Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia
If taylor can have a melting 7-year-old, then I'm having shape-shifting birds.
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we've got those same swallow-bat-birds here, over the canal. i like to watch them too. amazingly acrobatic.
when i was a student i did a summer internship in boston and sublet an appartment from a guy who had gone home to his parents' for the summer. one night i was reading in bed before going to sleep, when suddenly i noticed a dark shape flapping erratically around the bedroom !!! i was a bit frozen with panic for a moment, then it fluttered out of the bedroom and i leapt out of bed, and slammed my bedroom door on my way out so it couldn't get back in. i managed to chase it into the second bedroom and shut that door too so at least it was contained.
unfortunately, i then discovered my bedroom door had one of those locking doorhandles with a button lock. i had never noticed it before since i had not so far had any reason to shut that door. so at around 1 am, i was locked out of my bedroom, where all my clothes and other belongings were. i called the guy i was renting the flat from and woke him up (poor guy) and he groggily told me to call the landlord (he turned out to be on vacation as well, i think). i ended up having to get a locksmith to come and let me back into the bedroom after spending the night on the very odd sofa (it was a modular one made up individual seats pushed together, and it was shaped sort of like a row of muffins. not the most comfortable sofa to sleep on.) ; the locksmith said he *could* come right away, but he would charge me three times more for a night visit.
i also called the city bat-catcher who showed up with a pair of huge gloves and a little tiny cardboard box, and couldn't find the creature anywhere. he told me that the bat had probably gone out the window. when i pointed out that the window was closed, he pointed to the part of the frame that was a little bit crooked, and told me bats can actually collapse their skulls to fit through even a tiny little space !!
luckily, he must have been right, because i never saw that bat again for the rest of the month. although i also kept the second bedroom door shut after that, just in case.