The Thought Instigator
Other than jagged holes filling dying, bark-ravaged trees, I don’t think I was ever knowingly aware of woodpeckers until we bought our house in 2018.
I never knew they possessed the power to turn me to the dark side.
Until then, woodpeckers drilled that distant cadence from the woods, lofting echoey staccato percussion beats to complement the warblers nearby. But then I learned so much more.
Woodpecker setup
Everything checked off the inspection list pretty much okay, except for the jerky holes in a few shingles covering our chimney. I looked at our new neighbor’s chimney across the yard – same construction, but no holes. Hmm. Maybe the holes had been there a while, ignored, out of sight, out of mind. Whatever – the house was what we wanted, where we wanted, and we weren’t going to let a few fixable holes in the shingles thwart us.
What did we know?
We had the shingles replaced shortly after moving in, and the carpenter said no woodpecker would go at it with the synthetic ones he used. Sounded sensible. But who said woodpeckers were sensible?
The bad news
According to birdwatchingpro.com (https://birdwatchingpro.com/how-do-woodpeckers-peck-so-fast) a woodpecker can peck 20 times a second. Huh?
Wait a minute, what? Twenty times – a second? Yup! All sorts of writeups explain the bird’s anatomy, which allows it to peck up to 12,000 times a day and up to 1,400 times the force of gravity. That’s 1,400 g’s! Fewer than 100 g’s will concuss a human, our bird watching pro says. Macho astronauts face about 3 g’s during liftoff (and they’re wearing g-suits!), and most people will go unconscious at 9 g’s as blood struggles to get to the brain. Thanks to spaceanswers.com for these goodies.
I’m not going into the physiological marvel that the woodpecker is – partly because it’s pages of information long, but mainly because I don’t care. The short answer you really want to know is that because of its beak configuration, 99.7% of the force transfers into the bird’s body, not its head – see Audubon’s explanation – and its neck muscles rival Igor the weightlifter. Nature is a marvel, and I’m satisfied to call this one of those. All I care about is that the damn birds stop drilling holes in my chimney.
But, oh no. There was a force at play I didn’t realize. It seems the birds drilling my chimney aren’t merely hungry, they’re, well, horny. Um…
The first thing we learn when reading the various sources of info out there is that woodpeckers rip off bark and penetrate trees to get at those yummy insects crawling around inside. Okay, I get that some species like to eat live bugs. I prefer mine dried and chocolate coated. I digress.
But we also learn that these destroyers of private property also whack away at wood to communicate – especially to lure a mate. If only I knew years ago to try slamming my face into a tree a hundred miles an hour. There I go digressing again.
It seems some wood resonates in just the right way for boy woodpeckers to send throaty coos to innocent girl woodpeckers. Apparently, it works – they keep on doing it. And doing it. And doing it. And, as apparently, certain shingle-covered chimneys send a perfect pitch into the mating ritual madness.
At least, ours does. Just not our neighbors’.
So, it wasn’t long before the rat-a-tat-tat resumed and more shingles were decimated. OMG, this was our house! Our home! Our home, which I’m sworn to protect and defend!
So, what to do?
wikiHow to the rescue – not
A visit to our buddies at wikiHow gives us a list of 10 ways to get rid of woodpeckers. Now, this is probably a good place to note that someone’s wife, who shall remain nameless, informed her husband how much she loves woodpeckers, how beautiful they are, etc., etc. Now, her husband could respond with wikiHow’s opening statement in their article titled “How to Get Rid of Woodpeckers” – which strikes even this writer as being ever so cold.
WikiHow says: “As cute as woodpeckers can be, you certainly don’t appreciate it when they drill away loudly against some nearby surface. At best, the sounds they make can be a rude awakening. At worst, a woodpecker can cause expensive damage to your home’s siding. Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep them away from your property.”
Finally, a voice of reason – and someone to blame for a lone husband taking action.
Thing you can do #1 says to make loud noises. Like blare a boom box, and yell a lot while flailing around. You know.
Thing 2 says to place a fake bird of prey on the property, such as mounting a plastic owl or hawk on the roof. Then, A, we’d have a permanent plastic bird of prey on the roof, and B, wikiHow says the woodpeckers might figure out the scam and return anyway.
Number 3 calls for hanging wind chimes near the pecking place. Well, not sure how to hang wind chimes at the top of the chimney, and, also, that would call for a very tall ladder, and, worse, the lone husband climbing way up the very tall ladder. Nuh uh.
Equally nonsensical suggestions round out the list. But there had to be a way to stop this savagery. Hadn’t there?
And then the light went on. And with it the image of a pump action long barrel and scope. Oh, yes, the dark side. It was calling me by my given name.
Daisy to the rescue
Yep, a trip to Walmart and soon home with a Daisy Powerline 880 with a 4×15 scope. Yessir, me and my Daisy, we were going do the trick, a team of roughriders if ever there was. Now, this was my first BB gun since I was 12 or 13, but I’d proven myself a pretty good marksman as a kid, so I was confident of my adult proficiency.
Now, the wait. But not for long, the little bugger. Rat-a-tat-tat!
I’d loaded a handful of BBs into the trusty Daisy, and had practiced opening the cartridge, pumping the handle up to 10 times, and then injecting a little steel ball into the chamber. The fun part, at the outset, was setting the scope, which magnified just fine. I fiddled with the windage and elevation adjustments but found the factory setting seemed right. It’s not like there’s much windage behind my house, and how much elevation shift might there be from my deck to the chimney?
I’d also found that 10 pumps was overkill for my mission; five was plenty adequate. Hell, two would probably get there.
I pumped the handle five times, filled the chamber, and slowly, quietly, opened the slider to the deck. I tiptoed across to where I could see past the roof edge, and there, there, hanging onto my chimney shingles and rat-a-tatting away, was the cutest little red-headed woodpecker ever. Cute he may be, I thought, but I was on mission.
I pulled Daisy up and squinted into the scope. No glasses necessary to get a bead eye on this varmint. I aimed the scope right at his center, took a slow breath, and then shifted the barrel up and to the right a nudge and squeezed. The sharp retort barely preceded the sound of BB smacking wood, and the love-bent birdie leaped up, turned in mid-air, and shot away into the woods.
Now – you didn’t really think I’d actually shoot the little critter, did you? OMG, I’d never shoot a bird! I had no intention of maiming him – or killing him, which I knew Daisy was capable of doing. I just wanted to scare him away. Make him think about it next time.
And even more!
And there were next times. And over them I could detect a growing pattern of awareness by the culprit. That hesitation, mid-peck, the head swinging back and forth in the brief silence. And then, finally, the day came. The day I knew I had him.
I repeated my steps onto the deck, my tiptoes to the far side. Daisy was loaded. I raised the rifle, took aim – and suddenly the little guy stopped mid-rat-a-tat. He slowly turned toward me. His spidey sense was right on. He saw me and Daisy. His eyes bulged open like Wile E. Coyote about to drop from the cliff. His head jerked back, his face a look of terror, and he shot off into the woods.
I fired into the air behind him, to not let him off easy. But my mission was done. He didn’t return. Until the next year. Or perhaps, no, he never returned, but rather, I decided, it was his offspring, his reward from his mating rat-a-tats.
I like to think so.
Of course, we had to go through the exercise again that next year. And again the following year. And again this year. But Daisy’s at the ready, in a cranny by the slider. And we have lots of BB’s. Oh, lots of BB’s. Come on, little buddy. Bring it on!
So – what do you think? Makings of a new novel?
What has driven you to step face to face with the dark side? I’d love to know. Drop it into the comments!