Every year we do have sparrows who insist on nesting under the gutter above me bathroom.... despite the bird boxes fixed close by on the house wall in an effort to tempt them elsewhere.
Last few years this do cause some anxiety as the odd fledgling jumps the wrong way so to speak and ends up bouncing around in our minimal roof space. (No fatalities that I know of... but it has caused extreme measures of removing loft hatch... opening the window wide and leaving the bathroom alone... for days sometimes....)
So it seems this be shaping up to be another wayward year. On a couple of occasions, above my head, I do hear some small thing flapping about where it shouldn't, although eventually all seems well and all "cheeps" do be back where they belong. However, the other morning I do grow suspicious as (like a submariner listening to sonar) I track a small cheep, travelling above me down the the room.... away from the nest.... its appropriate fledging point.
I do fret. But then I hear The Old Man shout that the baby have got out. He can see a bird on the roof of the kitchen porch below the bathroom. We both heave a sigh of relief.....
Until I pick up a watering can in the yard and hear a nearby adult sparrow cheeping like billy-o and answering chirps from well above the kitchen porch.
I do look up. To my horror I do see a tiny yellow beak, flapping in time to the chirps... from behind the grille of our extractor fan outlet in the middle of our upstairs wall.
"Ecky Thump" I do swiftly paraphrase, appalled.
There is no way we can reach the extractor grille .... above that thin plastic roof of the porch .... and also some distance from our solid but complicated house roof. We be too old and dizzy for such acrobatics.
There is only one route left....
It will have to be an inside job.
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