Dead bird in the stove

Winter is coming.  Don't you feel the chill in the air?

Lately our temperature has ranged from the teens overnight to the 50s during the day.   The water in the livestock's water troughs freezes over each night.  The garden hose I use to refill the troughs didn't thaw today until mid-afternoon.

The house is cooling down too.  The temperature inside this morning was 53 degrees.  So tonight I lit a fire in the wood stove for the first time this season.  As the fire started I checked the ash pan and found a dead bird.  Ah... so that is what happened!

A few years ago one summer a bird -a flicker - fell down the chimney and walked into the stove whereupon its tapping on the glass window alerted me to the bird.  I used a blanket to take the live bird from the stove to outside where it flew away.

A few weeks ago I heard sounds coming from the wood stove or the pipe leading from the stove to the chimney. Another bird?  I checked the stove and found nothing.  I even took the pipe apart and found nothing but a yellowjacket.  Oh!  The noise must have been made by the yellowjacket inside the pipe.   I hadn't checked the ash pan as the space between the stove's burn area and the pan is so small.

Good thing I found the bird before the stove got hot!