A Patch of Birds

This morning we visited my parents to see the walls stripped of wallpaper in the middle of a home repair & home redecoration project. There in the dining room was a patch of the bird wallpaper I remember from childhood--birds in foliage rectangles with their names printed beneath them: marsh hawk, boat tailed grackle, eastern mourning dove, eastern bluebird, wood thrush, mallard, cardinal. The professional wallpaper stripper and installer has left this one patch because it is problematic; it's on a different surface than the rest of the wall and won't come off without doing damage. She'll solve this problem.

But she won't do a small job, a patch, in a house where my husband is doing repair work so the owners can put their house on the market. So my husband had to do it. And you can't just patch the one trouble area (he had fixed a hole in the wall). You have to re-do the whole strip in the area affected. Sigh...  Poor him.

And poor me, sensitive wallflower, on a hopeless search for a patch of birds, a sample of the vintage wallpaper with birds and their names, to show you, dear readers. For one thing, "wallpaper" means something else these days; for another, some would consider this particular pattern, er, better off left in the past.

I did, of course, find the home decor kind of wallpaper, samples of which you see here. Page after page, I kept hoping for my particular patch of birds. But some things cannot be found.