Birds have started to take over our house…

It started last night when I was sitting up on the couch working with Mandy on one of her Java programming projects.  Sean comes up and says that he thinks we have an animal in our water heater.  I head down to the basement, and sure enough, in the steam tube on top of the water heater we hear some scratching noises.  All of a sudden, out of the bottom of the tube, I see a little head poke through.  At first I thought it was a bat.  But once realizing it had a beak, saw that it was a big fat black bird.  I got a screw driver and started to take apart the tube.  Once the tube was apart though, the bird was no where in sight.  We had the basement door open for easy access to the outside world, but no bird.

We sat down and waited for a few minutes, and saw the bird poke his head around the corner in the tube.  He kept disappearing though.  Eventually after about 20 minutes, he got all the way down to the end of the tube and started looking around the basement.  He hopped out onto the water heater and spotted the open door and took off.

Little did we realize though, was that there was more than one bird!  We left the basement door open all night long.  When I got back from class around 10am this morning, Sean was out in the kitchen trying to get another bird that was perched on our lights.  We got him into the family room and tried to get him out the window, but the poor guy was very confused.  Eventually he went back into the kitchen and went out the back door.  Needless to say, the cats were sad to see him go.

Exciting times… hah.  Pictures posted below (of course taken with the iPhone).

above pictures taken last night

above pictures taken this morning