The Bird

Today's adventure: a bird in the bedroom (for some reason I didn't post this when I wrote it - which was around October/November 2010).

I was sitting on the bed, laptop in hand, when a huge bug flew past me and hit the window. The house has a part that's always open to the outside so we get the occasional wandering beetle that makes its way upstairs. Then my boyfriend (Rene, for future reference), who was on his computer, told me to save the bird. What bird? Then this genius realized that what I thought was an enormous beetle was really a tiny bird (how exactly I made that mistake I couldn't quite say). He'd flapped his way to our room, then mistaken the window for an opening and crashed into the glass. Two things happened next. The first, I slowly walked over with a towel to try to capture him. The second, the dog not so slowly awoke from his perpetual napping, snapped into dog gear, and leaped towards the window. Now, this dog is a 100-year-old schnauzer named Lucas and it was quite an unexpected sight to see him in hunting mode. I tried to keep him back with my foot while trying to wrap the bird in a towel with my hands. He somehow managed to lodge himself between the mattress and the wall so it was no easy job to try to pry him out without hurting him. I started to worry that Lucas would succeed in removing the bird before I could,  so I gave up, tossed the towel to Rene, and locked Lucas in another room. When I came back, the bird was at the top of the window near the ceiling, Rene was trying to corner him, so the bird wedged himself in a little space between the post and the window. We were sure he was a goner at that point because we could see no way for him to escape. But, with some of Rene's crafty maneuvering, he was able to move the window just a bit, guide the bird out of his dungeon, and wrap him in the towel. We then walked him to the open garden, released him, and watched him take off like a bolt of lightning into the morning sky. It was a nice way to start the day.