The Dead Bird Saga
So, we’d been hearing noises in the Coonara flue for a while; the scratching of tiny claws, the chirping of a Starling. At first we assumed it was trapped, but as the days kept going by with that annoying metal scratching noise, we decided there must be a nest in the flue and the bird was making full use of a free warm dry house to raise it’s chicks. And then the noises stopped, and rather than this concerning us, we didn’t notice it at all. And we forgot about the noises entirely… until yesterday. Yesterday was the second day in a row of greater than 30 degree heat. I was loving it. I was loving it right up until I walked in the front door after work and was assaulted with the sickly sweet odour of rotting flesh. Cautiously sniffing shallow nosefuls of putrid air, we quickly tracked the smell down to the wood heater innocently sitting in the corner of the kitchen/dining area. Opening the door of the heater made it obvious exactly where the stench was emanating from.
We retreated to the other end of the house, opened some windows, and pondered the problem. How do you remove a dead rotting bird from inside the chimney of your so far purely decorative wood heater? Having investigated briefly we knew the baffle plate inside the heater box was rusted in, and not able to be removed, so of course we decided to burn the bird out. Not having any wood though, we were going to have to wait through the whole next work day, also forecast to be over 30 degrees.
So we waited, and arriving home today, car boot loaded with kindling and wood purchased from a convenient hardware store nearby, I was happy to find the smell wasn’t as bad as yesterday. I grabbed the local paper from the mailbox and made some twisted knots of it. I had just finished setting up a pretty little wood pile over the paper when the Storm Trooper arrived home. Together we started the cooking fire, full of hope that our problems would be shortly solved.
Unfortunately the dead bird had other ideas.
We closed the door of the heater and the fire, looking so promising for a good 5 or 10 seconds, suddenly went out and smoke filled the heater. We let it sit for a while, then opened the door letting the smoke pour out into the room.
With the door to the rest of the house closed and the two back doors wide open, we tried again, this time with the air vent open to allow more oxygen in. Clearly, we thought, that had been our problem the first time. But no. We let out more smoke and dead bird stench into the house. Through persistence, or perhaps stupidity, we tried again. Twice.
The bird was blocking the flue.
Then I noticed a couple of maggot cases (as they pupate into flies they grow a brown casing around themselves, and look like mouse pooh) sitting on top of the heater. Perhaps the stench-culprit wasn’t actually in the heater itself!
Next port of call; inside the roof cavity. The hole was small so I volunteered to go in instead of Storm Trooper. I also hadn’t been in the roof before and was keen to have a look around. In the roof it was cramped and HOT! I slowly climbed around the struts inside the roof, keeping to the beams, careful not to electrocute myself on the wiring for the down lights, and cautiously avoiding the spider webs in the dark. Actually it wasn’t all that dark. The tiles were letting a fair bit of light come in, although not enough to see if there was a rotting carcass over by the flue. The torchlight showed me a rats nest, but no bird. Trekking back to the manhole, I climbed down, sweaty and filthy.
Our next plan of action: get up on the roof and see if we could access the bird from there. Storm Trooper is a lot more sensitive to smells than I am, so taking with me an old screwdriver (for scooping), I climbed the ladder and stood on the roof for the first time since we’d moved in. Slowly crabbing across the tiles on hands and feet I made my way over to the flue. The smell was definitely coming from inside it, as were a lot of flies. Removing the cap, holding my breath, and peering inside made it obvious our torches were not up to the job. All I could see was a slightly smoky black haze. I poked a broom down to no avail. I dropped flaming twists of paper down the chimney, which showed me that the bird must be right at the bottom.
I gave the flue a good jiggle and we tried to smoke the house out twice more.
Bringing the numerous tools down from the roof, we collapsed the ladder and discussed our options. I decided that we needed to somehow get around the baffle plate inside the heater and scoop it out from there. Maybe the poor rotting bird was runny enough by now that would be possible. I moulded a coat hanger into a special baffle plate scraping implement and got to work. Piles of soot, and numerous plastic icy pole wrappers started falling out. Perhaps this was what was stopping up the flue, and not the bird after all. We tried again to light the fire, and filled the room with more dead bird smoke.
Storm Trooper finally remembered that his Dad used to install Coonaras as a job years back, and called him for help. Apparently we should have done this to start with.
It turns out you can lift up the sleeve around the flue, then lift up the flue itself and get to whatever is sitting on top of the baffle plate. As soon as we had moved the flue aside enough it was quite clear where the bird was. Clouds of putrid air wafted out of the hole leaving both of us retching. Grabbing the bird in gloved hands and wrapping it in a plastic bag, we evacuated the maggot dripping putrescent corpse to the outside bin.
Finally the fire should work, we thought, and burn off any left over smell. We were convinced that the next 5 minutes would be the end of the problem.
Clearly we didn’t remove enough of the soot, and we got another heater box full of smoke in the house.
So now the whole house smells of smoke, and the saga of the dead bird continues.
Eventually we hope to be able to use the kitchen again.
I have been thinking for a long time about starting up my own blog, and finally, here I am.
I have a couple of different reasons for wanting to write this blog, but previously I’ve managed to come up with plenty of excuses for not starting. I’ll give you a few examples, and maybe this will give you your first insight into who I am (or if you know me well, maybe you’ve guessed them already).
First of all; my reasons for blogging:
I love to write, but I don’t do enough of it. I would love to develop my writing skills, and I feel that this will help, since I’ll give myself a target and try to stick to that many entries per time period selected.
My job at work does not take up all of my time, and often not very much of it at all. This will help me keep my sanity, and allow my creativity some freedom which is currently lacking.
Sometimes I want feedback on my fiction, and somewhere like this seems a reasonable place for it (I hope).
These seem to me like fairly good reasons for a blog. But now for the excuses:
What if people find me totally boring?
What if I can’t keep up with my writing/entry target?
What if everyone just thinks I’m doing this because I reckon I’m fantastic and everyone should know what I think (this one is very strong in me – I don’t want people to think this, because it’s really not how I feel about myself)?
What if no one signs up?
And what if they do, and they realise that my writing is just crap?
Well, those are the risks of course. But they are risks I have to take to achieve my goal (or to fail to achieve my goal).
The main reason I haven’t started this blog before now is fear of failure. I strongly tend towards avoidance rather than risking failure, and it is a mental habit that I have been trying hard to break for a long time.
Perhaps you will help.
[And as I’m writing this draft, trying to get up the courage to create a blog account I read back and think ‘no, this is way too boring, who would want to read this?’
‘But Hippofeet,’ I think ‘that’s the whole point! You can only care about that enough to add in something more interesting. You can’t fail to start because of some stupid little voice telling you it’s boring’… Aha! The saga of the dead bird should do it!]
