I found a bird nest in my plane. I guess this is pretty common if the plane is outside. 

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Starlings are the worst offenders. Engine compartment nest are the smoky one if you don't find them. Mouse nests are corrosive and need a good cleaning.

Not sure what type of bird it is. My wife said it was probably a wren or a sparrow. 

Yes clean that nest out of there or you will have bird droppings all over your airplane including areas that you may miss, and those droppings are bad for your paint.

I notice by the self locking nut the 801 must use a bushing bearing on the elevator horn pass through, the 701 does not and instead uses a drilled bolt with castle nut and cotter pin.

Yes this is an 801 that I purchased. Does everything look Kosher?

Make sure to preflight properly under the engine cowl for bird nests. They can literally start appearing in a few hours at certain times of the year and can be a fire risk

   Yes I will certainly pay attention to the birds. My wife just happened to see the bird flying out. You need a ladder

to get up to the tail and see in there. I don't think it would have been a hazard to flight. It was in front of where the cables exit.  Engine compartment would be way worse. 

It's not only outside. Just as bad in the hangar. Around here, wrens are the worst. They will build a nest on the engine and I have found one built into the exhaust stacks. Bout the time you break ground the thing will catch fire. Every spring it's look for the wren nests.

22 with rat shot won't knock holes in the hangar roof.

Yes fire not good. That's another reason I want to put quick release Dzeus fasteners on the cowl. So You can remove it and replace it quickly. 

For the engine compartment, the simple fix is to make a set of cowl plugs that you 'use' when parked.  They can be connected with a cord that passes around the prop so that if you forget to take them out, the prop will if you start up, & just being a chunk of foam will not hurt anything.  Only time that ever happened to me was when I did a start up to just taxi a ways....didn't have the cord trick on then, but no harm done.  Wouldn't work out good to take off with them in.  

The ability for birds to get into the airframe and build nests definitely needs to dealt with, especially near control surfaces.  Holes like that need to be blocked somehow.

Yes I need to get some cowl plugs. But they can always fly in from the bottom. 

I've had several nests built in the cowl over the years, but the access was always from the front opening.  They liked to land on the prop and walk right in.  When I kept that covered I never had one want to come in through the bottom.  This was at our local airport, and the problem bird there was starlings. Not a bad idea to cover the bottom though.  Maybe another kind of bird might act different?  Harder to deal with checking the bottom on preflight.  It only takes one time to forget, to wreck an engine.  

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