How To Get a Bird Out of Your House

Bird in the house! Bird in the house! Oh my God, there’s a bird in the house! OK, first things first: Relax, this happens to everybody. (It does, right? It’s not just me?) I personally ran through about a million scenarios before remembering that I know absolutely nothing about birds. So while the bird continued to fly around in a crazy tizzy as though it were my fault he was trapped in my house, I called a friend who owns like 10 birds. Here’s how she said to get the bird out of the house:

• For starters, she told me to close all the doors to the room the bird was in, so it couldn’t just run amok throughout the apartment. Then I lowered the window shades so it couldn’t run smack into a closed window (the windows weren’t the kind that open).

• Next was the hardest part: I had to stand still and stop shouting and babbling and waving my hands like I’d just won American Idol. The bird didn’t like that, and that’s why he was going totally crazy and flying all over the place. I thought he was just doing that because he was a bird and that’s what birds do, but apparently birds are very sensitive, empathetic creatures.

• When the bird finally sat down and stopped looking at me like I was going to eat it, my friend told me to gently toss a towel over it. The bird couldn’t fly once under the towel. Then I picked up the bird very, very gently, so it was still under the towel, and put the bird in a cardboard box, using the towel as a cover for the box.

• I took the box outside, lifted the towel, and my new friend Ryan the bird (yes, I named him) flew off into the sun, never to be seen again.

Now that I wrote that all out, it seems much easier than when it was actually happening. Has a random bird ever flown into your house? Let us know how you dealt with it in the comments.