We kept hearing the ‘tap, tap, tap’ of a woodpecker on the end gables of the house. By the time we walked round to look, all we heard each time was a rush of wings and a distant woodpecker disappearing over the other end of the garden.
It was so fast and blurred it was hard to tell whether it was the green or the greater-spotted woodpecker. Both are seen regularly in our garden, and we think we’ve also had lesser spotted around. The green woodpecker usually feeds on the ground, rather than clingjng to walls.
The evidence of what the bird was up to was visible in marks on the barge boards and soffits, where the woodpecker must have detected rotten wood and boring insects.
Today when I arrived round at the wall, the bird was still there, undisturbed by my approach, but I could not see it. The noise continued louder than ever, as if it were amplified.
And so it was: the woodpecker had broken through into the loft, found more old wood to attack, and the noise was amplified in the loft space like a sounding board. Because it was now inside the house, the bird had not sensed me coming.
I watched and listened for a couple of minutes before a (greater, I think) spotted woodpecker emerged rapidly and whirred off. The hole it made is in a soffit, where the two barge boards,and the soffits underneath them, meet at the peak of the gable.
There was a tiny hole there before through which only bats could pass. We know that because we once found a dead pipistrelle that had fallen through a crack in a bedroom ceiling (now filled). But the hole is now far bigger, easily enough for squirrels to get inside and rampage round the contents of the loft.
What the woodpecker is so keen on inside we don’t yet know, but with plenty of old wood there is no doubt a large population of insects to feast on.We are going to have to stop it.
Previous woodpecker attacks have always been on our old walls, which they dig into searching for insects wherever the clay daub is exposed. We have to do regular repairs to the surface stop those attacks, because woodpeckers are only interested in soft places where plaster and limewash coatings have dropped off.
A proper repair to the soffit will need scaffolding, which will be a lot of money. That whole gable is anyway due for repairs in a few years, and it would be better to do both jobs at the same time to avoid paying twice for scaffolding.
We’ll instead empty that end of the loft of long term storage so we can get to the gable, and block up the hole from inside, possibly by nailing some spare lead sheet over it. That means carrying some old boarding to the loft to lay as I move along, because there’s no floor near that gable end.
I’m not looking forward to it – the job is about as enticing as unblocking a sink, my other pet hate, so it will not be at the top of my priority list. But it must be done.
saving The Old Brewhouse 