I hope they don't hold a grudge

So I mentioned, briefly, in my last post that one of the things we had to do to get the house ready to sell was rem.ove the bir.ds from the exhaust fan over our oven. We have a really neat, original exhaust fan built right into the wall; the fan is one of the cute things about our house (the laundry chute and little built-in mailbox being two of the other things that I'll miss). You open a little door above the oven and the fan starts right up. There's a vent on the outside of the house, which is how the little sparrows got into the fan to build their nests.

This is now the second year that they were building in there - We first noticed them in October 2006, when J was about 6 months old. At first, I liked hearing the chirping of birds and didn't notice that they were actually in our vent - I thought that they were just sitting on the fence outside. But then that spring, when they had eggs in there and later, when the baby birds were hatched, we heard them ALL the time. All day and often through the night as well. I called a few places for quotes on remo.ving the nest, but was told that there wasn't anything that could be done as long as there were babies in there - we'd have to wait until summer and then remove it.

So we listened to the birds all spring (J would chirp along with them) and they started to feel kind of like our pets. Summer came, they left, and we forgot about the nest and having it removed. The fact that most of the quotes for removal were around $300 probably also had something to do with our lack of motivation to rem.ove the nest.

This fall, the birds came back and started working on the nest again. I called around again for remo.val quotes, everything came back over $300, and so Husband and I decided to tackle the birds ourselves. And we had to remove them now - it wasn't going to be a selling point to someone that we have a family of birds comfortably settled in our oven fan.

We tackled the bi.rd project last Saturday, the night before our first open house. Husband duct-taped a heavy-duty trash bag all around the vent, then opened it and used the trash bag to scoop everything out. I was amazed at how much was in there! They had two separate nests, one in front of the fan on the outside of the house and one behind the fan, inside the house. We cleared everything out, sprayed down the fan with disinfectant, and it looks good as new.

I do feel slightly guilty about having torn apart all their hard work, but at the same time, I don't care since these birds were going to cost us $$ to get them removed. Since Sunday, however, we have had to leave the fan running all the time because the birds are sitting out on our fence chirping as loud as they can! I think it's in protest for having lost their nest. We don't want them to move back in (at least not until we are out of the house!), and we couldn't figure out something to use to cover the vent since its an odd shape. So it's funny now to hear them "complaining". I hope they don't shower our cars with bird crap.