How To Get Rid of Woodpeckers

oodpeckers may be cute, but they make lots of noise and drill large, ugly holes in your wood siding. I moved into a house with cedar siding without realizing that the previous owner had done nothing to protect it from woodpeckers. I have learned from experience that you need to take care of woodpeckers as soon as they appear, before it becomes a habit for them. This means prevention.

Elimination

Shooting them
Shooting the little f*ckers is probably the most obvious way to get rid of them, but aside from being not very nice, it suffers from two practical disadvantages: one, it's illegal, and two, it creates even more holes in your wood siding, which rather defeats the purpose. Standing outside your house with a shotgun for hours at a time looking up at the roof is also a good way to get arrested in many areas.

Likewise, poison and trapping are illegal in most places. Exterminators will generally refuse to do anything except spray for insects. Spraying is done in the spring, after they hatch.

Reflector tape

Reflector tape
Reflector tape scares the carp out of the birds and is highly effective. The 2-inch wide type is better because it makes noise and doesn't get tangled up when it gets windy. If you've ever been 40 feet up on a ladder trying to work while this tape is dangling near your head, you will understand why it frightens birds. It's noisy and disorienting. In fact, most things that make humans nervous will generally frighten birds. However, there are limits. Telling birds their property taxes are going up or their credit card has been canceled generally has little or no effect.

The reflector tape should be cut into 2-foot long strips and attached to a piece of screen frame about two feet apart with a 2-inch piece of spline. Attach the screen frame about a foot down and one foot out from the wall so the wind can't blow it up onto the roof. Do not use duct tape--it will leave a residue on your gutter or soffit.

Does it work?
Yes--it looks tacky, so woodpeckers, sophisticated connoisseurs that they are, will generally stay at least six feet away from it to avoid being associated with such a tacky display. Unfortunately, if your house is more than 8 feet high, this means parts of it will still be unprotected.

Update Make sure the reflector tape is not directly under the edge of your eaves where dripping water can reach it. I had one reflector tape frame that started growing icicles and was pulled off the wall by the weight.

Bird glue / spikes
Speaking of tacky... There is a form of glue that is sold to repel birds. It's not strong enough to entrap them, but they dislike the sensation and avoid it. However, you can't cover your entire wall with it. This stuff is better for pigeons, who typically land on a narrow balcony. Same with bird spikes.

You can also apply an invisible Teflon spray. This causes the birds to slip off your siding when they try to peck. Unfortunately, it's expensive, and it's not really invisible.

Plastic animated owl and speaker

Plastic owls
Woodpeckers are easily frightened and plastic owls sometimes work. The two most common mistakes people make with plastic owls are not placing them high enough so the birds can clearly see them, and not moving them around. If the bird can predict where the plastic owl is located, it loses all of its shock value and the bird will ignore it.

There are also animated plastic owls that have photosensors built into their base. Whenever there is a bird-like disturbance, these animated owls make a hooting sound and rotate their head toward it. Unfortunately, they're made in China, which means you have to take them apart and rebuild them before they're useful.

To rebuild it, I removed the battery and switch, and ran a long cable indoors to a larger set of D cells. The little speaker inside also went bad after a few months, which made the owl sound hoarse. An owl with laryngitis. Real scary. So I purchased an outdoor speaker and mounted it on the platform next to the owl. If your neighbors complain about the noise from the owl, you can put a resistor in series with the speaker.

The sensors, of course, cannot really detect birds, but they will be set off by moving leaves and, especially, by reflector tape. When the sun hits the reflector tape, your electronic owl will go crazy, hooting continuously and spinning its head around in endless circles. This convinces the birds that a crazy person lives in the house, and they will avoid it.

Plastic owls are less effective against other types of birds. I had a cardinal that decided that its reflection in my window was an enemy bird. Every day, it bashed itself against my window, frequently knocking itself unconscious. Birds are unlikely to be killed doing this, because the brain of a bird is made of a hard rock-like material composed of a mixture of aluminum and magnesium silicates and pyroxene ((Mg, Fe)SiO3). Placing an owl in the window had no effect until I placed it on top of a small cylinder lamp. The light shone upward and made the owl appear even more menacing. This caused the cardinal to fly over to the other side of the house and bash itself against the side window instead.

Does it work?
Usually not, unless used in conjunction with reflector tape. The problem is that owls are nocturnal and woodpeckers are diurnal. But it increases the effective range of tape. The owls have to be moved around frequently, and they are only effective against species that are afraid of owls, so they won't work against large birds like pigeons and crows. The best place is a platform in the middle or preferably the upper part of the wall, at least fifteen feet above the ground. If it's too low, or if it's too hard to see, it will not register in their brain as a real owl.

This plastic snow owl, available in hardware stores, should ideally be placed on the wall, at least 15 feet up

Real owls
What about a real owl? If you live in a rural area with lots of trees, you could set up an owl box. It should be set up some distance away from your house, because owls will not hunt right next to their nest box.

Plastic Hawk Effigies
Plastic hawk effigies are hard to find in this country, but are sold in Australia and England. The hawk effigy must move and must cast a moving shadow on the ground in order to be effective. Another possibility is to spread fake dead plastic woodpeckers around on the ground to make it look like something is killing them. (You could even use a strategy I learned many years ago from playing Doom: if you can trick your deer and the woodpeckers into fighting each other, you might be able to get rid of both at the same time.)

