(CNN) — A pair of woodpeckers in California are surely devastated after a pest control technician, answering a routine call, discovered his enormous trove of acorns cleverly hidden between the walls of a California home.
The owners of the place, located in Sonoma County, called Nick Castro, owner of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, after they saw maggots coming out of a bedroom wall. They turned out to be mealworms, feasting on an incredible number of acorns, which a couple of woodpeckers are believed to have accumulated.
“It was really strange. I’ve never really seen worms with acorns before,” Castro told CNN. But the unusual in this case was just beginning.
After making a small 25 square centimeter hole in the wall, Castro recounted that the acorns began to come out and spill on the floor. That alone wouldn’t be terribly strange, but “they just kept dating,” he said.
“It was pretty incredible to see the amount,” Castro said. He estimates there were at least 317 kilograms of acorns, probably collected in the last two to five years.
Woodpeckers often store acorns outside of houses, sometimes in rain gutters, but rarely inside. In this case, Castro discovered that the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a different hole to feast on their stash.
“Every day there can be weird things, with the creative ways that creatures can enter homes,” Castro explained. “They can still fool us from time to time.”
As they fell from the attic, tens of thousands of acorns collected from several nearby oak trees filled the cavity in the walls, Castro explained.
But this bizarre find took the unusual to a whole new level for the man who has been working in the pest control industry for more than 20 years.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance of finding something that significant,” Castro said. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.”
It was necessary to create three more holes in the walls of the house to remove all the acorns, which finally piled up and reached about 6 meters in height, Castro estimated.
Castro and his team of three spent a full day extracting the nuts.
“We filled eight large, black garbage bags. They were so heavy that we could barely lift them,” Castro said. “They had to have weighed at least 45 kilograms each.”
They threw away the acorns because they were covered in droppings and bits of fiberglass from the wall insulation.
