Do you smell acorns?

Nick Castro of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control said he expected to find a dead animal inside the wall of a Glen Ellen, CA home where residents reported seeing maggots and mealworms emerging from a wall. “Every day there can be weird stuff, with the creative ways critters can get into homes,” Castro said. “They still can fool us once in a while.” The owners spotted worms coming from a bedroom wall. After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began spilling out. That alone wouldn’t be terribly unusual, but they “just kept coming,” he said. “It was pretty incredible to see the amount,” said Castro. He estimates there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years. The mealworms were feasting on an incredible hoard of acorns, believed to be amassed by a pair of aptly named acorn woodpeckers. “It was really strange. I had never really seen worms with acorns before.” But the weirdness was just beginning. Often woodpeckers store acorns on the outside of homes, sometimes in rain gutters, but rarely do they get them inside. In this case, Castro discovered the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to feast on their stash. As they dropped from the attic, tens of thousands of acorns gathered from several nearby oak trees filled the cavity of the walls.

Nick and his colleagues discovered the acorns were piled about 20 feet high inside the wall. But this odd find took unusual to a whole new level for the man who has been working in the pest control industry for more than 20 years. “On a scale from 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance to find something this significant,” said Castro. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.” It took creating another three holes in the home’s walls to remove all the acorns. woodpeckers had been poking holes in the chimney stack and had been stashing acorns in the openings for the past two to five years. He said the acorns eventually fell through into the wall cavity. Castro and his crew of three spent a full day extracting the nuts. “We filled eight big black bags. They were so heavy we could barely pick them up,” said Castro. “They had to have weighed at least a hundred pounds each.” The acorns were thrown away as they were covered in droppings and bits of fiberglass from the wall’s insulation. He said he repaired the damage to the home’s exterior and added screens to protect the wood from the birds.

Humor for the birds

A woodpecker with a sore beak walks into a bar and asks,
 “Where’s the bar tender?”

What bird never sings the lyrics to a song?
A hummingbird.

What do you call a woodpecker without a beak?
A headbanger.

I went to the backyard this morning and I saw a bird of prey eating avocado toast.
It was a millennial falcon.

February 9th Birthdays

1997 – Kelli Berglund, 1988 – Rose Leslie,  1999 – Isabella Gomez, 1943 – Carol King

1982 – Tom Hiddleston, 1943 – Joe Pesci,   1997 – Jimmy Bennett, 1997 – Saquon Barkley

Morning Motivator:

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble.

May I have some more acorns?