I don’t suppose you know how to trap and/or kill a goddamn woodpecker, do you? At least one of the little bastards has pecked two holes clear through the cedar siding of Our Humble O’Bode. I will do anything short of selling my redundant internal organs to stop it.

There’s a hole on the north side of the house and one on the south side. He pecked the one on the north side first. It was summer, I was home sick from work and I could hear pecking all day long. If I pounded on the wall with my fist as hard as I could, which was actually pretty feebly, he went away for a while, but came back later. I had to listen to him pecking holes in our house for two days. When I was well enough to go outside again I found what looked like the scatter pattern of a shotgun loaded with bird shot. I patched up the damage with some epoxy and didn’t think about it again until about a week later when I went back out there to see if the nasty aftertaste of epoxy persuaded the little bastard to go peck on someone else’s house. That’s when I found the hole. Not a little hole, either. This was a hole big enough for a squirrel to climb through, and since I didn’t want any squirrel making its nest in the siding of our house, I nailed a piece of three-quarter inch plywood over the hole. Cannonballs bounce off plywood that thick and, so far, the woodpecker hasn’t tried to peck a hole through it, or anywhere near it. I don’t know what I’ll do if the little bastard decides to give it a try, though. Probably explode.

I found the second hole by accident, while I was juggling an armload of groceries that I was unloading from the back seat of the car and cussing the beam of sunlight coming through the wall, blinding me. That made me stop what I was doing because there’s just one window in the garage and I was nowhere near it. There shouldn’t have been any sunlight where I was standing, but there it was anyway. The light was coming through a hole in the upper corner of the wall, and I painted that wall just last summer and didn’t remember any holes in it. I went around the side of the garage after I took the groceries inside and, dammit, there was another woodpecker hole just like the first one!

I don’t know if there’s just one woodpecker or more than one. I want to say there’s more than one because we have one of the few houses in the neighborhood that still has its original wood siding. Everyone else has graduated to vinyl, and I’m starting to see why.