Bird Drama

I think that about this time last year, I wrote a post about some woodpeckers that nested in the wall of the apartment complex, right outside my bedroom. After a while those birds went away and I thought I was in the clear. But the birds came back this spring. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. About three weeks ago, I noticed a lot of noise in the wall of my bedroom. It was obvious that the birds returned and were hatching new babies. Eventually they hatched and it sounded like there were about 40 chicks in my wall in addition to the parent birds. Actually it was probably only 2 or 3 chicks. At any rate, the noise in the wall was significantly louder once the baby birds hatched. At about 5:30 in the morning I would hear one of the parent birds slam into the wall where there nest is built and then the babies would chirp wildly...and loudly. I could deal with this in the morning, because I usually wake up for work at about 6:00 anyway. But recently over the past few weeks the birds have become more active at night...all night. I assumed that the babies were probably growing and the space was getting tight, because I could hear a lot of rustling against the wall. But over the past week, there has been more than rustling. The birds were now clawing, scratching, drumming, and pecking against the drywall. Even when I knocked on the wall to try to scare or quiet them, it did nothing. Whenever I knocked, they scratched back. No, this isn't a game, I'm trying to sleep. What has been frustrating is that they do this nonstop, all night long. My ears are good and my hearing is sensitive, so even when I tried to tune it out, I couldn't. I even put cotton and toilet paper in my ears and covered my head with pillows and I could still hear the birds clawing and pecking against the wall. One night, at 3:30 am, I had to leave my bed and sleep on my futon because I couldn't take it anymore.

I'm a nature lover and an animal person, so I tried to deal with it as best as I could. But I don't pay $850+ in rent to sleep on my couch, and I haven't been able to get more than 3 hours of sleep each night for the past week. My job isn't easy to do when you're sleep deprived, and when I don't get enough sleep I start to get severe headaches, and those usually knock me out for a few days. So, at my breaking point, I went to the office in the apartment complex to let them know that there has been some "woodpecker damage" outside my unit. But, unfortunately for me but fortunately for the birds, these birds are a protected species and there is nothing that you can do about them. All you can do is patch up the hole once they fly away and hope they don't come back. So, that's that.

On the bright side, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed, it has been really quiet tonight. When I looked at the hole where their nest is, I didn't see any baby bird heads pop out to look at me. And the wall in my bedroom seems really quiet and I don't hear any rustling. So I'm hoping that the babies finally learned to fly and maybe they flew away. It's dark now, so I suppose there is a chance that they'll come back to their nest. But I'm secretly hoping that they've found a new place to sleep, because I could really use more than 3 hours of sleep tonight. We'll see...