Last year, it took me about two days to realize that the noise wasn’t the wind shaking the flue in the chimney. When I finally opened it, a bird fell into the towel I held in my hand below the flue. I put the silly little Stellar Jay outside, gave him some peanuts and a dish of water to wash off the dust while he regained his composure. He finally flew off looking fine.
So this year when I heard the noise, I knew exactly what it was. Only I forgot that I didn’t have the flue shut and, because the fireplace itself was dark and so is a Stellar Jay, when I opened the little screen to place the towel under the flue preparatory to opening it, a Stellar Jay immediately flew at me with some level of frantic purpose.
I fell over backward and hit my head, allowing the jay time to fly across my living room and up to the top of the closet door. My two parrots and cockatoo reacted as though Voldemort had entered their home. They screamed and ran frantically all over their cages while the Stellar Jay checked out the lay of the land from his lofty position.
Once I was on my feet again and my head stopped throbbing, I opened the sliding glass door to the porch. I recognized the jay as a regular visitor and figured he would recognize the porch and trees and fly to it. Only he didn’t. He just sat on the closet door.
So I got a towel and tried to grab him which led to a merry chase through my living room and kitchen with my dog Blue running around frantically at my feet and, since she’s pretty blind, tripping me up every other step. My birds continued to scream and the jay continued to circle the room in silence as though determined to ignore the open door and inviting porch until he’d seem everything he’d come to see. Then he flew straight out the door and perched in the tree for a moment before descending to the porch to get a drink of water from the dog dish out there. He completed his adventure by grabbing a peanut before heading home to tell the family about his day.
Meanwhile, I got left behind with two hysterical parrots, a cockatoo hiding in his little house and a nearly blind dog who clearly had no idea what had just happened except that suddenly his mom had started running around like a mad woman and if she went nuts, they who would be left to feed the dogs?
And then I went off to my public broadcasting board meeting and pretended I had a normal life.