Just one of those horror movie moments

I had to do a double take - I'd come home from work, checked the mail, read the afternoon paper and went up to the study to check my email. A quick stop at the upstairs bathroom halted me in my tracks.

There was a dead bird in the toilet.

I stared at it for a minute or two. Surely this couldn't be. How the hell did it get there. I looked around for some sign of how it might have gotten into the house, into the plumbing. No clue. I went back in the bathroom and, yep, it was still there. Still dead. After taking a moment to figure out how to get the poor thing out without actually touching I pulled it out stuffed it in the trash and took the trash out to the curb.

Thinking that I surely couldn't be the only victim of toilet-drowned birds I decided to google. Amazing how many hits the words 'dead bird in toilet' gets. The explanation was simple and logical. Critters get into the vent stack pipe on the roof of the house and sometimes can't get back out. They clog things up a bit, causing a kind of suction and, voila, the clog pops out at the closest opening, which just happens to be my upstairs toilet.

The guys at work got a chuckle out of it then one of them mentioned that he hadn't had a bird, but he did get a squirrel jammed in the vent stack. Twice. Definitely too big to pop out in the toilet he had to get a plumber to get the things out of the pipe.

This weekend I am definitely getting some screen to cover that vent.