“Fill it with some wood shavings, and even some leaves and some natural stuff so it doesn't smell like something from Ikea, so it actually smells like the world out there," Walsh said. Walsh suggested another option that wasn’t sure to work, but sounded intriguing: offer the woodpecker an upgrade. We would wait until the bird was out, cover the hole with metal, then hang a nesting box directly over the hole. “Now I think we've passed that point,” Walsh said. “I think that if we dangle some Mylar here, he's going to be unperturbed. He's got a nice house in a leafy suburb of Boston.” "We apologize for that behavior, but we'll will send him a memo,” she added with a laugh.īut in all seriousness, how do you send that memo to a woodpecker saying, “please move out?” It was crucial we convince the downy to do so before he started posting that Tinder profile and starting a family it would be illegal to evict. The standard first approach would be the scarecrow method - hanging objects that might frighten the bird, like flashy mylar streamers. But given his comfort level with my family, it was unlikely we could scare this bird. "What happened to you was not a tweet that he was sending out, or a Tinder profile that he was sending out. It was it was more that he was building a home." And to a female, it says, ‘ I'm here,'" Walsh said. “When they’re drumming to attract a mate, and declare their territory, it says two things: one, ‘I'm here!’ to another male. Walsh explains that woodpeckers bang on wood for two distinct reasons: construction or communication. Obviously I’m a bird lover, and I think woodpeckers are particularly wonderful - I mean, a lot of birds sing, but how many can sing and play drums? But no one wants to be housemates with a drummer, especially one who starts at 7 a.m. Our home faces conservation land in Lexington, and I love to feed and interact with the variety of wild birds that frequent our backyard. Some of these birds now recognize me by sight, and some individual relationships have evolved, as they’ve figured out they can fly up and “ask” for their favorite treats to be replenished. Chickadees and titmice politely request sunflower seeds, robins ask for mealworms, blue jays holler at me for peanuts. And this particular downy woodpecker would fly to the window by my desk to request sunflower seeds and for a supply of suet to be refilled - not far from where he would decide to drill a hole conveniently close to the bird smorgasbord. “You really don't want a family of four woodpeckers in between your sheetrock inside your house and your exterior. It's going to smell, it's going to be bad for everybody,” she said.Īnd while my wife was kind enough not to bring it up every time we woke to the tapping, the woodpecker problem was entirely my fault. I reached out to Joan Walsh of Mass Audubon, who has become my indispensable consultant on woodpecker behavior, and she confirmed we had a problem. Even the downy, the smallest of our woodpeckers, can do serious damage to a home. Having a woodpecker live inside the walls of your home is an unequivocally bad thing. It’s not just the noise (though it is a drag not being able to sleep in on the weekends). As our brains started to come online, it was clear it wasn’t the radiator, or one of the kids tapping - the sound was coming from the exterior of the house. I stuck my head out the window to see a downy woodpecker sticking his head out of the hole he’d just drilled in the side of our house. The problem started last November. We woke up to a muffled, steady tapping noise on our bedroom wall. It had that weird, rhythmic but irregular quality, one of those mysterious kinds of patterns where you’re not sure if it’s just the radiator coming on, or someone trying to tap out a message from the other side of the wall.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |