Chimney Madness

The craziest thing happened this morning. I'm not sure how to explain this, but try to stick with me....

We were getting ready for work when we heard banging from downstairs, I went down and heard thudding from the chimney.

We have a wooden board to stop the draft coming down, we always assumed the roof had mesh or something on the top of it. Anyway, I called Kirst downstairs and she announced "oh **** there must be a bird stuck in the chimney, we have to get it out".

So there we were armed with a blanket, a box and a stick. We needed to move the wooden panel, to let the bird come into the box. I managed to get the board down and although we really didn't want to scare the bird I'll admit there was some high pitched shrieking and panicking. So the bird came down and as I pealed back the blanket there he was, looking at me with his beady eyes and rather than being in the box he was sat perched on the corner!

We thought we'd managed to get him in the box, but as we took the blanket away, he escaped and went on a mad circuit of our lounge (getting soot everywhere) before entering the kitchen. Kirst managed to get him on to a broom and carry him (by now we'd established he was Magpie) like some sort of trained parrot out the back door.

After all the drama I turned to Kirsty and said can't believe I didn't get a shot for my blip, she said I would have killed you if you got your camera out while all that was happening!! We've had a cleaning frenzy since the incident.

P.S the bird flew away absolutely fine, we are going to make sure it can't happen again!