So, for a few weeks now, while doing laundry, we have been noticing coathangers and clothes pegs which are evidently not ours, since they look very different and are made out of plastic, not fibre, like ours are. One of the new clothes pegs even has paint on it, so there's no mistaking it as something we own.
Now, someone must have been sneaking them in while we didn't notice: which meant that someone had to scale our perimeter wall, then jump inside the garden, and then climb up onto our first floor terrace while we didn't see a hair of them in the daytime. Oh, and the neighbour's dog acts as a neighbourhood burglar alarm system, so not even a stray leaf goes where it shouldn't without everyone being immediately notified about it.
It was my mom who claimed that she saw the thief - no, unknown laundry benefactor - in the act one day and told us about it.
Or specifically, crows that we feed on the terrace, who my mom spotted wrenching off clothes pegs from the neighbour's wash (yikes) and then triumphantly carrying it over to ours. My mom claims she even saw the crow put the peg on, the RIGHT WAY, so that it stayed on the clothesline.
My estimate is that it must have taken TWO crows to actually carry the coathangers since they are far too large for one crow... or, who am I even kidding, maybe it WAS that one crow who was fetching everything...
Anyway, now we are in a fix. We can't very well go up to our neighbours and return the items saying: sorry, but crows stole these coathangers and clothes pegs and put them on OUR line, and we only know this because we saw crows removing them from your wash, and so, please take good care of them and invest in crow-proof clothes pegs? Because we are 100% sure that this will happen again.
Anyway, will update to report how this goes.