Near Harrogate, September 2010. Female great spotted woodpecker excavating a bluetit nestbox which is fixed to the bottom half of a disused telegraph pole. You can see her chucking out bits of wood, and I think she may be digging from the nest box through into the pole at the back. By the time this was recorded, she had been tapping away in there for at least a week, and she and other woodpeckers had been seen on previous occasions enlarging the entrance hole. (UPDATE 8 Sept 2010: She has since been roosting at night in the box. ) Although I could hear her tapping, the sound didn’t record properly, so I have added a soundtrack of Georgy Vinogradov singing “2 Maxima”, recorded in Moscow before 1951. It’s a lighthearted song about two machine-guns, and his imitation of the machine-gun sound is not unlike the woodpecker’s tapping which echoes from the birdbox. CCTV film of the same woodpecker inside the box is here on Wokanyixia’s channel: www.youtube.com
