Bird Trouble

Birds are beautiful here in Nigeria,

It’s just a fact; I’ve seen so many colorful, vibrant birds here that I’ve almost lost count. But every time I’d spot one, it’d quickly dart away, screaming into the sky. Well, a week ago, the whole family finally got to look at one up close! Here’s what happened:

We were sitting around in the house, when we heard a peculiar sound coming from the study area, COMING FROM THE CEILING. At first we had no idea what it was, but for a while I was looking at our roof like it was alive after that. And you would do that same thing to if every time you went in your study to watch a show or something the roof started thumping out Morse code to you. At first we thought that the problem might have been rats, but why would rats be living in the roof anyway? And besides, the thumping went on in broad daylight as well, so that didn’t sound so likely. Then one day, my father was outside in the backyard, for some unkown reason, and he saw a bright blue bird, flying out of a little hole in our roof. He only saw it for a few seconds, but he said that it was really pretty, and it’s beak was huge. We all wanted to see it, (we also wanted it to go away,) so we devised a plan. Whenever any of us heard the thumping on the roof, my Dad and I would go outside, climb up our ladder, which we had leaned on the side of the house over the hole, and use our fishing net to catch it. It sounded pretty easy in our heads, and we were all like “yeah!” and “okay,” but it wasn’t a walk in the park. The first time we tried we stayed there for like forever and nothing came out. The second time, we learned to things: that birds are smart, and that this bird had a boy/girlfriend. We were up there on the ladder, when we noticed that there was another blue bird watching us on a palm tree. It had flown out just before we were coming, but the thumping was still loud in there, which meant that another bird was still inside there, pecking away at our ceiling. After we tried scaring it into our net (we would bang on the side of the roof and hope that it would fly into the net), we kind of gave up and started climbing back down. And the minute we had reached the ground, that little blue bird that had been resting on the palm tree started screaming it’s song to the roof, and then started flying away. The other bird got the message, and darted out of there after it. We weren’t very happy. But luckily, the third time was a big success; we used our scaring technique, and got one of the birds that was in our roof! It was…wait, lemme not describe it. I’ll just show it to you: I told you my dad said it’s beak was too big for it’s body. We let it go after everyone saw it. My mom looked at it through the window. But anyway, we let it go, and we haven’t had anymore thumping problems since. And guess what? The minute we let the darn thing go is when my Dad thinks about what happened and said, “hmm, maybe that bird wasn’t destroying our roof after all. It could have just been eating the bugs.” Wow. Thanks A LOT father. Real quick thinking.

Signing off

The Traveler

P.S. I can't show it to you right right now because of technical difficulties (in other words Multilinks Telkom), so I'll post the pics as my next post or something.