Ted, the bird we have down here that pecks on wood trim on houses so bad is locally called a yellow-hammer. My grandad next door built a brick home in 1947 but it had a good deal of wood trim. He hated those yellow-hammers because they pecked holes in the trim. The people that told you about eliminating the bugs were backwards, and wrong. The bugs aren't there until the wood pecking birds create the holes, which the bugs then inhabit ......... until the birds come back and "clean out" the holes.
https://wildsouth.org/yellowhammer/I don't know about yellowhammers, but when I was building my house, I was working inside one day when I heard a loud tapping. It sounded like someone was knocking on the front door. I went to see, and nobody was there, and no vehicles were in the driveway. A few minutes later, the tapping started again, and again I went to the front door. Nobody... nothing. Then I heard the tapping again, and now being outside, it sounded different than inside the unfinished interior. I walked around the back side of the house, and when I got around the corner, I saw a small woodpecker, a downy woodpecker I think, pecking on the expensive 5/4" clear cedar trim I had just installed around a large window at the end of the kitchen. He quickly flew away, but damage was already done. And he returned again later to do more pecking at the same spot.
I vowed that I would eliminate the threat, and the next day, I brought an old Savage model 94 20 gauge and some shells. Shortly after I arrived and started working, he started pecking on the same piece of cedar trim. I loaded the gun and crept around the house. As soon as I poked my head around the corner, he spotted me and took off like bat out of hell. I mounted the gun to shoot, but he hugged the side of the house, and I was afraid I might rake the siding, so I didn't shoot.
This same scenario went on numerous times over the next several days. He would fly like a little fighter jet with his left wing tip almost touching the siding, and then swoop left around the front of the house, never giving me a clear shot. Then finally, after almost a week, he made the fatal mistake of flying a little further away from the siding, and I pulled the trigger, turning him into a ball of feathers. I was elated, but by then, he was totally through that piece of cedar trim and into the Tyvek House Wrap covering the plywood sheathing underneath. I cursed the little bastard.
Shortly thereafter, I started noticing large black ants inside the house, crawling over the sub-floor and studs in the unfinished kitchen. Carpenter ants! After a few days, I watched one to see where it might be entering or leaving, and was shocked to see it crawl into a small gap at the end of the large header made of sandwiched Hemlock-Fir 2x12's and plywood, over the kitchen window. This was exactly right where the dead woodpecker had been drilling into my new cedar trim board on the exterior. I never thought that carpenter ants would attempt to nest in new dry framing lumber, but they kept going in and pushing fresh sawdust out. I tried dusting the area with powdered boric acid, to no avail. I tried blowing boric acid powder into the crevice where they entered, and they would come out unfazed, covered with the white powder. I decided it was time to get serious, and shot a little Diazinon in there with a syringe, and that killed them before they could get established and do real damage.
I have always been thankful for the game animals I killed while hunting. I never felt much remorse for any vermin I've had to shoot. But to this day, I still think about that little woodpecker, and I'm sorry I shot him. He was only trying to tell me something very bad was going on in my new unfinished house.
