A California pest control company recently reported one of the most unusual cases it has ever worked on – a woodpecker filling the walls of a house with over 700 lbs (317 kg) of acorns.

Nick Castro of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, a pest control company in California, thought he had seen it all in his 20+ years in the business, but even he was shocked by one of his most recent finds. Last month, Castro was commissioned by a California family to fix the “work” of a persistent woodpecker that kept pecking holes in the outer walls of their house and filling them with acorns. The woodpecker didn’t account for the empty space between the wall layers, so the acorns he kept bringing in didn’t stay put; instead, they fell to the bottom of the walls and eventually started coming out of various orifices inside. Nick knew he would find a few acorns if he searched well enough, but nowhere near the massive pile he ended up with…

Photo: Eliobed Suarez/Unsplash

At first, the pest control expert checked the exterior of the house and confirmed that this was the work of a woodpecker. The walls of the home were “completely destroyed”, with dozens of holes pecked in them, and if that wasn’t confirmation enough, Castro and his team actually saw the bird putting more acorns into these holes while they were there.

Once the pest control experts started cutting holes into the interior walls of the house, mountains of acorns started pouring out, and the more holes they cut, the more acorns they found. In the end, they filled eight large garbage bags with about 300 lbs of acorns.

“They just kept coming and coming, nonstop,” Nick Castro told The Dodo. “Acorns were thought to be only about a quarter of the way up the wall. Turned out, they were piled high up to the attic of the house.”

“This bird was crazy we actually saw him there when we were there putting more in the holes he created,” the pest control expert wrote on Facebook.

In case you’re sorry about the woodpecker and all the work it put into its massive acorn stash, you will at least be relieved to know that no harm has come to the bird. Nick and his team just patched up the holes it had made in the walls, and after the owners of the house add some new vinyl siding to it, it will probably just look for a new place to gather food for the winter.

“Unreal, never came across something like this before,” Nick Castro summarized his experience with the work of this incredibly busy woodpecker.