Up at the garden this week, we heard the sound of a male Great Spotted Woodpecker hammering its beak against a tree. They do this to announce their presence in the area and can batter against a tree trunk up to 40 times a second, which makes you wonder why they don’t get headaches. If we did that, our brains would swirl around inside our skulls and we would soon be unconscious and, even if we weren’t unconscious, then we’d probably be very uncomfortable and no doubt quite cross as well. Fortunately, nature has provided woodpeckers with an efficient shock absorbing system, which means that their brains are able to absorb the blows, avoiding concussion, so allowing them to hammer away as much as they want to.
There are plenty of trees around the garden for the woodpeckers to
hammer against, but some woodpeckers have discovered that they can make
a louder drumming by using telegraph poles instead of trees. I first
discovered this several years ago, when I was wakened at first light by
the sound of the bedroom radiator vibrating. This happened on several
mornings during the next couple of weeks and, initially, I was
mystified at what could be causing it.
Not the best bird shot I've ever taken, but you can clearly see the woodpecker
On the mornings when the radiator vibrated, I wandered around the house, trying to find the source of the vibration and eventually, after a few days, thought to open the front door and listen outside and it was there that I discovered the culprit. At the top of the telegraph pole on the pavement, a woodpecker was enthusiastically battering away at the metal cap on the top of the pole. The reverberation from the hammering was carried down the telephone lines, through the wall and from there to the radiators. The sight of my tousled, dressing-gowned self at the front door was enough to send it rushing straight for the woods, but it returned many times to continue its drumming.
Looking into it, I came across other stories of woodpeckers hammering on telegraph poles, as shown on Lucinda Manouch’s attractive blog, amongst others. A web search on the phrase ‘woodpecker damage’ brought 38,000 results and it seems that plastic woodpecker decoys are even being tried out in Canada, where they are attached to utilities poles in some places to try and deter the real woodpeckers from pecking them so much that they fall over.
The sight of woodpeckers hammering at telegraph poles is certainly something to watch out for in late winter and spring and if you are woken by vibrating radiators, you know where to look first.