700 Pounds Of Acorn Smuggled By Smart Woodpeckers

A pair of California woodpeckers may be feeling blue after a pest control technician stumbled upon their massive hoard of acorns, cleverly stashed in the walls of a California home. The homeowners called Nick Castro, owner of Nick's Extreme Pest Control when they spotted worms coming from a bedroom wall. The worms turned out to be mealworms feasting on the hoard of acorns, believed to be amassed by a pair of acorn woodpeckers.

After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, the acorns began spilling out and just kept coming, according to Castro. He estimates there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years. While woodpeckers usually store acorns on the outside of homes or in rain gutters, they rarely stash them inside. In this case, the birds dropped the acorns through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to feast on their stash.

It took creating three additional holes in the home's walls to remove all the acorns, which ultimately piled up and reached about 20 feet high, according to Castro. He and his crew of three spent a full day extracting the nuts, filling eight big black garbage bags. The acorns were thrown away as they were covered in droppings and bits of fiberglass from the wall's insulation.

This unusual find took Castro, who has been working in the pest control industry for over 20 years, by surprise. He called it a one-in-a-million chance to find something this significant, adding that he expected to find only a few handfuls, not tens of thousands of acorns. Woodpeckers stash one or two acorns outside the house, or near the sewage. Here the collectors were smart and made a life long investment of food in someone's house!