Has anyone successfully deterred an insistent Wood-Pecker?

[PreggieUBA2C]

Ugh. We're renovating because of some of the problems in our home that incidentally make it attractive to little critters.

Last night I had 5 hrs of broken sleep because of mice and wood-peckers. I know how to deal with the mice (but we're not working on the area that lets them in yet ) but the wood-pecker is grating on me. It pecks as long as the sun is up and right now there is light until around 10:30pm and again by 5:00am. In mid-summer, we'll have 24 hrs of light, so I really have to deal with this now!!!

I live on a farm in the wilderness, so there is absolutely no shortage of dead trees for nesting and drumming, yet it is choosing our home to do so.

Right now, while dp is not home, we are playing a game wherein it hammers and then I run ot the door and it flies away to the top of a tall tree that is in plain sight and waits until I am inside to return to hammer.

I am waiting for dp to come home so he can staple up some metal mesh that bulges out from the eaves to keep the bird away from pecking there, but will it not just choose another spot? We can't reasonably wrap the whole home in netting or mesh! Or is that the only solution?

I would have stapled some mesh up myself at 5:30am, but I am too pg to be that high up on a ladder. Dp returns around 8am.

Ugh. I'm so tired and have been up trying to keep all the 'visitors' from waking my sleeping dc because nothing is more vital to our family functioning than that they sleep enough, and irony of ironies, the bird is hammering above their bedroom window. And then when I open the door, the farm dog barks (not ours- we share the property) and this riles the geese up which in turn gets the roosters going.

This started yesterday morning. Nobody here is a crack-of-dawn farmer, so I'd like to stop this cycle right away if possible.

Any success stories?

[mattemma04]

My mom hung up bird netting from the gutters. She also sprayed various things that would give off a scent for a long time to discourage the woodpecker from pounding away at her wood siding. It helped a lot last year.I don't know if the birds have returned this year.

[hildare]

remove the food source- it's obviously going for some buggies in there.
you could also distract it with suet cakes on trees further from your home.

[PreggieUBA2C]

Well by this morning, it had punched out a hole three inches in diameter.

There was a fat line of foam board insulation that it had worked on mostly and only just finished up the hole by pecking through the wood below. We're replacing all the siding, so a part of the stuff that was covered before under the flashing was open. So, we pulled the flashing back down and nailed it shut temporarily (we'll have to pull it up again, but to put up the new wooden siding).

We are also re-insulating and removing all the foam board because it is just a boon to critters up here. They love it. This makes sense but I hope that it hasn't fully established the corner of our home as the corner of its territory because then it might just peck through our new siding too. There are no bugs up there- just foam insulation.

We took this place over from others who had abandoned renovating the renovations from the people before, so there are lots of little surprises like this all over. It's interesting picking up where others left off without having them to consult. Sort of like playing Battleship.

We can never be accused of being afraid of a challenge!

We're also going to hang up some wind chimes and keep checking on the corner for wood-pecking. I think once we have an eaves up, we'll put in a net all around so that we don't have to stop individual birds from nesting and pecking.

It's so strange; we've lived in the remote north in the forest for four years and this is the first year we've had uninvited critters. Also the first time doing renovations and I'm 36 weeks pg with little time to complete things. We can see trees and wilderness as far as the mountaintops allow in every direction, but our home is attractive. Eeeek!!! We just moved to a farm this past December though. Perhaps the available feed has something to do with it.

I wish I had kept my son's long hair when we sheared it. It may have been a good bird-deterrent wind-chime component.