Polperro chimney sweep mistakes owl 'chilling out' in wood burner for a log
A chimney sweep on his last job of the day in Polperro, Cornwall, thought he'd spotted a log in a wood-burning stove – until it turned out to be a live owl.
Most of us check the stove for a stray log before lighting it. Rob Stead checked one in Polperro, Cornwall, and the log checked him back.
The 36-year-old self-employed chimney sweep, who is from Looe and works across South East Cornwall, was on his last job of the day at a Polperro home whose owner was away for four weeks, BBC News reports. He put down his sheets, looked into the living-room wood-burning stove and saw what he took to be a log.
“I thought it was a log laying there,” he told the BBC. It was not a log. It was a live owl, apparently just “chilling out” and peering at him through the stove glass.
Real photo: Polperro harbour, Cornwall (April 2025) – not the house in the story. Photo: Mr Ignavy / CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Geograph / Wikimedia Commons).
When he shone his torch in, the “log” started flapping. The owl had come down a six-inch flue liner and round the baffle plate, and its wingspan was simply too big to get back out the way it came in. The old bird guard on the chimney had been damaged by the weather.
AI illustration – the moment the log blinked. Not the real sweep or owl.
Rob rang the homeowner, who asked him to get rid of the uninvited lodger. So he shut the doors, wrapped the owl in the customer’s fresh towels and carried it out to the back garden. “They told me to crack on,” he said. “I’m just happy I remembered to put them in the wash before I left!”
Released in the garden, the owl glided to the corner of the garden and, a little later, flew off – presumably to find a chimney with a working bird guard.
AI illustration – spot Gaz, our gorilla, hiding somewhere in this picture.
“I thought crikey, this will never happen again, I better take a picture,” Rob said – and the BBC, never one to miss a pun, signed off with the advice: owl-ways check your stove before lighting it. The story was also covered by Cornwall Live and the Cornish Times, and popped up again in a BBC round-up of the strangest things sweeps find in chimneys.
Reported by BBC News (Britta Zeltmann, 27 Oct 2026), with Cornwall Live and the Cornish Times.
