SFGate -- woodpeckers stash 700 pounds of acorns in walls of (human) house ...............................
Feb. 6, 2023
Bay Area pest control company removes 700 pounds of acorns from Airbnb
By Amanda Bartlett
SFGATE
Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.
Nick Castro thought he had seen it all.
The founder of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control in Santa Rosa has been in his line of work for more than 20 years, and during that time, he’s encountered all kinds of critters, from bats, raccoons and skunks to cockroaches, wasps and scorpions.
But the most unusual job of his career came last month, when he got a call to check out an Airbnb in Glen Ellen.
“There were some worms that appeared to be coming out of the wall, and the worms looked like maggots,” Castro told SFGATE by phone. “Everybody kind of thought there was a dead animal inside the wall.”
When he and his team arrived at the two-story home, they used a drywall knife to cut into the living room wall and take a look at what was inside. To his surprise, they didn’t find an animal, but instead, a seemingly unending barrage of acorns, which were piled up all the way up to the attic and proceeded to fall out of the wall cavity in a steady stream.
“It was unreal,” Castro said. “We see weird stuff all the time, but I’d never seen anything like this.”
Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.
Castro measured 700 pounds of acorns, to be exact. And there weren’t maggots but mealworms lurking inside of them. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers who had been poking holes in the chimney stack to stash their food for future meals, only to have their hard-earned snacks fall into the empty wall cavity where they couldn’t retrieve them.
Castro said he had to cut open four different holes in the walls to remove the sheer number of acorns, which were covered in fiberglass insulation and filled eight 40-gallon garbage bags up to the brim. The process took hours, and from there, the acorns were loaded into a van and hauled off to the dump.
He may have felt a twinge of guilt after disposing of the birds' hard work, but he had to hand it to them. "They were pretty creative," he said.
Nick Castro of Nick's Extreme Pest Control found 700 pounds of acorns inside a Glen Ellen Airbnb last month. The culprit? A couple of woodpeckers.
While Castro was wrapping up the job, something caught his eye overhead. It was the woodpeckers, fluttering around, trying to access their food supply from the ventilation portholes along the rooftop.
“That’s how we knew exactly what they were doing,” he said.
Castro believes in coming up with nonlethal strategies in his pest control work. He sealed off the structure so the birds couldn’t get back in and encouraged the homeowner to install vinyl siding to prevent any further damage to the property.
“He said he hasn’t heard any pecking since,” Castro said.
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