What is with us and Birds?!?

Maddie and Jake bellowed for me this afternoon and said there was a bird in the garage. They didn't sound terribly distressed and I was in the middle of something, so I said I would be there in a minute. I thought it was probably just walking around the edge of the entrance or something.

Nope. The bird was up above the open garage door. Then it was in the shelves Mike has up about the garage door. Then it was sitting on the large pipes hanging on the side of the walls. Then it was on the other side in Mike's tool area. Then it was flying over my head and heading to the other side - again. I grabbed one of the kid's winter shovels and suddenly I had three kids screaming at me to not kill it! (Maddie had a friend over.) I assured them I was just trying to coax it down and not smash it. But for some reason this bird couldn't see the giant opening the garage door provided and instead kept flying into the ceiling hitting it's head, or into the wall hitting it's wings. At one point it literally flew into the wall, bounced back, flew into the wall, bounced back - about 5 times before landing on something. Which poses this question: when a bird hits it's head does it see flying birds circling above?

Anyway - Maddie and her friend tired of my lack of animal control skills and seeing as how the bird hadn't pooped on my head, they left. I told Jake to go get his dad and tell him a bird was in the garage. Mike came down a little confused at first because he thought Jake had said, "Mom can't get a "board" out of the garage. He was wondering 1) why I needed a board and 2) how weak was I? Anyway - Mike grabbed the same shovel that hadn't been working for me and went to work chasing/swiping the bird back and forth across the garage, but never OUT of the garage.

In the meantime, Jake was the bird's advocate. The first conversation went like this:
Jake: Dad! You can't talk to it like that - it doesn't understand you.
Mike: What should I do Jake? Do you think he'd understand Spanish better?
Jake: Dad!!! You have to talk to it in tweets. Bird talk. "Tweet-tweet".
After that Jake was all boss telling Mike not to swing at it (and for anyone wanting to call PETA, we never swung at it...). Occasionally Jake would throw out a few random "tweet-TWEET!" phrases himself. In the background as the bird flew across the garage (which now had two large doors open and the side door open) I called out "fly toward the light!" Apparently it wasn't looking to go to heaven yet though. I'm sure in all this any outside neighbors were wondering what the heck kind of power outage the Murphy household was having because we had to keep opening/closing the garage door since the bird would land on it or on the track and wouldn't move unless forced out by the moving chains. At one point the bird landed on my car and I had the sunroof open. I went into a small panic mode then - there was no way I was cleaning out bird droppings from the INSIDE of the car. (Jake did suggest I leave the roof closed after this when I park it in the garage.)
Just as I was about to offer up my next suggestion, Mike grabbed a box in one hand and the shovel in the other and had a look that said, "now or never!"

Finally, after what seemed like all afternoon, but was probably only 10 minutes, Mike managed to free the bird.
Mike wondered aloud if it was the same baby bird that just sat on the deck the other night while he and I walked up and down the steps, not a foot from it and it never moved. Mike thinks this bird may not have gotten all the brains in this latest batch of eggs to hatch.
Anyway - the bird flew off across the street to the neighbor's tree near their garage. If anything happens, we have a shovel and box they can use.