After returning from his morning walk in Paris Ris on Saturday, 63-year-old retiree Steven Tan found a note under the windscreen wiper of his car.
“Hi!! There is a bird inside your bonnet,” read the note.
Sure enough, Mr. Tan discovered a pigeon stuck behind the grill of his Honda HR-V.
The bird was frantically trying to escape through gaps in the grill, but could not get out.
“When I first saw the note, I thought a bird had flown in when I opened the boot to get my hat,” he told Coconuts.
“I was baffled how it managed to get in there. Some years ago, a cat crawled in and got locked in my car,” he said.
Concerned that the bird would die from the heat of the car’s engine or from dehydration, Tan called animal rescue group ACRES.
How the bird managed to sneak into the tight space between the grill and the radiator is a mystery.
“I am no expert in pigeon behavior. Maybe someone played a prank and forced the bird inside,” Tan said.
ACRES volunteer Serene Lek arrived on the scene at about 11am on Saturday to rescue the pigeon.
With the help of her husband, she used a plastic grabber to maneuver the bird into a position where she could grab it from a sealed section behind the bumper.
The stressed bird was retrieved from the car uninjured and later set free in an area where there were other pigeons for it to hang out with and share its ordeal.
Lek speculated that the bird had entered the car from underneath, and somehow crawled to the front end of the vehicle.
In January, a pigeon landed on the bonnet of a moving vehicle and hitched a ride around the city, but the species has not been known to venture inside the guts of a car.
