The intervention had to be banal. But when Nick Castro, a pest control technician, digs a hole in the wall of this home in Sonoma, California, expecting to find a dead animal there as usual, it’s a flood of acorns that spring, on December 15. December.
The businessman has to try several times to remove the more than 300 kilos of fruit that a bird of the woodpecker family had stored there, probably for two to five years, says the Washington Postfollowing a post by Nick Castro on Facebook.
“I was a bit surprised”
“I was a bit shocked and wondered when it was going to end,” says Nick Castro, who says he’s never seen anything like it in twenty years of business.
Originally, Nick Castro was called in for an intervention on this house where the inhabitants had noticed maggots and worms coming out of a wall. The technician had quickly associated the development of these insects with the probable presence of a decomposing animal on a wall.
Therefore, the procedure had to be classic: open the wall, remove the corpse, and then make sure that the route through which the animal had infiltrated was covered.
These birds “have compulsive behavior”
According to the contractor, the acorns were likely stored by the bird through the chimney before leaking into the wall through a hole. According to a woodpecker specialist interviewed by the Washington Post, these birds tend to hoard large amounts of food for the winter.
“They have a compulsive behavior. They rummage and store as much [de glands] can,” says Paul Bannic, director of a Seattle-based wildlife conservation organization and author of two books on these birds.
Once the wall was emptied, Nick Castro transferred these more than 300 kilos of acorns into eight large garbage bags that he threw away before repairing the chimney through which the bird had amassed its booty.
Source: BFM TV
