Let the Chirps Fall Where They May

In publishing the following story I may be giving credence to yet another urban folk tale. For one thing, it sounds faintly familiar, which is usually a fatal sign.

However, unlike most urban folk tales, it is plausible. And more in its favor, it supposedly happened to the man who told me the story. Usually, the story happened to the teller’s aunt, or his aunt’s cousin. The true protagonist is always at least one step removed.

This story comes to me from O. J. Vogl of Torrance. Vogl is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, which suggests that he is a man of some mettle, though it is no guarantee of his veracity.

Vogl calls his story “The Bird in the Attic,” and his telling of it recalls the late James Thurber. Vogl says that a few days ago he heard a chirping in his attic. “It persisted, intermittently.” His wife, Ellen, heard it too. They decided it must be a bird.

Vogl phoned the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as any humane person would have done. They asked him where the bird was. When he told them it was in the attic, they said their people could not go into attics, but they would send someone out to appraise the situation.

“An hour later a badge-wearing woman arrived and verified that there was indeed a bird in the attic.” She wondered how the bird could have got in. Vogl speculated that it may have got in through a hole where solar heating pipes had been installed. The woman said her insurance did not cover going into attics. She said she would call the Beverly Hills rescue squad.

She called later and said the rescue squad would arrive sometime after 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Vogl waited. They did not arrive. In the afternoon the chirping stopped. Vogl thought the bird might have perished in the heat.

He mounted a ladder and opened the trap. The heat surged out. He flashed a light about but saw no bird. “Just in case,” he said, “I put a dish of bird seed and a dish of water near the trap opening.”

The next morning they were relieved to hear the chirping again. Vogl called the SPCA again, told them what had happened and asked them to call the rescue squad again. Evidently they did.

About an hour later two men came. One looked in the attic with a flashlight. For some reason, the man looked at his watch. Perhaps timing the chirps. Then he moved the ladder down the hall and opened the cover of the smoke detector. He removed the batteries and dropped them in Vogl’s hand.

“There’s your bird,” he said to Vogl.

With much embarrassment, Vogl remembered reading, two years earlier, when he had had the smoke detector installed, that when the batteries were becoming weak the detector would emit a chirp every 30 seconds.

He apologized for the trouble he had caused. The men from the rescue squad said it was all right, that it happened to them frequently.

I am inclined to believe that Vogl’s story is quite true. It may be an old story, however, in that something similar has happened to many other people. A chirping smoke detector is very likely to be mistaken for a bird.

However, it is a pleasant story, and it has some of the quality of an urban folk tale without the macabre aspects common to those stories; for example, the one about the alligators in the New York sewers and the one about the Israeli woman who dropped a cockroach in the toilet and doused it with pesticide, to the irritation, to say the least, of her husband, who later, while using the toilet, dropped a lighted cigarette into the bowl and exploded the pesticide.

As I have been writing this it has come to me, also with some embarrassment, where I’ve heard the story before. Years ago one of our sons gave us a smoke detector. Not being handy at the installation of such devices, I put it temporarily down in the garage. A year or two later we heard a chirping in the garage. We, too, thought it must be a trapped bird. Fortunately, we discovered the source before we called the rescue squad.