These hoarders hide their bounty within the walls of a house.
A pest control technician who thought he was responding to a routine call got a big surprise from thousands of acorns when he cut a hole in a wall. Instead of a suspicious dead animal, the technician found that the woodpeckers had stored hundreds of kilograms of acorns.
I came across it at a job. Bird was a bit more of a treasure,” says a Facebook post from Nick’s Extreme Pest Control shared late last month.
“It filled about 8 trash bags full of acorns that weighed about 700 pounds. Unreal has never encountered anything like this.’
It was something the owner of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control in Santa Rosa, California hadn’t seen in two decades in business.
“You could tell this bird was a little rat,” Nick Castro, 42, told the Washington Post. ‘This is crazy. It just doesn’t stop.’
Castro said a customer in mid-December reported maggots and mealworms coming from the wall of their Glen Ellen home. He and two other technicians cut a 4-by-4-inch hole with a knife, and the acorns spilled out in a pile that reached 20 feet high.
More acorns came out as Castro reached into the hole and moved them. Castro and his colleagues cut three more holes in the wall to remove all the acorns.
“I was a little shocked and wondering when it was going to end,” Castro said. “We were really expecting maybe a handful, at most, but nothing like this. There’s no way you can explain it.”
They carried the eight garbage bags filled with nuts into their truck. That’s when they saw woodpeckers and more acorns outside the house, leading Castro to believe the birds had made hundreds of holes in the chimney stack and stored the acorns for two to five years. The nuts seemed to start falling into a hole in the wall.
Oak woodpeckers are known to bore holes in homes and other places and store food, according to Paul Bannick, director of the conservation group Conservation Northwest.
“It’s a forced process,” Bannick told the Post of the woodpeckers. “They will collect and store as much as they can.”
Contact our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.