if it's not the 8 dogs keeping us up, it's the woodpecker

Apparently we have one more person living with us at the new house - Woody the woodpecker.

The funny thing is, Mr. KK's grandmother used to always complain about a woodpecker, because he was constantly pecking on the outside wall of her bedroom. It's not that we didn't believe her, but...

You never want a woodpecker visiting your house, because it usually means that you have some type of insect in your home.

For Mr. KK's grandmother, what she didn't know, was that her house was being eaten alive by termites. We found that damage during the remodel. I've never seen anything like in all of my years watching HGTV. There were days I would be carrying pieces of wood covered in crawling termites out to the dumpster. The termites had eaten half of the house.

It's totally worth the time to peek at the pics here.

We called the exterminator and he took care of everything. Said it should last longer than we'd be living the house.

So you can imagine our surprise - and fear - when we heard Woody drilling holes into the siding yet once again.

By now we were freaked out that we were going to lose the other half of the house to termites, so we called the exterminator back.

After a full examination, he concluded that we did NOT have termites. It seems woodpeckers are territorial and creates of habit, so our little friend came back now that the renovations have died down.

But that still didn't solve the problem that the little asshole was drilling holes into our wood shingles.

And here is where it got ridiculous.

He told us there are ways to 'deter' woodpeckers from putting holes in your house by tricking them into thinking that their predators are waiting for them.

"They are afraid of red-tailed hawks," he said, hanging us this to hand in our bedroom window:

Now, I just have a few questions:

1. will the woodpecker think this flimsy photocopy of a hawk silhouette is the real thing?

2. because this is black & white, what happens if the woodpecker thinks this is a black-tailed hawk? will he not be frightened?

3. are birds this stupid?

4. does he seriously think i'm hanging this 8.5" x 11" paper bird in my bedroom window???

Well, the joke's on us. Because we didn't put it up. And Mr. KK was outside at 3am last night in slippers with a flashlight looking for the little sucker.

And woodpeckers are relentless. Trust me.

(did you read about our termite damage? seriously, click the link)