Apparently, flickers pecking at houses is a common problem and remedies include installing bird netting or hanging old CDs, Mylar strips or flashing lights to scare them away. Or just go with the universal solve-all: duct tape.

So far, the duct tape seems to be keeping the flicker away from its destructive front-door molding drilling. Or, perhaps they have chosen other nearby trees to make a nest.

These two holes were intended as an entry and exit for a kind of northern flicker condo in faux wood resin material, created by persistent stealth pecking after the writer took down to old, bug-riddled sugar maples that were a threat to crash into their Guilderland home.

A northern flicker, a common woodpecker in these parts, pecked this hole stealthily in the molding alongside their front door, without the Grondahls noticing it.

GUILDERLAND — Hell hath no fury like a flicker scorned.

It’s a long story. Let me explain.

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We built our “new” house 24 years ago. I walked our lot, the last of phase one in our sprawling subdivision, with the builder, Richard List. He rode in a pickup truck with his beloved Doberman Pinscher perched on the front seat. He liked to operate heavy equipment and moved Pine Bush sand dunes around like a sculptor of the land.

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Eight mature trees were scattered around our half-acre suburban lot — sugar maples, mostly, but also a couple of stately beech trees. “I’m happy to work around them and save as many as you’d like,” List said as we walked the lot. He said it was cheaper and easier for developers to clear-cut all the trees and to scrape a building site as flat as a tabletop. But he preferred to deal with the inconvenience of........

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