This spring my house was attacked by those flying, pecking problem makers! The hell of this for me its that I paid several thousand dollars last summer to have the house painted! The cost included replacing any rotted natural wood trim with synthetic wood. Did the carpentry crew simply get lazy last year and not replace trim in areas that the estimator had not included? Or did these pecked areas rot over the winter exposing the areas to woodpeckers? And the pecked-to-shit areas are higher up than I have ladder or inclination to reach...

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I have a Downy Woodpecker that apparently is the worlds most stupid woodpecker. He constantly pecks on the synthetic siding of my building. No bugs to eat on that stuff!
I also have Pileated Woodpeckers. Think of a woodpecker the size of a crow! They make quite a racket.

That wood is rotten. Probably full of termites too.

The woodpeckers did you a favor.

The woodpeckers don't work for free. They're after a meal and there's one there somewhere.
That's the real problem.
Where I live, carpenter bees are a big problem and the result looks like yours.

We have one that, at sunrise every morning, hammers on the metal chimney cap for a minute.

Thursday our plumber put in an extended furnace vent cap. Last night a woodpecker discovered it. Could hear it throughout the house. Luckily it only lasted a couple minutes.

I always thought they make that loud noise to attract a future ex wife.

We have a few, but they luckily stick to the trees

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...Think of a woodpecker the size of a crow!...

Yikes! that would be a big bird.

Well, I'm going to have to find a handyman to get those rotted boards down and new synthetic trim boards installed.

Some people try attaching shiny foil strips to blow around near areas woodpeckers like to scare them but I never found that to work well. What did work was a suet feeder loaded with suet for woodpeckers in the backyard near the house. Apparently they go for the feeder since it’s easier and ignore the house. YMMV.

My experience was just the opposite. Feeders, especially suet brought them in. Then they started damaging all the houses in the neighborhood. By stopping feeding them, I cut their numbers way down.

People will tell you if they're pecking, it's because you have bugs. That's not 100% true, some do it as a means of communication. After listening to them banging on the metal vent hood up north most of my life, I can certainly believe that. They're also destroyed my neighbors trim boards and siding, none of which is actual wood.

I had a ladderback woodpecker would bang the heck out of a metal rain gutter, little bastard.

Have you ever seen utility poles that were wrapped in hardware cloth ? They can wreak havoc on a wood pole .

Same fischtown. It’s loud as hell when they hit the rain gutter.

It's weird to me that your fascia is bare wood and not flashed with metal. Around here pretty much all the houses have metal trim on those areas, and I've never seen a woodpecker going at it. I'm not even sure how he'd hold on to do so.

We have tons of them around here. Red-headed, red-bellied, and those huge Pileated ones that YooperSigs was talking about. Sometimes they visit our feeder and they're fun to watch. I'm all about them eating the bugs, too...I figure it takes a lot of ants and termites to keep something that big alive!

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Originally posted by 92fstech:
It's weird to me that your fascia is bare wood and not flashed with metal. Around here pretty much all the houses have metal trim on those areas, and I've never seen a woodpecker going at it. I'm not even sure how he'd hold on to do so.

Yes, that is a good point. My wife and I had this house built 25ish years ago. We live in a community that was master planned by Toll Brothers. But there were several smaller, local builders participating in the development and we chose one of the smaller builders as we liked this floor plan the best.

To your point, all the Toll Brothers houses in my neighborhood have aluminum clad facia/trim. My builder did not use it.