Anything that would make you nervous at the top of a 40-foot ladder will also frighten away a woodpecker. Giant plastic rattlesnakes that automatically spring out come to mind. Birds hate snakes as much as humans do--maybe more.

Lasers
If you're a guy, you gotta have lasers. Green diode lasers are available that create a beam that spreads into a line. Aligned parallel to the wall and pointed up toward the eaves of your house, the laser creates an invisible plane of light. Because it's a line and not a point, it's not bright enough to harm the bird's vision, but it annoys the heck out of them because as soon as they move their head toward your wall, their eye moves into the path of the beam.

Obviously, even though they're relatively safe, you would not want to use lasers if you have children. Be absolutely certain the beam is stopped by your roof eaves, or you could interfere with overflying aircraft. If your roof has a peak shape, you could mount the laser near the peak and point it down instead of up. The disadvantage in this case is that it's harder to replace the batteries.

Birds have excellent color vision, superior to that of humans. Their retinas have four cone pigments: longwave ultraviolet, blue, blue-green, and yellow-orange (370, 445, 508, and 565 nanometers) compared to only three for humans (blue-violet, green, yellow) (424, 530, and 560 nm), and they can see red slightly better than humans can. However, red lasers range from 635-690 nm, so green (530) is still more visible than red for both humans and birds. Moreover, the effectiveness of red varies with different species.

Don't forget to put a resistor (at least 10Ω) in series with the laser, or it will pull too much current and burn itself up.

Does it work?
I have not yet tested it.

Bird / Deer Netting
Deer netting is fine plastic netting that is draped over bushes to keep deer from eating them. From a distance, it's impossible to see. Similar netting can also be suspended near the roof, a few inches out from the wall, to prevent birds from gaining access. However, in addition to being annoying, birds are really stupid. Birds are related to dinosaurs, and if the dinosaurs were as stupid as birds, it would go a long way in explaining why they became extinct. I have seen birds get tangled up in deer netting. When it happens they make an awful noise, and you have to climb up and cut down the net to release them. Not good if it happens to be raining and they're forty feet up. A better alternative is heavier netting or wire mesh, but this is more conspicuous. The mesh does not need to be fine enough to be impenetrable. Birds are generally unwilling to endanger their own escape route, but of course the mesh should not be so wide that they can use it as a perch.

Does it work?
It serves as a physical barrier, so it's 100% efficient at protecting the area that it covers, but you can't cover your entire wall. There is nothing to stop the birds from drilling a few feet lower.

Woodpeckers can be tough to photograph

Bird Distress Call Generators
Birds make distinctive noises when injured, or when there are snakes or other hazards around. Bird distress call generators like the BirdXPeller Pro from Bird-X play recorded distress calls from a variety of species. The theory is that birds will be frightened, or at least lose their appetite. They are expensive, but a couple hundred bucks is a small price to pay to protect your wood siding. I have not tested them.

Decoys
The theory here is, build a sacrificial shed and stock it with bugs, or you fill a bird feeder with suet so the woodpeckers will attack it instead of your house. This could backfire because you might attract other species, like crows. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If you get crows, they will scare away (and maybe even eat) your woodpeckers. If suet doesn't work, and you're really desperate, gather up some road kill and place it around your house to attract crows.

Electrified fence
I haven't tried this, but an electric fence might also be a good way to get rid of woodpeckers. If they associate your house with an occasional mild shock, they might go elsewhere. Since birds are not big enough to remain grounded when they contact your fence, you would need to intersperse some ground wires next to the electrified wire, or it won't shock anything. Be sure to turn it off when you hire someone to power-wash your siding.

Wiring your bushes with 35,000 volts of electricity is a great way of getting rid of deer as well. Hmmm ... on second thought, maybe that's not such a great idea.

Woodpecker repellent
Spraying woodpecker repellent over a repair is supposed to create a bad odor that deters them from re-drilling the hole again. I haven't tried it, but in my experience, if you spray the hole with insecticide before repairing it, woodpeckers never return to the same spot. I had a bad experience with a similar product called Liquid Fence that is supposed to act as a dog repellent. Despite its claims, the odor was easily detected by humans. It took a month before the revolting smell on my yard disappeared. (It did seem to stop the neighborhood dogs from urinating on my grass and creating brown spots; however, that became academic a few months later when Verizon showed up with an excavator to install FiOS and converted my entire front yard into a mud pit.)

Prevention tips

1. Spray your siding for insects annually. Woodpeckers are searching for insects like carpenter bees or termites. Spray inside any small holes and seal them up. Bees hover in front of your wall searching visually for holes to enter, so every hole must be sealed.
2. Pounding on the wall from the inside, surprisingly, works well, because woodpeckers are very sensitive to vibration. But they will return 5-10 minutes later. The more strongly you manage to frighten them, the longer they will remember it.
3. Woodpeckers are seasonal. In this part of the country, the peak time is when the leaves are off the trees.
4. Spray woodpecker holes with insecticide, then fill with naphthalene mothballs before sealing with putty.
5. Get rid of any bird feeders and sources of open water. Keep your gutters clean so there is no standing water inside, and put bad-tasting stuff inside (detergent, not salt or Clorox, which will corrode them).
6. If all else fails, paint your siding. Woodpeckers will not generally attack a painted surface. If they do, it's a sure sign of insects.