Acorn Woodpeckers Turn Vacation Rental into Nutty Storage Unit

Summary

An exterminator named Nick Castro discovered more than 700 pounds of acorns packed inside the walls and chimney of a vacation rental home in Glen Ellen, California, north of San Francisco. Castro made the find during a routine inspection, cutting open a bedroom wall only to have a cascade of acorns pour out. He estimated the hoard had been accumulating for two to five years, the work of a pair of acorn woodpeckers that had exploited gaps in the structure to cache their winter food supply.

Acorn woodpeckers are well known for their granary behavior, drilling thousands of individual holes in trees or wooden structures to store acorns one by one. In this case, previous owners had wrapped the home in vinyl siding after the birds had already destroyed the original wood exterior — but the birds adapted by dropping their acorns down the chimney stack instead. Castro's crew removed eight large garbage bags of acorns, all contaminated with fiberglass and rodent droppings.