I live in an old house. One hundred years old real soon, and in need or some odd nips and tucks here and there. This spring, some birds…grackles, starlings, whatever… dug a hole in the rotting wood that is under my gutters just outside my front door and crawled in there and built a nest. And had noisy babies. And then left. They weren’t just up under the soffitt, or whatever it’s called…they were in under the roof of the living room. I could hear them near the light fixture in the ceiling.
So, being a good tenant, I informed the landlady, who said she’d get someone (probably her dad) over here to clean the birds out and repair the gutters, which she was required to do LAST year after the annual rental inspection. Since it took her a year to repair the ceiling in my bedroom, which was being held up by a plank, I didn’t expect anyone out immediately, but hopefully soon.
Now the birds are back, making more babies, and when I took the trash out in the first rays of light the other day, I saw something hanging from the soffitt a ways down from the nest hole…I assumed wasps were starting a nest, but forgot about it until I got home today…the first time I’ve been home in the daylight for awhile. So I opened the front door to look and see how big the wasps’ nest was, and …this is where it gets gross. The easily squeamish should exit the room now…
It wasn’t a wasps’ nest, it was the head of an adult bird sticking down through the wood like some nightmarish gargoyle…Black feathers, bright yellow beak, part of a wing, I think. It’s dead. Dead, Dead, Dead…just sticking out of the wood like an upside-down trophy. I slammed the door shut and haven’t been able to stop the heebie-jeebie feeling that keeps running down my back as I think about it. It probably tried to poke its way through a hole in the wood and got stuck there and died. This explains why my cat Tweak has taken the unusual step of leaping to the top of the opened front door (the inside one, not the screen door) and perching there, trying to get at something outside…though I never heard a bird in distress.
I am so grossed out that I can’t even think about sitting in the living room near that door. And my landlady does not appear to be home, and I can’t afford to pay anyone to come out and take care of this…all I can hope is that her dad will come over this weekend, or soon, before someone walking down the street sees it and calls the housing department. I want this to be over with, and gone…I fear I will be having bad dreams tonight.
Seven Million trees in this town and they had to nest in my Gutter.
Stupid, fucking birds.