Down the chimney, into the cat! By Pat Gibson

For the first few years we lived here above Sulfur Creek we didn't use most of the main story of the house. It wasn't finished. We had bedrooms up there and a kitchen downstairs, but money being what it was (and is!) we had to wait to get the walls and floors done.

Out where we eventually put the main kitchen, the standpipes for the plumbing were through the roof but not connected to anything. This left a short drop of about two feet for any small bug chasing bird that might want to crawl down. Once in the house, it would fly around frantically bumping into windows and walls trying to get back out. If we were home, one of the crew would holler and we would attempt to coax the hysterical critter out the door. The main intruder was the canyon wren. It is a small insect eating bird that you see hanging almost upside down under the eaves eating wasp eggs. It is brown and gray with a white breast. Now I thought that the bird that came in my house was a nuthatch because it had to come down the pipe head first, but the nuthatch is only found in East Texas among the pine trees. You may want to dispute me on the bird identification and that's fine. It might also be a house wren but the breast was white.

The nuthatch is the only bird that regularly runs down a tree trunk headfirst. Some spiral around the trunk hunting for bugs like a creeper, but the creeper starts at the bottom of the tree and goes around to the top. The nuthatch starts at the top and goes headfirst down the tree to the bottom. To keep the birds from coming into the house through the pipe, we stuffed the bottom of the pipe with insulation. We had one kill itself once while we were not home and that really upset the crew. We hadn't counted on another entrance that one wren found to its sorrow.

One of the things we had installed but had not used was a fireplace. It is one of those metal box types with a metal pipe going through the roof. Now the damper (the flapper that closes off the chimney so the warm house air won't escape when you don't have a fire) is a little loose in one of those fireplaces. Also the crew thought it was fun to play Hansel and Gretle and put someone in the fireplace. While playing this, they discovered that the little bit of sky visible through the pipe was very interesting. (Isn't it strange what kids find interesting?) As a result, the chimney was often open to the house either by the crew leaving it open or it flapping in a wind. It may also have been the weight of the bird that opened it. However it got into the house, our Siamese cat was upstairs that day and the bird didn't have a chance. After we cleaned up the feathers, we told the crew to stop using the fireplace as the wicked witch's oven and keep the damper closed. On another occasion our current cat, Frodo, was allowed to bring his dead bird into the room of his master, crew number one. It took a good thirty minutes of vacuuming to get up all the feathers that time.

Both cats have brought interesting thing into the house at one time or another, but that's another story.

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