Wednesday, May 2, 2012

When Birds Build Big





So I was doing an inspection on an older home in Pleasant Grove the other day. As I walked around the home's exterior I noticed a bird perched on the gable vent (you know, that one hole up near the roof on the side of the home) and wondered if birds might be nesting in the attic.
Notice the pile in the middle and the smaller hay piles moving to the left 

 Yeah - I was pretty much right. There was no sign of this happening on the inside of the home, but birds had   pretty much made this attic their own ant hill. I didn't get too close to this bird high-rise because a flock of hundreds of startled birds in a closed space - lit up only by my cell phone and above only sheetrock - didn't sound appealing to me. The movie "The Birds" came to mind - it's an old time movie by Alfred Hitchcock. In its day it was terrifying. The gist of it was that birds attack humans and kill us all. I didn't want to be that movie.  

So I took a pic of both sides of the attic under each gable vent. The one to the south was approximately 12 feet in length, with a tall point of about 4 feet. The other side was more like a pyramid - just a big cone leading to the gable vent, also around four feet high. Much birdage.

Now typically, attics are much too hot in the summer for anything to survive, but if you have a foot or two of hay/twigs/stuff over you, who knows? It might just be slumber time. 



More information on Home Maintenance and Household Hazards at www.crossroadsengineers.com 


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