Grouse vs. window

Hi Folks,
Curtis here. I am going to use this blog post to tell the story of the most interesting thing I have seen at Shekinah. It is a story that begins somewhere around the end of November...

It's Monday morning around 8:30. The sun hasn't really come up yet so it's still pretty dark. I make my way down to the Timber Lodge to check things out and put some stuff away that we had set out for a group of quilters who had occupied the Timber Lodge for the weekend. I go in through the back door and, as I look up to the end of the hallway, it looks as if those quilters had left glitter all over the floor of room 22. "How inconsiderate", I thought to myself. They could have at least asked for a vacuum to clean up. As I approached the room and turned on the light I realized that it was not glitter but broken glass all over the floor and there was a pretty good sized hole in the window on the opposite side of the room. Oh, great. Somebody threw a rock through the window. Should I call the police to come check it out? No, I will start by getting Katie down here to help clean up and we will figure out what to do. So I radio for Katie to come down and, 
in the meantime, I put my shoes on and go into the room. On the far side of the room from the broken window there lies................. a dead grouse. No feathers lying around so we can rule out any flapping around before death. This thing died instantly after crashing through the window. The triple pane window! And there is glass everywhere. On the floor to every corner of the room, on the bottom and top bunks, under the beds, out the door, and around the corner. This grouse obviously flew through the window with considerable force. Which leads us to our next question: how did a grouse, with its stubby little wings, build up enough speed to crash through a triple pane window 20 feet off the ground? That we may never know the answer to but I suspect it worked its way up the trees opposite the window using small flights and then dive-bombed the window from above. 

 However it accomplished the feat, it left a huge mess. Katie and I spent over an hour in there picking up pieces of glass and vacuuming. Then we took some pictures and closed up the window with cardboard. Later that day, Kristy (former executive director) and I went back and spent another 45 minutes or so cleaning up with a slightly more powerful vacuum and found glass that Katie and I had missed the first time around. It is really amazing how far that glass could go! Someone suggested to me that perhaps somebody just broke the window as a prank or by accident and placed a dead grouse in the room to cover up their actions. I like the creativity in the answer but there is no way that grouse didn't come flying through the window at breakneck speed. 

 
Fast forward to Jan. 23rd and our replacement glass finally arrives. And it is a good thing because the weather is nice for installation and that cardboard over the window was not great at holding back the cold over the weeks that it was required to do so. I believe it was very lucky that nobody was sleeping in that room at the time the grouse went through. I imagine that would cause quite a scare.