Anyone who follows me on Twitter, or is a friend on Facebook, is no doubt tired of hearing about this whole sordid affair, but I have to get this down somewhere.

Last night I went out to drive my brother and his wife downtown (they wanted to go play pool, didn’t want to leave their car in town as they’d be drinking, and cabs in this town are ridiculous – although they would be taking a cab home because I like to go to sleep). When I got home, Rob and I settled down to watch a couple of episodes of Stephen Fry In America.

About 20 minutes in (Stephen was hypnotising a lobster in Maine), Rob decided to go downstairs to get some clothes out of the pile of clean laundry on top of the dryer. Yes, yes, I’m a terrible housefrau. He’d been down there for a couple of minutes, presumably folding things (or maybe just trying to find underpants in the three-foot pile of clothing), when all of a sudden I heard a loud “GAH!”, and then complete silence.

“Rob, what’s up?”
“Louise! Come down here! There’s a bird!”
“What?”
“There’s a bird down here! C’mon!”
“A real bird?” (I have to qualify this: Rob and I often joke about birds, because he knows I hate birds, so we’re always like “Oh, birds. They’re always f*cking around” and making up stories about how birds are plotting and stuff. Okay this doesn’t sound funny here but it is, really).
“No, a Lego bird! C’mere!”

At this point I only sort of half believed him. Then I opened the basement door and A BIRD flapped across the doorway. FLAPPED. With its flappy horrible WINGS and BEAK and CLAAAAAAAWS and THOSE LITTLE BIRD EYES.

I shrieked (I’m sure the neighbours appreciated that at 11:30 at night), slammed the door shut, and proceeded to go into hysterics. I was literally crying and hyperventilating.
If you know me, you know I’m not a particularly panicky type of girl (outwardly – inwardly, I worry about everything, all the time), but this? This totally set me off.

I really really really can’t handle birds. I don’t know why. I mean… if they’re outside, I can be outside with them, in their general vicinity. If they get too close I get a little freaked out, but I’m usually fine with it. Because there’s a whole world out there for them to fly away into. And birds in cages? Like budgies? Fine. But a crazy blackbird flapping around in my basement? NO NO NO.

Rob, the brave soul, stayed down there with THE BIRD. I stayed on the other side of the door, listening to him. He had me go Google what to do with a bird in the basement. Surprisingly there aren’t many results for the Google query “THERE IS AN EFFING BIRD IN THE GODDAMN BASEMENT OH MY GOD OHHHHH SHIT WHAT DO I DO I AM GOING TO DIE“. Even when I calmed down and just typed in “Bird in basement get it out”, there wasn’t much to go on (I will add here that Rob was completely disappointed with the lack of Google bird ninja tips). The main consensus was “Open a window, turn out the light, and the bird will fly toward the sunlight“.

Yeah. Well. Have I mentioned that it was 11:30 at night? And there was no effing way I was going to let a bird stay in our basement until morning! First of all, how did that bird get in there? Did it fly down the chimney? In through the dryer vent? What? We had no windows open. So obviously this was some kind of super stealthy bird who would no doubt do sneaky terrible things in our basement and could probably figure out how to get into the rest of the house – where I was already desperately trying not to lose my shit – and OH HELLS NO that was not going to happen.

I listened to Rob for the next few minutes. He had opened the window (which, in the middle of January, with a -25C windchill, must not have been pleasant) and was trying to herd the bird toward it (I’m not sure how, I imagine it involved running and flapping his arms, or perhaps a towel, because when he came upstairs later he had a towel in his hands), and trying to convince the bird that going outside was really the best idea. “Damnit bird! What are you doing in here? Get out! You don’t live here! This is not your home! Go outside! No! What? Fuck! What are you doing? Why are you going that way? OUTSIDE IS THIS WAY! GO THIS WAY!”

Birds. They don’t listen to reason.

At one point, I called tremulously through the basement door, “Robbie, do you want to take a picture of the bird? I could slide my cellphone under the door and you can use that camera”. “Um… well maybe you could give me the real camera? I don’t think your camera phone will work”. “But then I would have to open the door!” “It’s okay, the bird is all the way over on the other side of the basement. It’s not going to come this way, it’s too scared of people”. Yeah, right. Sneaky catburglar bird with all its stealth was probably just pretending to be scared and then the second I opened the door ZOOM it would be all IN MY FACE and I would be in cardiac arrest and dead and it could take over the whole house like it had always planned. But, Internet, I did it! I opened the door, stuck the camera on the top step, screamed for good measure, and closed the door again – all within about half a second.

I retreated to the living room (which is within 5 feet of the basement door) and sat on the sofa, listening to the further sounds of Rob’s bird-herding. It was not going well. At one point, after about 20 minutes he said something to the bird like “Dude, come on! Just go outside! I don’t want to have to stun or kill you!” at which point I screamed “Don’t kill it!” (NOT, might I point out, because I felt any type of pity for the sneaky bird bastard, but because if he knocked it down, it might land on some of our stuff, and who wants to own anything that’s tainted by Devil Bird? Okay, and because I didn’t like the idea of him killing it). “I’m not really going to kill it – I just want to trick it into thinking its life is in danger!” “Oh! Okay! But don’t use anything I own to hit it with!” At this point I imagine that my beloved was thinking very nasty thoughts about me being a backseat bird-herder.

Several minutes later, my husband gave a loud victory whoop. “It’s gone!” “Is it really gone?” “Yes! Come down!” “NO! Did you catch it?” “No, it finally flew out the window!” “CLOSE THE WINDOW IN CASE IT COMES BACK!” “It’s not coming back! And I already closed the window! You should come down!” “WHY DO YOU KEEP TRYING TO GET ME TO COME DOWNSTAIRS? ARE YOU TRYING TO TRICK ME?” “Okay, fine I’m coming up!”

I have to admit that for a few brief moments, I convinced myself that the bird was still down there, and had hypnotized my husband (BIRDS ARE SUPERNATURAL) into pretending it was gone so that it could enact its evil plan, next time I went downstairs, of SCARING THE JESUS OUT OF ME and becoming the Boss of Everything… but then I let Rob come up into the house.

And the excitement was over.

Now. I know, first of all, that people will say “The bird would be more scared of you than you are of it” but that is simply not possible. If I had to choose between oh, being in a room full of severed heads for two days, or in a room with one bird for 10 seconds? It would not be an easy choice. A bird would probably choose to be in a room full of severed heads, but only because BIRDS EAT THAT STUFF.

I still haven’t figured out how it got in, which leads me to believe that it will eventually come back, bringing its evil birdy brethren along for the ride. I did manage to go down into the basement once today, but this was after I made Rob go down and send me up the all-clear. And it’s been a few hours since then, so I’m pretty sure the bird is back down there and I can’t go back.

GAAAAAAAAAAAH BIRDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh. Photos? Yeah. I am SO not putting them on my blog. Here, you can look at them on my Flickr stream.