Bite-sized dental wisdom in under 2 minutes.

The other day, I went to switch out the wreath on my front door.

Yes, very seasonal of me.

I opened the door, took the wreath down, and brought it inside.

And then I saw it.

Bird poop.

A lot of bird poop.

On my door.

So naturally, my first thought was, “Great. Another thing I have to clean.”

For about three seconds, I was really annoyed.

Then my brain caught up.

Wait. Why is there bird poop on my door?

Which is when I realized there was probably a reason.

So I immediately threw the wreath back outside, closed the door, and started peering through the front window like I was in a horror movie.

Sure enough, there was a giant bird’s nest on the back of the wreath.

With one very large bird sitting on top of five tiny baby birds.

Which was especially fun because I am not an animal person in the least.

I am allergic to most animals, and I already clean up after three children. I do not need to expand into wildlife.

Also, can we talk about how close I was to bringing an entire bird family into my house?

If I had not noticed the nest, those birds could have been living inside my house.

And then I would be forced to move. Obviously.

Or worse, I could have put the wreath back in the storage bag and taken it to the basement, which means it would have turned itself into a Halloween wreath with baby bird skeletons attached to it.

Try explaining that one to a 4 year old.

Anyway, the birds were fine.

And somehow, over the next few days, our family became very invested in these birds. We looked up what to do. We watched from the window. We checked on them.

And by “we,” I mostly mean me.

The person who claims to not care about birds was suddenly checking on them every few hours like I was running a tiny bird NICU from my front porch.

Eventually, I went to check on them and they were gone.

They had flown away.

Then I immediately looked around the porch to make sure there was not a murder scene.

There was not.

But the whole thing made me think.

At first, I thought the bird poop was the problem.

It was not.

It was the clue.

And dental offices are full of those.

The thing annoying you is usually not the whole problem.

It is usually the evidence.

The schedule keeps falling apart. The same instruments are always missing. Claims are sitting unpaid. Patients are not getting scheduled. The front desk keeps asking the same questions. The team keeps “forgetting” the same step.

It is easy to get annoyed at the mess.

I get it. No one wants to clean bird poop off the door.

But if you only clean the door and never look for the nest, you are probably going to keep having the same problem.

The visible mess is usually pointing to something underneath it.

A broken process.
An unclear handoff.
A missing checklist.
A training gap.
A step no one actually owns.

So yes, clean up the mess.

You still have to do that part.

But then look for the nest.

Because the thing that is irritating you might just be the clue.

-Dr. Alex

P.S. I built Milo after finding a lot of nests in my own practice. Turns out most of the recurring messes had the same root cause: nobody had written down who owned the step. Milo is a checklist app for dental teams that fixes that.