[Daniel] Chickadee Catastrophe

The first thing Moriah said to me after we greeted each other this evening is that we had a bit of a predicament. A small bird had flown into our dryer's exhaust vent on the apartment and gotten stuck in the flexible hose leading to our dryer, within the apartment. We quickly ate supper and I decided I was determined to get the bird out instead of relying on our apartment complex's rather brutal maintenance.



First, I pulled the dryer out slightly and disconnected the hose. I heard a flapping and chriping so I covered the end of the hose to keep the bird in it. I then worked the dryer slowly out of the closet it and the washer are in. We grabbed a paper bag and put it on the end of the hose. I then rattled the hose, trying to knock the bird into the bag. I went through the entire hose, from wall to end, and in the bag...



...was nothing. I blinked at it, rattled the hose again and looked at Moriah. "Perhaps it got back out the way it came?" was the first thought that came to mind. But just to be sure, I asked Moriah to grab a flashlight and looked into the dryer itself.



Two little black beady eyes greeted me as the little brown (female?) chickadee blinked back at the bright light. I was surprised, to say the least, especially given that I hadn't covered the dryer vent as I was messing with the hose. I turned the bag toward the dryer and for several minutes, Moriah and I tried banging on the side of the dryer, hoping it would scare the chickadee out into the bag so we could let it back outside. But when I checked the bag again, again there was nothing in the bag. And upon looking back in the dryer vent, the chickadee had gotten frightened and lodged itself much further down the vent, around a 90* angle so only the ends of its tail feathers were visible.



The short version of the rest of this is that the chickadee had lodged itself so deep that it was practically in the exhaust fan at the front of the dryer. We disassembled the dryer in about 30 minutes, taped off the dryer vent the chickadee had come in through, tipped, pounded, shuffled and carried the dryer outside onto the patio. I was about to remove the cover on the fan but decided to tip the dryer one more time. With Moriah peering in, me holding up and tipping the dryer and apparently the smell/sound of fresh air motivating it, the chickadee fell out of the dryer vent it had come in through onto the patio and quickly flew away.



I then carried the dryer back in, spent 15 minutes cleaning the bird poop out of the vent, an hour reassembling it (no leftover screws!) and another 30 minutes cleaning up the remaining mess.



Executive summary: 1 chickadee lodged in our dryer, 1 confused corgi, 2 young adults struggling against a resistant Maytag, 3 hours spent extracting the bird and 0 grumpy, nasty maintenance persons involved. Oh, and 6 pictures to prove I can disassemble and reassemble a dryer.