The Birds Part I: Roommates

This morning G pulled me over to the dryer and pointed at it. It was emitting little chirps from the dryer vent, that long foil-ish tube thing that comes out the side. They were rather loud birdish chirps, but I was convinced they were coming from the vent exit, where there was, perhaps, a little songbird welcoming the day. But as I walked by it again, I noticed that there was a very small birdish chirp coming from the bend in the tube right by the dryer and very much inside the condo. Now I am a very bird-friendly person, and the sound of a little bird in distress has much the same effect on me as, say, a baby crying.

Calmly we emailed the property manager asking him to please help us fix the bird-in-dryer problem and to please let us know how we can make him fix the dryer vents outside so as not to have this problem in the future. When, after five minutes or so I hadn't heard back, I took to pacing by the dryer. G knows my feelings for birds, and so offered to dissasemble the dryer in such a way that we might be able to detach the vent and usher the bird to his freedom. After about a half an hour of dissasembly and attempted bird wrangling, I managed to bend the tube enough to slide the bird into a bowl and cover it with a towel. We swiftly brought the bird to the balcony, left him in the bowl with a towel around it and went back inside to let him recover as he was breathing heavily and wouldn't move. We peered at him through the blinds and noted with worry that while he recovered, he couldn't seem to fly out of the bowl.

G went back to re-assemble the dryer, and soon called to me saying he had heard something else in the vent. Indeed, more scrambling of little bird claws. While I was attempting to pull the tube out further so that I could bring it down to the floor for a smoother exodus, I heard a different noise, like something was inside the dryer. As I stopped to listen, another bird flew from behind the dryer, at G's head, and into all of the windows pointing outward. We herded her out and then got the other one out of the tube, but this one was so little she didn't have all of her feathers yet. As I put her out beside the first she was shaking terribly. I spent about an hour distraught that my poor little dryer birds wouldn't survive, when mom came back and I got a call back from an animal rescue shelter. It now seems that we will have new roommates until they learn how to fly.

Exhausted little birdies after beeing well fed by mama