Operation birb freedom: a true silly story of unnecessary bravery

A little adventure from my life back in 2021, finally polished up for the blog…

Wife and I rescued a birb from a house that was being demolished. It was trapped inside and frantically tapping on the windows, flying back and forth, clearly freaked out. Oh noes!

Birb? “For those not terminally online,” writes Asher Elbein for Audubon.org, “birb is affectionate internet-speak for birds. Damned entertaining article, see more in the footnote.¹

On with the show. And the snow. The scene was very snowy, because this was Christmas 2021.

Across the street from Trapped-Birb House.

Operation Birb Freedom required some exploration and minor risks, and thus we feel rather heroic. We don’t get out much. I once felt heroic for holding a door for someone for an unusually long time. “I am such a nice guy,” I proudly thought.

So my bar for “heroic” is arguably a bit low. Also “risks.”

The site was fenced off and we were no doubt technically trespassing, so the neighbours could have called the cops, though I doubt it would have amounted to anything. It’s not like our skin has a colour or anything. There was plenty of ice around, but no ICE, not in Canada.

COP: What are you doing?

US: Trying to rescue that poor birb!

COP: Aw! Merry Christmas, nice people!

Or, at worst, “Well, that’s a nice idea, but I am going to have to ask you to leave. I will just take care of that birb for you.” Because Canada!

That’s assuming a cop could have even gotten there, because it was a proper Snow Day, a rare and traffic-crippling event in Vancouver.

The other more legit risk: it’s also possible we could have impaled ourselves on demolition site junk obscured by snow. A trip to the ER for a tetanus shot was on the menu, where we doubtless could have died while waiting for service.

But we had to rescue the birb! (“I am such a nice guy. Heroic even.”)

We saw no way to access the front of the house, and so we hiked all the way around to the back of the house via the alley, much like Amundsen trudging across Antarctica. We scrambled over a modest barrier and poked around in the back yard for a while, mostly looking for a way to access the front of the house where the birb was focusing all its escape efforts … but there was just no clear, safe path. Some stairs had been removed. I considered more scrambling, but the possibility of slipping/bashing/gashing there was a little too obvious.

Trapped-Birb House itself.

Perhaps a back window, then? I decided to widen a hole in an already-broken window, using a frosty brick. In my entire well-behaved life, I have never broken a house window in any context. It felt good, you know? Something inside me changed that day. I have a new title: Breaker of Windows.

The birb ignored us and continued pecking and flapping at the front window.

So we gave up. Operation Birb Freedom was a failure! Melancholy, we trudged back around the block and returned to the front of the house to pay our respects to the doomed birb. Unless it flew out the back window.

That’s when I realized that there was a huge, gaping hole in the site fence — a proper gap you could just bloody walk through into the front yard. How did we miss that on first inspection? 🤦🏻‍♂️

So I tramped through the front yard snow to the window the birb was fixated on… and just … swung it open. It was unlatched and easy to move. If I had done this initially, Operation Birb Freedom would have taken, oh, 90 seconds?

The birb flew out after moments. Ta-da! Mission accomplished! Achievement unlocked! Suck it, Amundsen!

Best thing about this entire experience for me? The weird clarity of my delusion that the birb understood that we were watching it, trying to get our attention and hold it, begging for the help we so courageously and selflessly attempted to provide.