Woodpecker in the House

It was after a week of getting no sleep that I realized we had a woodpecker in the house. I didn’t exactly know where or how it got in, but I definitely knew that the constant clanging and pecking was from a woodpecker no doubt about it. When I told my dad what I knew it to be, he was very unhappy, as an avid bird watcher he didn’t want to cause any of the winged creatures harm, but he reluctantly believed me and we set out looking for it. We had to wait for night to fall before we could start our search, the darn thing only seemed to cause ruckus when everyone was trying to get a good night’s rest, but as soon as the sun fell the woodpecker started up.
The odd thing was that the sound it made wasn’t its usual beak-on-wood sound as you would expect it to be, it had a hollow, metal note to it that we couldn’t quite identify, so we split up. I went to the attic and my dad went for the basement, my two year old brother (who insisted on helping us) sat in the kitchen and listened for, or more likely slept through, the bird’s obnoxious sounds. As I crawled around in the dingy, old attic, I struggled to focus on not falling through the ceiling, and locating the bird, until I crawled right past it. I cried out for my dad and went running/speed crawling back down the ladder and into the living room, where we met each other out of breath. Panting and smiling, we both exclaimed that it was in the chimney, which wasn’t exactly something to be excited about but we were both just proud that our detective work paid off.
Finding the woodpecker, as it turns out, was the easy part. Since it had made its home between the chimney stack and the metal piping, there was no easy way to get at it. Having a woodpecker in the house was panning out to be a lot more work than I had expected. My dad suggested we tear down the bricks of the chimney so we could remove it safely, unfortunately for him my mother was not going to let him do that. Instead we called in the pros and let them handle it, we had to move out of our house for about a week, but when we came back we were able to sleep soundly since there were no more woodpeckers in the house.

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