later to check on the bird and he was gone.
So…the story doesn’t end there. At least, I don’t think it ends there. This morning, bright and early at the ungodly hour of 8 am, I had The Local Tree Experts come and take out a 20+ year avocado tree and severely amputate one of our mango trees. This is part of our home improvement agenda – we’ve been wanting to remove these trees from the back yard ever since we bought the house two years ago.
As the guys were working on cutting down the mango tree, I realized that they were bringing something down from the branches.
Do you see what I see? Baby pigeons. Now I am terrified that the bird that flew into the window – the one that is probably dead somewhere – is the momma bird to these two guys. After the finished trimming the tree, they were supposed to put the nest back into the tree (they told me they would) but they left it sitting on my patio table! I found a little spot where the nest would fit and secured it there with some errant branches. I keep checking to see if a momma bird is coming to feed them, but no such luck so far.
Can your snakes eat them?