The flickers are doing you a favor by letting you know you have bugs
(probably ants) in the walls on that side of the house. Also the flickers
are eating some of the bugs.

Thinking about it, are the flickers drumming or actually drilling holes? If
only drumming and making a racket then they like the tone (sound) of this
side of your house and are using it to mark out their territory. Around this
time of year (actually started at the end of December this winter) the
flickers love our drain pipes and the steel cover over the chimney. The
flickers here stopped drumming about a month ago.

If you have bugs to stop the flickers from drilling more holes in the siding
you need to get rid of the bugs. We discovered Carpenter ants in a wall last
year while replacing the siding. We had Orkin (main office is in Fife,
1-800-562-5610) come out and take care of the ants. Was about $300 to take
care of the ants and to spray around the foundation ever other month for a
year. The supervisor as well as the technician that did the work were both
very cognizant of the value of having birds around the house and stressed
the pesticide they use would only harm the ants. In fact, they warned us the
pesticide would not affect the spiders or any other bugs we might have and
we had a bit of a discussion about what bugs we wanted to get rid of.

We can attest to the fact the spiders were not affected by the pesticide.
Rather wishing we had chosen to get rid of them as well with the number that
came inside this year, probably wondering what happened to their food source
(the ants). We still have an apparently healthy population of juncos,
sparrows (White Crowned, Song, and House), Bewick wrens, robins, as well as
flickers and jays that frequent the ground around our house. We also appear
to have a lack of ants.

Bruce McKenzie
Kenmore, WA USA


----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve T. Zimmerman" <Lerxst at compuserve.com>
To: <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 23:03
Subject: flicker problem



Can anyone offer any suggestions for deterring a flicker from
destroying the side of my house?

Thanks,
Steve Zimmerman
Renton, WA
lerxst at compuserve.com