Do birds get out of chimneys?

14 comments

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2. They’re dead. They generally can’t fly vertically for any distance.

3. Their bird friends would have waited until you were sleeping and dropped a rope for them to climb out nothing to worry about.

4. They’re gone, one way or the other.

5. We had a boarded-up fireplace in my house when growing up. It was in my sister’s bedroom. She was around 10 and had quite a typical, pink, soft toys, posters of pop groups (Steps, Spice Girls) tweeny sort of bedroom.

   One day in early spring, she had noticed a few flies in her room. My dad came to look at it, and the flies seemed to be congregating around the fireplace. My dad pulled back the boarding from fireplace and out came this huge, black, buzzing, deluge of flies. I can still hear the buzzing noise of what must have been upwards of 500 files came streaming into the room. My sister was not, as you can imagine, particularly impressed as her rather carefully-curated room was infested by this buzzing mass.

   My parents got the windows opened and the door shut very quickly! I can’t remember how they cleared the room – if the flies went out into the world or if they needed flyspray. I do remember there being quite a few around the house for the next week or two.

   Anyway when the room was less minging-to-be-in, my dad went back in and found the rotting corpse of a crow behind the fireplace. Must have fallen down, died and then the flies fed happily on its flesh.

   TLDR: they died and you need to get a chimney sweep to get them out of there to avoid flymageddon

6. If victorian era children couldn’t get out I wouldn’t fancy a birds chance.

7. You’ll get your answer in a week or two if it starts to smell.

8. Get that sorted out sooner rather than later, otherwise you might just find that you’ll start to get an ungodly stink on Christmas Eve that’ll put you off eating all the food you’ve just spent a fortune buying, and if the source isn’t easily accessible, it’ll cost you a fortune to get a sweep out over the holiday period.

9. When I opened up the fireplace in our house I found a couple of bird skeletons.

10. They are dead. I had a bird fall down the chimney and got stuck like that. In the end I ripped out the front and rescued it and fixed it all up. They cannot get the angle to fly up like that

11. Wait for the maggots dropping onto your hearth and/or the thousands of flies.
    Then you’ll know if they’re dead or escaped.

12. Probably dead

13. An owl once fell down our chimney and came out in the boiler room… a room we almost never go into.

14. I removed two original Victorian fireplaces from my house (they were poorly covered over and left to rust so couldn’t save them unfortunately) and behind both were at least three bird skeletons.

    So no, they can’t get out