I noticed on the weekend that we had a bird going into the upstairs bathroom vent. We still have some of those stupid slat style vent covers in places I haven’t been able to reach easily – the upstairs bathroom vent being on of those. These slat style vents are easy for a small bird to pry open and get into.
Anyhoo, The Boss went upstairs into the bathroom yesterday (we don’t tend to use that bathroom very often) and noticed a horrible smell and what appeared to be bird poop on the floor, all of it coming from the vent fan. Oh crap! At first from her description I thought that the floor was covered in bird crap but it turned out to only be a relatively small amount. We were going to call in a pest control company but after a few minutes we figured it was worth it to take a look and see if we could fix the problem ourselves.
When I got home, I went upstairs and took a look. There was definitely something poop-like in the vent and there also appeared to be nesting materials. I slowly pulled the vent cover off and there wasn’t really anything interesting other than a mass of brown crap. Oh, and the stench was crazy.
Once we got prepared with cleaning stuff and some bird trapping gear (just in case), I proceeded to dismantle the fan. While dismantling the fan, we had a few white worms fall out. Oh yeah, maggots. Double crap. Now I started to realize what was in the fan. It wasn’t bird poop, it was a dead bird. Fantastic. I proceeded to pull out what was left of the bird (looked like a young one that must have fallen into the vent fan instead of going out to the end of the pipe that leads outside) and cleaned up all of the gunk.
Here’s hoping that there aren’t anymore birds (dead or alive) in the vent as I sealed up the outside opening for now. I’ll have to get up in the attic at some point in the next couple weeks to pull off the vent line and clean it out.
So what did we learn from this? Don’t put those stupid slat style vent covers on your house. Use the good old covered vent style that blow the air downwards. Most birds won’t be able to get a perch to be able to push those flapper style ones open.
