Perhaps the bird flew in while the external grille was off, and the customer (or someone else) replaced the grill himself - might have been several days ago (I don't know how long it takes a bird to starve to death).
I've had birds fly into the kitchen before now. I do not have a cooker hood though, and normally the minute you appear they beat a hasty retreat. Brian
but i have heard the tale of fully grown snails being extracted from cars rear light clusters as they were ratteling around, in those cases the baby snails get in through the drainage holes in the bottom of the light clusters, then they grow eating up any minute bits of moss/algie or other nutrients in there, then die of starvation or are cooked by the heat of the bulbs.
but that kind of thing wouldn't work for a bird..... except a the few that hatch fully formed and able to feed themselves when they hatch like quails and most of the duck species.... but none of them can fly straight after hatch, and quails have no direction control in their short flight (speaking of chinese painted quails of which i have a few)
True enough with the latter Mk egg that Mother Nature has developed over the past 500 to 3500 million years (an Egg Mk 5000 or later?).
The advent of the egg predates the arrival of the bird species known colloquially as "The Chicken" by at least 500 million years, predating its dinosaur ancestors by almost that same amount of time.
I think we can safely regard the hypothesis of a bird hatching out of an egg 'accidently' laid in the cooker hood vent ducting as a non-starter (you'd still have to account for how a fully grown hen bird of any species could have got into the ducting).
A more likely, if improbable, route would seem to be ingress into the kitchen (open door or window) from where the bird may have flown up into the cooker hood and found or tore itself a gap in the filter to squeeze through, possibly perching itself amongst or just below the blades of the fan (the bird must have still been alive when the cooker hood fan was turned on - sound of squawks and then the fuse popping).
TMH didn't state whether the bird was found wedged into the fan blades (fuse popping event) or whether it looked as though it had signs of injury consistent with being sucked through the fan blades which could have provided the 'hard evidence' in support of the "ingress via the kitchen" hypothesis as the most likely route to its demise.
A closer inspection of the cooker hood filter could have revealed a more probable point of entry by the bird which may have provided TMH with sufficient evidence to provide a satisfactory enough answer to his question.
On the basis of the evidence provided, ingress via the kitchen seems to be the most likely scenario (unless TMH has simply underestimated the ability of a small bird to squeeze past improbably small gaps in the vent cowling).
From all the available evidence, the vent cover must have been removed or dislodged sufficiently to allow the bird to gain entry sometime within the previous 24 to 48 hours.
Your description ('chimney') suggests a flat roof vent. Either the owner or his agent had refitted the loose wheather cowling some time during the preceding 24/48 hours totally unaware that a bird was trapped in the vent or else some person or persons unknown of a psycopathic nature had introduced a captured wild bird into the vent for malicious reasons.
This last is pure conjecture if the owner hadn't done any such maintenance prior to your visit but there seems very little else left to explain the situation.
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