Places you find birds where they shouldn’t be

(Sorry, all you poor birdies. I always did my best to help.)

• Just inside your roof (accessed via a corner behind the drainage), well out of your reach (and life-threateningly precarious to access via a ladder), in a cosy little nest, in a distant corner of the inaccessible ceiling cavity
• Underneath your desk, decapitated, with a trail of feathers – barely settled – leading towards the cat door
• In the chicken coop (aside from the actual chickens – they’re allowed), having snuck in via the tiniest of gaps in the mesh to capitalise on the scraps and grain; but inevitably got stuck, and now they’re zooming from one end to the next in a panic, bashing themselves about, with you in the middle
• On the menu (sparrow) at your local Japanese restaurant
• Scratching inside the ceiling, piercing holes in the bathroom filtration system
• Pushing out the vents of the old heat transfer system (that no longer works) with claws that look like rat feet; and then you get in a rat catcher only to find it’s a bird that eventually escapes via the bathroom vent with your son’s encouragement
• Flying into the spokes of your wheel when you’re descending a hill at pace (I’m so sorry, it happened so fast)
• In your dreams: flap, flap, flap; scratch, scratch, scratch; rustle, rustle
• In your wife’s ornithophobic nightmares: flap, flap, flap; flap flap flap FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP...