Nature Girl

Even hosting a pair of cardinals, while common enough elsewhere, is a treat, considering how blue jays and grackles drive away so many songbirds. But—there’s always a "but"—even Nature Girl’s appreciation is tested by woodpeckers.

They’re handsome birds; legendary, even, when it comes to the ivory-billed woodpecker, once thought extinct, but possibly still present, with controversy surrounding reported sightings. Forget that. We’re talking about everyday woodpeckers, although that’s a misnomer, because their declining numbers and habitat mean they are officially protected by both state and federal government. That’s a problem for big developers who want to clear out the pines where the birds like to nest. And it’s something of a problem for me, as far from a developer as I may be.

First, understand that my house is a two-story, cedar-shingle home, with two real fireplaces (one in the bedroom), and two working chimneys. People say they love it. Woodpeckers also love it, and joyously, loudly, prove it. Imagine a machine gun going off outside your bedroom window at daybreak. Think of a giant, slamming a full round of coconuts against your wall at close range. True, it only lasts for a minute or two, so you can often fall back asleep.

Then, in a slightly different spot, comes the sound of a jackhammer slamming through the roof. A storm with pounding hail the size of tennis balls on a metal roof. Now you’re getting the idea.

The thing is, while woodpeckers do make holes in tall wooden and wood-like structures for nests, they also just like to make noise. The metal around the top of the chimney, the gutters and roof itself, provide a different, and apparently favored, pitch for the pounding. The noise is a territorial thing, a mating thing. He who has the loudest peck gets the girl. But once he has the girl, they’re together for life. Then there’s the business of letting interlopers know this is his territory, of making a home and just letting everyone know what a manly bird he is.

You can beat on the inside of the wall. You can go outside and wave your arms or rakes or palm fronds. The birds, secure in their height, may cock their heads and glance down at you curiously, and then start the second verse, same as the first. Or they may ignore you completely (which is more than you can say for the neighbors). Wildlife experts say this is a common problem and that the birds can, in fact, do some significant damage.

Suggestions on what to do are available from universities, wildlife groups and birders. Solutions? Not so much. Hitting them with water from a hose is fine, if you can get the pressure to reach and they sit still long enough. Putting up a fake owl or other bird of prey may work for a few days, but the woodpeckers realize very quickly there’s no real threat.

More intriguing is the "attack spider." The animated advertisement alone scared me. According to the ad, the spider "is a battery-operated device that will chase away damage-causing woodpeckers. Activated by sound, the spider drops down on an 18-inch string while making a loud noise. Then it climbs back up the string, ready to attack again. This unusual solution is both very inexpensive and highly effective. Woodpeckers cannot stand them!"

At $15 each, plus what seems to be a recommended $15 installation kit, I see major potential here for Halloween. But installing them on my house or two-story chimney? Don’t think so.

Experts at the University of Florida say moving objects scare away birds; things like strips of aluminum foil, or aluminum pie plates, tied to strings and flapping in the breeze. They say less about how such things look or fit subdivision rules concerning appearances. A Southwest Florida environmental expert, Dick Workman, president of CoastPlan consultants, has decades of experience dealing with woodpeckers, especially when it comes to proposed development in protected habitat.

But he, too, has encountered the noise problem and suggests recordings that send out the calls of birds that prey on woodpeckers, as well as woodpecker distress signals. You can buy those, battery-powered and motion-sensitive, for about $200.

Workman’s experiences mostly involve red-cockaded woodpeckers, or RCWs as they’re usually called, in the wild, and he finds the birds’ intelligence and habits fascinating.

The birds like to nest in slash pines. Snakes will feast on the eggs and baby birds, but because snakes are repelled by fresh sap, older birds—families may stay together for more than one generation—keep fresh sap flowing around the nest, providing an additional signal of the nest’s presence.

That wood, however, is almost as hard as concrete. Making a satisfactory nesting hole can take as long as four years. That’s one reason for the stringent protections put on the birds’ nesting sites. The discovery of an active RCW nest can put in play prohibitions on any development in a 250-foot radius around the tree, he said.

Even the discovery of a nest thought to be inactive caused problems for one development along Davis Road in Naples, he said. In that case, the developer could do mitigation by purchasing a five-acre tract with a large active colony of RCWs next to an existing preserve, and donating the colonized tract to the preserve for continuing protection.

So the sighting of a woodpecker, especially the red-cockaded kind most often found on that kind of land, is not a thing of joy for the developer. But most people see plenty of subdivisions. Seeing rare birds, even woodpeckers, is a far more unusual event, and many people pay large sums of money to visit Southwest Florida in search of birds harder to find elsewhere.

A study in the 1990s found that birding in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary had an economic impact of about $9.4 billion on the area; another state Game Commission study shows Florida birders spent about $1.7 billion on their activities in 1996.

As for hearing woodpeckers bang on my house at daybreak? We need to get up earlier anyway.