I Heard "Our" Woodpecker

This morning, reading in the family room, I heard it: our woodpecker.

I say "our" woodpecker because he (she? I'll go with "it") is a regular annual visitor to our neighborhood, and I hear its rapid rat-a-tat-tat with mixed feelings: I'm glad the woodpecker is back--but is it on our property? Our house.

Some years, it has been.

I loved woodpeckers when I was a kid. Woody Woodpecker was a favorite cartoon character. (See pic at the top of the post.) (Link to some older cartoon footage.) I read the Woody comic books, too. He was frolicsome, funny, disrespectful (loved that as a kid--not so much later on)--and always, somehow, seemed to regain his sense of humor even after a dire (!) experience. And we heard his trademark laugh.

I don't know when I've seen a Woody cartoon, but I just checked on YouTube, and I saw that there are newer shows running--ones featuring living actors, too. I'll not link to them--they somehow annoy me. Something's very wrong about it.

Wikipedia tells me Woody was born in 1940 from the mind and pen of Walter Lanz and one of his artists, Ben "Bugs" Hardaway. Woody's voice, originally, came from the gifted Mel Blanc. The cartoons played at movie theaters (as part of the pre-show entertainment) until 1972, and then the cartoons moved to TV for The Woody Woodpecker Show (1957-58--then in syndication till 1966, the year I graduated from college).

So, basically, Woody was with me from birth to the beginning of my teaching career in the fall of 1966.

And I loved him--far better than Donald Duck and that crowd. Right up there, in my book, with Bugs and his buddies was Woody.

But ... my woodpecker-fondness diminished considerably the first time I heard one pounding on our house. It was loud; it was destructive; it made me think of (but not act upon) avicide.

Instead, we did some online research, learned that owls frighten them, so we went to Ace Hardware and bought a large fake owl--which produced owlish sounds when something was nearby--placed it on the roof near our woodpecker's favorite spot, and ... he did not return!

Another year he attacked our cedar fence. Plastic owl redux. Good-bye, woodpecker.

The last few years (his memory must be impressive) he has not been on our property at all but on the neighbors'. So I find the sound much more pleasant, you know? A sign of spring.

****

BTW: I see an ad all the time on Hulu--an ad for TIAA (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, a retirement plan once aimed at teachers but now generally available). It was first established by Andrew Carnegie--yes, the steel and library guy.

Anyway, the ad: It shows a researcher suspended high in a tree with camera equipment; he whispers to us that he is there to establish proof of the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker. But as he readies his camera, he discovers the battery is too low, and as he scrambles for a replacement, the woodpecker emerges from its hole and flies away. We hear the guy drop his camera, and as the voice-over tells us about how batteries run out but TIAA lifetime income doesn't, we hear the guy fall from the tree!

All the woodpecker's fault!

Found the ad on Google--didn't have to write that longish paragraph about it! Not gonna delete it, though. That would make my post seem too short!

Link to ad.