Knock knock.
Who’s there?
For those of you who live in houses with certain types of wooden siding, your visitor may be a woodpecker. Those same shingles/shakes/clapboards that caught your eye as a home buyer can prove irresistible to your industrious neighbors the Downies, Hairies, Red-Bellieds and Flickers.
This time of year, woodpeckers are in the market for two things: food and shelter. If what you’ve been hearing sounds like the random taps of a hunt-and-peck typist, and the tapping takes place over a fairly broad area, it’s likely that your woodpecker is, well, hunting and pecking. The woodpecker menu this time of year includes insects in diapause (a bug’s version of hibernation) as well as egg cases and pupae, with a few spider egg sacs thrown in for good measure. These morsels may be hiding out between the boards of your siding or underneath the cedar shingles. Either way, a hungry woodpecker will sense and seek them out, leaving small nicks and dings as signs of its search.
If, on the other hand, the taps are more forceful in nature, and concentrated in one spot, your woodpecker has homebuilding on its mind. Woodpeckers frequently excavate winter roosts, or cavities, in trees (or wood-sided houses) to provide shelter from wind and snow.
Although dead trees would seem to be the natural choice for such activity, woodpeckers have discovered that houses, in some ways, are even better. Siding is soft and easy to dig into; the insulation behind the siding improves heat retention inside the cavity; and sides of houses are relatively predator free. Like the realtors say, location, location, location…
But woodpecker-homeowner interactions don’t stop there. As winter progresses, the birds may use your home for a third important purpose: drumming. Even though January and February are still very much in the “winter” section of our human calendars, these months have increasingly longer day lengths—a sure sign that spring, and mating season, are on their way. Drumming is the way male woodpeckers declare territory and they do so with gusto, banging their bills against a resonant surface in a rapid, staccato rhythm.
As it turns out, many house parts make great drumming surfaces. Metal gutters and downspouts are highly prized for their reverberation; cedar-shingled mansard roofs for their rich timbre; and siding, for its solid tone and ready availability.
When spring does roll around, woodpeckers come knocking again, this time in search of a nesting site. Nests differ from roosts in that two birds—the prospective parents—participate in the excavation, whereas a roost has just one excavator/occupant. And because nests are where young are reared, the birds are likely to become very protective of the area for a period of several weeks.
Although folks like me may welcome woodpeckers to their cedar-sided homes (and, yes, a lot of our siding does need to be replaced), the vast majority of people would prefer that the birds forage, roost, drum and nest elsewhere. Thankfully, the dedicated researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (located, coincidentally, on Sapsucker Woods Road in Ithaca, NY) have devoted considerable time and resources to the issue, and offer these recommendations:
* Create visual disturbances by hanging windsocks, strips of shiny mylar or foil, or, my favorite, shiny plastic pinwheels that spin in the wind near areas that woodpeckers are interested in.
* Make noise. Bang pots and pans as the birds alight, or install motion detectors that emit a sound when woodpeckers, or any other sort of woodland creatures, come near.
* Cover existing holes with aluminum flashing or plug them with wood putty; just make sure no birds roosting inside!
* Avoid sticky repellents, which can adhere to a bird’s plumage and impair its ability to fly and keep warm.
Woodpeckers got you down? Give these methods a try, and keep your fingers crossed. Or, even better, knock on wood.
Pam Otto is the manager of nature programs and interpretive services for the St. Charles Park District. She can be reached at potto@stcparks.org or 630-513-4346.