My mom is...not very good at parking her car. In fact, it's pretty terrible. For some intangible reason, she always pulls her car forward after she closes the garage door. 9 times out of 10, she places the car so flush against the door, the license plate gets stuck on it and the door jams. Over the years, it's broken the garage door twice and her plate is almost a V. So on one of those nights, I arrive from work and that happens. I go up to the front door and ring it, etc. It's pitch black so I can't see anything but the light through the window. She opens the door and as I walk in, I see an odd shadow in front of me. It disappeared immediately, so I figured it was my imagination. I park the car properly for her and go upstairs to my room. A few minutes later Mom screams bloody murder and she's knocking on my door saying there's a mouse on top of the cereal boxes on the fridge! Of course I wonder how a mouse could get that high, and I go downstairs to investigate, and lo and behold it wasn't a mouse at all.

It was a little bird, smaller than the size of a fist! That's what that shadow was, it flying into the house. So I'm trying to figure out how to get it back outside! Nothing like this had ever happened before, and I had no clue how to get him out. Google wasn't any real help--it offered wacky and stupid solutions from gently caressing it in your hands and petting it(oh, and also a guide suggesting the exact opposite), to whistling a song Disney style, to throwing a sheet on it, even learning to live with it. Unfortunately for me, every single one of those articles had something in common--to close off the area the bird is in. The bad news is that my entire house is open floor. Downstairs, upstairs, the kitchen, living room, EVERYTHING. So I was tasked with finding my own solution. I opened the doors and was essentially forced to go up and down the stairs and throughout the whole house trying the coax the damn thing outside. And every single time it got close, like the blinds next to the front door or the TV console against the back, no matter what I did it would always 180 deeper inside(or upstairs) the house. I'm serious, it would literally be standing on the door and it kept turning around!

It took three and a half hours and the help or a local police officer to finally get it out of the house. I eventually found out how it got in in the first place. There's a small wreath that hangs on the door--turns out it actually built a little nest inside! And there were eggs!

I moved the wreath over to a small tree and hung it up as best I could. The eggs are still intact, hopefully it comes back to their young. But this was certainly something different of a night!