A Georgia woman used an umbrella to scare a vulture out of her home after the scavenging bird entered through an open dog door.
On Saturday, Vernalisa Rougeux and her fiance, Jake Totri, left their Roswell home for a quick bite to eat, leaving the dog door open for their dog Georgia, who was taking a nap when they left.
When they returned just 15 minutes later, Mr. Totri noticed an intruder by the back door: a vulture.
The pair initially feared that the vulture was eating a deceased Georgia, but those worries were assuaged when the dog, woken up by their return and reaction to the bird, ambled out onto their porch.
After Mr. Totri emerged from the house himself and showed Ms. Rougeux a video of the vulture, she decided to take action to evict the bird.
“Once I saw the vulture on the couch, I just took off running to try to do something. I needed to be bigger than the bird to scare it away,” Ms. Rougeux told Fox Weather. She grabbed an umbrella, opening and closing it multiple times in order to spook the vulture.
The vulture was successfully scared, but it began to fly around the house erratically, ramming into closed windows in an attempt to escape.
“At one point, it flew upstairs, grabbed onto the stair handrail and couldn’t grip it, apparently, and just slid all the way down,” Ms. Rougeux explained to Fox Weather.
After five minutes of chaos, the bird extricated itself from the house and went to perch on the roof of a neighboring home.
As for why the bird swooped down and went through the doggy door in the first place? Ms. Rougeux says that a stuffed bear belonging to her daughter was near the door.
The vulture did not have enough smell while outside to tell that the stuffed bear was an object, and apparently viewed it only as an inert animal shape within its range.
The couple spent the next two days sanitizing the home, and Ms. Rougeux says she’ll not soon forget her temporary avian adversary — particularly after rewatching video she made using doorbell and camera footage of the incident.
The video “just seemed unreal — I was just in shock watching! It was the craziest thing ever,” Ms. Rougeux told WXIA-TV.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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