WOODPECKER'S NEW HABIT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 135, 9 June 1932, Page 11

WOODPECKER'S NEW HABIT.

The woodpecker is damaging telegraph and telephone poles along English country roads by making its nesting holes in thorn instead of choosing, as is usual, trees which are dead or dying. Many posts have been so badly damaged that they have had to be replaced. A London company has asked the British Museum for advice as to the best method to prevent the bird damaging the poles. Tho reply of the expert of the Natural History Museum was that he cannot do more than suggest that the absence in that country of old trees had forced the woodpecker to turn its attention to what had the appearance of the matured tree —the pole covered by creosote. The same trouble is being experienced in Sweden. Some Swedish companies have taken the precaution to cover the holes by sheets of iron, but many poles are unsafe. Tho absence of old trees in the forest region has compelled the birds to seek their nesting places in poles of considerable t',fi»:ness.