By JON KLAVERKAMP

By JON KLAVERKAMP

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

Of the Yellow-shafted Flicker, Thoreau wrote:

Ah, there is the note of the first flicker, a prolonged, monotonous wickwick-wick-wick-wick-wick, etc., or, if you please, quick, quick, quick, heard far over and through the dry leaves. But how that single sound peoples and enriches all the woods and fields. They are no longer the same woods and fields that they were. This note really quickens what was dead. It seems to put life into the withered grass and leaves arui bare twigs, and henceforth the days shall not be as they have been. It is as when a family, your neighbors, return to an empty house after a long absence, and you hear the cheerful hum of voices arui the laughter of children....So the flicker makes his voice ring....It is as good as a house-warming to all nature.

Despite Thoreau’s praise of the ' Flicker, many homeowners in Rappahannock County are wishing the joyous bird would spread its cheer elsewhere. Upon returning to its breeding grounds in the east, the flicker has been celebrating the arrival of spring by pecking holes in the sides of homes.

For Thoreau to have enjoyed the bird so fully, he must have had steal siding on his log cabin. In Rappahannock, however, homes are made of wood and so the Flicker is hammering away with relative ease.

In what have thus far proved to be futile defensive gestures, homeowners have been boarding up holes as fast as the Flicker can drill them. The result has been a hodgepodge of boards and nails on the sides of some homes.

One victim of the Flicker, Barney O’Meara of Slate Mills, said the bird may hear hollowness on the side of a house and therefore think that a nesting place is just inside. Thus the bird pecks with diligence.

O’Meara has boarded up plenty of holes, but that hasn’t been a solution because the bird “just pecks in another