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you will probably never find out how the bird died or got into your parent's basement. you don't know where that bird has been though, before it died. it's probably not all that clean either. i would primarily focus on what types of bacteria or other harmful stuff could have been attributed with the carcass of a dead bird and make sure your parent's basement is free of harmful stuff that could have come from the dead bird. that's probably the most important thing, am i right?
Hi, I just found a dead bird in our basement; we had this happen three years ago. The basement is well sealed, we think! There was a dead one in our sump pump room. My husband says, "there's no way a bird could get into the basement." But there it lay. Dead. Now, there's a dead one: (the sump pump room door was open so, if it came from there, it died at the laundry tub just in front of the laundry tub; ohhhhhhhh! Ohhhhhh! I don't like this. I was about to pick up a piece of laundry and was leaning down forward, and my face came within a foot of the bird! It's a sparrow. Oh, that makes me so mad. I/we can't figure out how a bird could enter into the basement. If anyone has ideas; there's an enclosed front porch, that's sealed at the foundation - brickwork, good brickwork; theres a sealed window, glass block; and then the sump pump drain; with a lid on it, with a small amount of standing water in it. The pump's drain pipe is sealed well; but... maybe through there. By the way. I agree that a person didn't put the bird there. It could have gotten kicked by someone, accidently to land up under a table. Or, it ricochetted under? Doesn't seem right, but nature doesn't always follow the rules. Nikki
We don't know what kind of bird it was but if you watch the traffic light poles at intersections you will see starlings going into the open ended pipes/post where they build nests. there was a tufted titmouse pair that did the same on one of those free standing basketball stands.
So be aware that birds like starlings look for small openings to build a nest. It could be a dryer vent or a hole in the wall from a former in ground oil tank. As noted you do have vents for furnace. Some old houses have a brick chimney to vent the furnace, a typical entry barring the presence of a fireplace chimney.
If a window was open for short time. Door remain open while PSE&G guy was checking the meter?
Check the foundation carefully for access holes.
Anyone hear any strange sounds prior to the discovery?
House wrens, small brown birds, are quite bold and will fly into your house if your door is open for a minute.
Dead black birds don't so much foreshadow death as embody it.
Anyway, either this bird got into the basement through a hole you haven't found yet, or it got in when the door was open. The PSEG guy is very unlikely to have left it.
so i was at my parents' house over the weekend and had to go down to the basement to dig up some old books. i turned on the lights, and as i was rummaging through some boxes, i thought i saw something lying on the ground underneath an old coffee table. i looked underneath the table and, to my surprise, saw a dead black bird.
as you can imagine i was pretty grossed out, but i was also completely at a loss as to how the bird could've ended up there. the only entrances to the basement are a couple of small windows that are closed year round and the door from the foyer - and that door is closed 99% of the time, too. there is also no fireplace, air duct, or other opening from the outside.
besides, if a bird had somehow flown into the house over the past week or two, there is no way my parents wouldn't have heard the commotion from upstairs.
after carefully disposing of the bird, my dad and i discussed how the bird might have gotten inside the house. it didn't seem to have been there for more than a week or two, as there wasn't any noticeable decomposition or odor. there also didn't appear to be any visible trauma to the bird's body (sometimes birds accidentally kill themselves by flying directly into a window pane; other times, they're mauled by other animals and left for dead on the sidewalk).
my dad's conclusion? the pse&g guy planted it there (no offense to anyone who works for that company).
apparently, a worker from pse&g stopped by the house a week ago to check the gas meter in the basement. he's the only person who's been down in the basement recently besides my parents. and the location of the dead bird - hidden under a low-lying table in a dimly-lit area of the basement - couldn't have been an accident.
what gives? why would this guy do something like this? is he hoping we're a superstitious family (we're not) who'll interpret the discovery of the bird as a bad omen? is he just that petty?
ultimately it wasn't a big deal, but i was pretty ticked off that someone would stoop to such lengths over god knows what. if he's upset at my family for something, why can't he express that verbally rather than do something so foul and nasty?
This might be my 10000000th time saying this but people are really really nuts. Who the heck cares where it came from. Probably some hole and its not like it keeps happening. I might be concerned about this if it continued to happy time and time again. Crap happens in nature and with your house. PSEG has nothing to do with it so just stop it.
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