Brushes with Nature

A bird was trapped in our house the other day. How did a bird get into our house, you might ask? The giant hole in the ceiling that's been there for three years may have had something to do with it. I'm just guessing.

We found a pile of feathers in our TV room Sunday morning, and with two cats in the house, my first thought was that there was also a dead bird somewhere nearby. We looked around for a bird but couldn't find one, so we gave up, but keeping mind that there could be a bird, dead or alive, somewhere. Then Tanga becomes very interested in the tiny space behind the couch, so we pull the couch out. Still no bird. Michael walks to the other end of the couch. Out comes a bird, crashing into the window and then flying right at me. Tanga is going nuts, trying to catch the bird, so Michael scoops up Tanga and throws him in the bedroom. The bedroom door doesn't shut, so I stand against it while Michael opens the window to let the bird back out. Tanga spent the rest of the afternoon looking for that bird.

This isn't the first time an animal's been in the house. We had a bird get in a few weeks ago, but it stayed in the room with the hole in the ceiling, so opening one of the windows solved that problem.

But a bird is a nothing. About a year ago, before I had moved in with my cat, Michael used to keep the window in the upstairs kitchen open for Tanga. The window opened out onto the roof of the addition, and Tanga would go out there to play. Michael noticed one day that all of Tanga's kibble was gone and his water bowl was a mess. Thinking that he just had a pig for a cat, Michael cleaned up the mess and thought nothing more of it. The same thing happened again. Kibble all gone. Water bowl a dirty mess.

Michael was studying one night at his desk in one of the rooms on the third floor. Michael looks out and sees a pair of eyes looking back at him. The eyes belonged to a raccoon. Guess what else the raccoon had been up to. That's right. Eating cat food and washing his dirty paws in Tanga's water bowl. But this didn't stop Michael from keeping that window in the kitchen shut. Even after Michael found the raccoon hanging out in the sink, with Tanga chillin' in the kitchen with it, he wouldn't keep the window shut. Surprisingly, when I moved in, I put a stop to that. First, I didn't want Kirin getting out, because she might take off, and second, I didn't want the raccoon to come back and visit. Call me crazy.