Steven Harper Piziks

This afternoon I was in my office when I heard the heavy flutter of . . . wings?  I ducked and looked around.  A grackle was flapping around near the ceiling.  What the hell?  We usually leave the back door open during the day so Sam can get out to the back yard--with an 85-pound watchdog who hates strangers in the house, we don't worry about burglars--and it was therefore no mystery how it got in.  I wondered how long it had been trapped inside, though, and how much crap it had dropped around the house.

 

I ran out of my office and shut all the other basement doors, then shooed the bird upstairs.  This took some doing--it wasn't to fly everywhere =but= upstairs.  Finally it got up there, though, and perched above the kitchen sink.  I opened the front door wide and made sure the back door was still open, then herded the stupid bird out of the kitchen. 

 

It flew into the living room toward the open front door, then for no good reason, abruptly changed course and shot toward the living room windows.  WHAM!  The stupid bird fell to the carpet, stunned.  At first I thought it was dead, but it was still moving.  Birdbrain.  I grabbed a big bowl from the kitchen, dropped it over the little idiot, scooped it up, and dropped it over the fence into some tallish grass to let it recover.  A while later it was gone, so either it flew off, or something dragged it away and ate it.