Wielding broom and chair, I then began to try and shoo the thing out of the door. Unfortunately, the pigeon first confused the un-openable pane of glass above my patio door as an exit. So he kept flying into the pane and cracking his head. Feeling bad and not wanting to kill him, I put up a cloth over it so he wouldn’t think it was a window anymore. Shortly thereafter He found his way behind the cloth and proceeded to pace back and forth along the window, looking for a way out. So I took the cloth down again, shooed him away and put the cloth back up so he couldn’t sneak behind it. This is about 2 hours worth of fun. The next and final hour was spent thinking up more exciting ways to get him to leave. I did some googling and read about people gently knocking the bird senseless so it could be removed outside, but felt that required too much finesse. A capture and release program was briefly implemented, with no luck on the capture portion (the cat was locked away during these crucial endeavors). The quest began to take more immediacy as I was late for work and the damn thing was crapping everywhere (which was oh-so-much fun to clean up last night). Finally, the damn thing landed on the ceiling fan. So I stared at it, silently cursing. The problem now was that it wouldn’t fly low enough to see the sky through the patio door. It was either too afraid to fly that low or didn’t think it was an exit. So a weird thought came to me. What if I start the blades spinning? I turned the fan on briefly and got the blades moving a little. The pigeon, while apparently getting a little dizzy, was unperturbed. Hmmm. But I had made it dizzy. So I put them on a bit longer, get the blades going a bit faster and now hope to make the bird dizzy enough to fall so I can grab it and throw it out the window. What actually happened was a little funnier. It got spinning just fast enough that the bird had to use it’s wings to stay on the rotating blade. Eventually it was too much and the bird was actually flying a few inches behind the blade trying to land on it again. Unfortunately, the wings were flapping hard enough to keep the blade moving and the bird began a futile chase of the blade for about 3 revolutions. At this point he was just tired and dizzy and finally dropped alititude by a few feet, saw the sky through the open patio door and few out. Success! I ran over and yelled at it to “stay out!” and slammed the door.
Lesson: Whenever you get a captured bird in your house/apartment, simply get them to land on the fan and spin the blades. Foolproof!
P.S. The cat was very disappointed at my solution to the problem.
