The bird bag man.

Being in the hospital is really, really boring. Thankfully Andrew brought me my laptop and I can 'borrow' a weak wireless signal from somewhere nearby or I'd be going entirely insane.

Before I had my laptop, though, I was extremely bored and mostly confined to bed because the morning sickness has been so very, very, crappily bad. That meant a lot of flipping through magazines and staring out the window beside my bed. There's a building next door and I can look out onto its rooftop. So yesterday morning when I saw a man walk out onto the roof with two very large white cloth sacks I figured something worth watching was going to happen, if only because I hadn't seen anything happen on that roof up until then.

He had a black toolbox of some sort, and the bags already had something in them that had the bottoms weighted enough that he was walking while holding them up in the air. He made his way across the roof to a crate-looking thing that I hadn't really taken much notice of before. The crate seemed to be made of wire and when he reached it I realized that there were a number of pigeons inside it, as they started flapping wildly.

He set down his bags, lifted the top of the crate slightly, reached in, grabbed a bird and SHOVED IT IN ONE OF THE BAGS. He continued grabbing birds and shoving them in the bag, being really rough and brisk.

As you might imagine I was horrified. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. At that moment the day nurse came in and told me to come with her for a bit and all I could do was point to the rooftop and blurt, "There's a man putting birds in a bag!"

She was all, whah? She looked, though, and was just as weirded out as I was. We agreed that whatever was going on was highly disturbing, but she'd come to get me for a reason and we had to go. By the time I got back to my room the bird bag man had moved to another wire crate, having emptied the first, and was just finishing up shoving birds into the second bag. He heaved up the bags, which were eerily still at this point, and left the way he'd come.

I was still horrified. Why was he putting birds in bags? The crates were traps, from what I could tell. I saw that after he'd left more pigeons were pecking around the crates, so I assume he'd put out some kind of feed or something to entice them.

A few minutes later the day nurse came back with someone else (the floor nurse, maybe?) and got me to tell her about the creepy bird bag man. They went off and called security in the building next door, then came back and told me that they'd asked them to check it out since the sight of guys shoving birds in bags like that was disturbing to patients and staff.

Uh, yeah. They also asked me to keep an eye out for the return of the bird bag man, but I haven't seen him again yet.