Escape Hatch
What do you believe you are looking at? A calendar and a pretty framed picture in a corner of our kitchen, both showing birds? Appearances can be deceiving.
What you aren’t seeing has been used twice so far—most recently this past weekend. We regard it as the most valuable modification we’ve made to this house.
To understand what you’re not seeing yet, first you need to know what is behind the pretty framed picture. It’s a square hollow column that hides the plumbing waste stack for the bathroom above it. In theory, it’s a nice tidy idea. In reality, at the house we lived in before this one, my wife and I learned the hard way that at a certain age the seals in the waste stack fail. The plumber has to make an unholy mess, cutting holes in the wall and ripping off tiles in the bathroom to get to the leaking pipes and fix them.
For some reason the house we’re in now has this column for one waste stack and leaves the other waste stack as bare pipe mounted on the outside of the house.
A few years ago we learned, again the hard way, that the top of the hollow square column holding the waste stack is not closed off. We can’t reach it to cover it. In the UK it is common for birds to somehow get into the roof of a house. From time to time they get into ours. At our house, they are usually starlings. It would be incomprehensible the way most American roofs are done, but the way British roofs are done it happens a lot.
One of the birds that got into ours found the top of the waste stack and fell down it.
We could hear it at the bottom of the stack, behind a cupboard. We couldn’t reach it without ripping out half the base cabinets in our kitchen to get to the wall in order to cut a hole in it. Listening to the bird struggle was heartbreaking.
Months passed… and then it happened again.
But this bird was smart and determined. It sounded like it was using its wings, feet, body and friction in the confined space between wall and pipe to inch its way up. It got from floor level in the kitchen to a wider space behind bathroom plumbing on the next floor. It didn’t have constrained space to use there, so when it tried to start up the final segment of the column, it fell all the way back down to the bottom.
If it could work its way up again high enough for me to make an opening in the side of the column, it would be free!
My wife was still working away from our home then. She had to go to work. I started creating an escape hatch. To help the bird make the exhausting climb again, I tied a piece of rough twine to the kitchen faucet, lowered it down through the opening, retreated to the other side of the kitchen and waited.
The twine quivered as the bird grabbed it and used it to help with the climb. It took a long time, but by gosh that starling succeeded. It spent a couple of minutes or so examining the kitchen (I was hiding, watching through the camera of my propped-up phone) before flying to perch on the top of the open kitchen window for a moment and then flying away.
(Starling escaping)
We realized the next bird, and the next, might not be so smart and determined. I used foam to create a thick soft platform in the column around the pipe. It’s about at the height of the bottom of the opening. It is there to gently catch any bird that falls in.
Another piece of foam seals the opening so we don’t have a draft coming through it all the time, but it’s easy to remove. It’s behind the pretty framed bird picture.
We call this the bird hatch.
During the weekend we heard another bird. This one hadn’t fallen all the way down. It had stopped in the larger space on the upper floor.
We opened the bird hatch and the kitchen window. We talked a little, inviting the bird down to escape. Then we were quiet.
After a while it followed the light and went where our sounds had come from. My wife was in the kitchen when it emerged. It flew to the dining area first, where it clung to a curtain while my wife tried to open another route to the outside. It chose not to wait for that and left through the window like its predecessor.
We’d love to close off the top of the column. Until some future building project makes that accessible, we have a bird hatch in our kitchen, hidden in plain sight.
(All photos are © 2024 by Bonnie D. Huval. The video is © 2021 by Bonnie D. Huval, taken by propping up my phone and staying out of sight.)
I didn't realize the toll avian flu was taking on birds across the pond. We are fortunate to also have a wonderful spring chorus of birds and I miss them terribly come July when many stop singing or start to migrate. The purple martins arrive early, and leave early. Mockingbirds stay year-round and will sing in winter, too - just not as robustly. They are my favorite songbird.
A thoughtful way to help our avian friends (even if it IS a starling LOL) - I can't visualize the way this stack is situated but can't you put some kind of screen over it? I had an owner-built home in Maine (that was poorly built) and had starlings nest under the studio roof. They are non-native to America and aren't well-liked by birders, but I've heard them sing some pretty cool squeaky songs - even imitating machinery from city birds.