This is another situation that took place in the little Cottage my friend Rock and I rented our junior and senior years of college. It had a perfect location in a small valley just below a girl's dorm, and there are other stories to be told about that. We had some great parties there and sometimes we had overnight guests. This story is about a situation that threatened the friendly atmosphere we tried to maintain at our house. If your house has a hospitality defect it might deter some people from spending the night that you really would like to have stay.

Everything was fine until spring. You know, sap goes up in the trees, hormones rage, critters scurry, and birds sing. The latter example was the problem. The birds. Would you be likely to want to spend the night in a house where you were awakened by birds yelling from the basement at sunup? So Rock and I proceeded to set a plan in motion to protect our humble home from the Winged Screech Beasts. All we had to do was figure out what to do.

The cottage had two floors. The upstairs had two bedrooms and a living room. The first floor was a finished basement that was one big open room the same size as the upstairs. It too could be used as bedrooms. The bathroom was an enclosed room also located here. The kitchen area was also in the basement. The basement walls were cement block. We heated with natural gas and the stove vented through a hole in a cement block. The hole was not open to the inside, but there was a big gap in a cement block on the outside of the house where the stovepipe came through.

Upon investigating we found that a female starling, by entering through the opening around the stovepipe, had built her nest inside the hallow space in a cement block. No doubt it was nice and warm there and a great place to incubate eggs. The eggs weren't a problem but the squawking of the hatchlings sounded like dozens of fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard. The birds had to go.

There are lots of ways we could have accomplished this. We decided on a plan that would be fast, cheap, and complete. Rock had traveled south over Christmas and had some fairly good-sized firecrackers he obtained at one of the many firework stands. We figured about 3 of them would do the job. So we fastened 3 of them together and fashioned a long fuse that would delay the ignition. On "D" day we went into the back of the house where the stove vented and put the plan in motion. We waited for the female starling to fly out of the nest to retrieve some food for her brood. Then Rock slipped the string of firecrackers into the hole, hung the fuse down, and I lighted it. We ran a safe distance back and waited. Finally it went off. The blast was muffled quite a bit but the result was conclusive. Feathers, twigs, and pieces parts flew out of the hole along with a lot of smoke. Ding, dong the birds were dead. No more noisy mornings interrupting a much-needed sleep after a long night. This goes to show what men will do to prevent things from interfering with the necessities of life they hold so dear.