This week’s wildlife adventure hit yesterday at about 12:45, and I mean that literally.  It was warm and sunny enough, we were sitting outside at the table outside the Dutch door from the kitchen, eating lunch when we kept hearing the thunk-thunk of a bird hitting the glass of the living room windows.  But there was no bird ramming the glass, not from the outside, at least.

Spouse wandered into the living room.  There was a bird in there, somehow, even though the living room, currently more in limbo than under construction (it needs more time and money than we have to play with at the moment), has been sealed off from the outside world for months.  I only open the door and go in there to water the long suffering plants and I can’t remember the last time I opened the windows or the door to the outside.

After some herding and a few more bashes against the panes, we managed to get the baby sparrow out of the house.  It threw itself straight into a bush then, once it had regained its equanimity a bit, dove into the vegetation beneath a juniper tree, and narrowly avoided getting pounced on by the cat.  Eventually it climbed the tree and flew off, presumably to reunite itself with the feeding machines known as its parents.

The only thing we can figure is that it fell down the chimney.  We had a new flue installed a few months ago (the old one was too wide for sufficient draw and we were depositing dangerous amounts of flammable tar in the chimney) and a hat put over the top to stop rain dripping in and staining the wall behind the closed fireplace that we ripped out and need to replace with a super modern, highly efficient, wood-burning burning stove once we have a spare five or six (or more!) thousand euros lying around.  In the meantime, the pipe’s yawning maw gapes directly into the room (instead of into the back of a free-standing stove).

I don’t know if this means that the sparrows nested on the chimney, under the hat or if the young sparrow just failed to take the left turn at Albuquerque while getting to know the neighborhood.  I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on that, just in case anyone else decides to drop in.  Sparrows are always nesting in stupid places like that and rain gutters.  It’s a good thing they go through so many broods each summer or they’d never manage to have any surviving offspring.

But my stint as Death continues.  I rolled down the blind in the upstairs bathroom last night to find that the wasp queen who’d started a colony in the window frame, preventing us from closing the window (because as long as you don’t piss them off, wasps are fine), had gotten rolled up in their when I’d rolled it up that morning.  I always make sure there are no wasps, spiders, flies, moths, butterflies, or hover flies on the front side of the blind when I roll it up, but I can’t do much about the backside of it. I guess the wasp queen had gotten stuck between the shade and the glass (it’s easier to find a way in to that space than back out) and when I started rolling the shade up, had caught a ride on the backside over the roller and then up in between the roller and the cloth as the cloth rolled up.  Spouse says the colony will die now, but I am holding on to the hope that they’ll somehow make a new queen.