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Woodpeckers are fascinating birds. I live adjacent to an Audobon bird sanctuary and am fortunate to be surrounded by a wide array of birds while working from home and see woodpeckers zooming around all the time.
I’m also fortunate to have never been on the receiving end of a woodpecker’s obsession with hoarding acorns. A woodpecker’s diet consists primarily of insects, seeds, and berries. But woodpeckers are inextricably linked to acorns because they are nature’s creepy hoarders.
This brings us to this incident in California’s Bay Area. Nick’s Extreme Pest Control was called in after some acorns were discovered in the walls of a North Bay home…
‘Some acorns’ turned out to be 700 POUNDS of acorns that were left there by a woodpecker.
Nick’s Extreme Pest Control shared a Facebook post about this surreal incident. What looked like a few handfuls of acorns at first turned out to be a bottomless vault containing hundreds of pounds of acorns:
On Facebook they wrote “Came across this on a job. Bird was a bit of a hoarder. Filled up about 8 garbage bags full of acorns weighing in about 700 lbs. Unreal never came across something like this.”
Woodpecker Leaves 700 Pounds Of Acorns In A Home’s Walls
Scrolling through the photos you get a sense of how the situation grew surreal in a matter of minutes.
There is a subspecies of woodpeckers aptly named the Acorn Woodpecker. The Acorn Woodpecker exists for the sole purpose of hoarding as many acorns as it can get its beak on.
It is unclear if the culprit in this incident was an Acorn Woodpecker but the signs are there. This incident occurred in the North Bay area in Northern California and the Acorn Woodpecker’s traditional habitat distribution ranges from Panama to Washington up the coastline.