Vent birds

For the past month or more, my morning routine has been punctuated by episodes of apparent insanity.

It starts out peaceful enough. I'm at the kitchen table, breakfast within reach and cat curled on my lap while I work on the laptop. Sounds of the neighborhood waking up and going off to work filter through the shutters along with a gentle wash of morning sun.

Then without warning, I spring from my seat, startling Cat into hiding, and dash into the laundry room. I poke the start button on the dryer frantically a few times, making the unit grumble and vibrate but not catch enough to start. A racket erupts within the wall, then sudden silence follows as a flash of black streaks past the window.

It's the vent birds again.

A determined and fearless group of grackles has been hard at work building nests in our dryer's exhaust vent for weeks now. Despite my repeated attempts to scare them off with dryer noise or even blow away their stocks of pine straw with a full dry cycle, they just keep coming back.

The vents have flaps designed to open only when we need them and keep feathered riffraff out at all other times. But grackles are not your ordinary birds. They are stubborn, aggressive, and smart as heck. First they figured out how to prop the dryer flap open with a twig. When the twig broke, they learned to dive using the rain gutter as a launching spot, swooping down and then sharply up to get under the edge of the flap. That's when I started firing at them periodically with blasts of noise and heat.

For a long time, I was content to just keep running the intruders off the property. While it was annoying--there were days when I got almost no work done between spasms of bird-blasting--the method seemed to be effective enough.

Then we had a stretch of warm, dry weather. I hung laundry on the line four days in a row. On the fifth day it rained, so I chucked the wet laundry in the dryer. Twice. Three times. After more than double the normal drying time, towels were still damp.

Doggone birds!

This past Friday, T decided to outmaneuver them once and for all by cleaning out the remaining nest material, then stapling a screen over the open vent.

It was a nice theory.

It took removing the flexible duct from inside and reaching in from the outside, a makeshift duct-and-wall snake, a shop-vac, and three and a half hours up and down a ladder in the sun for him to get the nest out. Twigs, string, leaves, bits of plastic bag and other litter, handful upon handful of pine straw--it just kept coming. Fortunately, it was all nest and no bird. Finally, screen in place, he called the job done.

But take a second look at that picture. See the vent on the left? That's the exhaust for the downstairs bathroom. It has a good, tight flap.

Yet I hear a suspicious rustling in the wall....