A couple of woodpeckers were certainly devastated after a pest control technician, in a routine procedure, found a huge collection of nuts cleverly hidden in the walls of a California home.
The owners of the Sonoma County home called Nick Castro, owner of the pest control company Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, when they spotted worms coming out of the wall in one of the bedrooms.
They turned out to be mealworms feasting on acorns – the nut produced by oak trees – which are believed to have been gathered by a pair of aptly named acorn woodpeckers.
“It was really weird. I had never seen worms eating acorns before,” Castro told CNN . But the strangeness was just beginning.
After making a small four-inch hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began to fall out. That in itself wouldn’t be too unusual, but “they just kept coming,” he said.
“It was amazing to see the amount,” Castro said. He estimates that there were about 300 kilograms of acorns, probably collected between the last two to five years.
Woodpeckers often store nuts outside houses, sometimes in rain gutters, but they rarely place them inside. In this case, Castro found that the birds dumped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to feed on their stash.
“Every day I can see strange things, like the creative ways animals manage to get into houses,” said Castro. “They can still trick us from time to time.”
When they fell from the attic, tens of thousands of walnuts harvested from several nearby oak trees filled the cavity in the house’s walls, Castro explained.
But this strange discovery took the unusual to a whole new level for the man who has worked in the pest control industry for over 20 years.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s a 10. It’s a one-in-a-million chance of finding something this significant,” Castro said. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like that.”
It was necessary to create three more holes in the walls of the house to remove all the acorns, which accumulated forming piles about 6 meters high, Castro estimated.
Castro and his team of three spent an entire day extracting the nuts.
“We filled eight big black garbage bags. They were so heavy that we could barely carry them,” Castro said. “They must have weighed at least 45 kilograms each.”
The acorns were thrown away because they were covered in droppings and pieces of fiberglass from the wall insulation.
Source: CNN Brasil
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