My new winged nemesis...

I have a new winged nemesis, and it's not the zipper bird this time. Oh no, it's far worse...


I'm seriously ready to call out some professionals...

It's a new bird that has shown up in the past few weeks, and it puts the previously mentioned, highly annoying zipper bird in the "completely harmless" category.

Here's the new bird's bio:

Name: The Gila Woodpecker

Appearance:

A female: the color of dirt with an evil pointy beak.

Sounds like:

According to the website, "All About Birds," the Gila Woodpecker sounds like this: "Call a loud, raspy 'churr.' Also short 'pip' notes. Also drums."

Drums? Did someone say "drums"? Did anyone else know a bird could drum?

Maybe only woodpeckers can drum...

Click here to hear its rather unpleasant song.

My personal opinion?... Its song is pretty loud and obnoxious, but it's nothing compared the cacophony it creates with its damn beak...

More on this in a minute... but first --- an interesting fact from the website "All About Birds":

* The male Gila Woodpecker forages mainly on the trunk and main branches of saguaro cacti, while the female concentrates on the periphery and diseased areas.* (Sidenote: Yet another unfair example of mother nature's conspiracy against females.)

And now to the point:

A Gila woodpecker has been terrorizing me every morning before 7:00 a.m.

For the past six days, I have been awakened in the most ignoble manner, by what sounds very much like a jackhammer drilling through the metal vent in my roof. It literally scared me so much this morning (errr, a Sunday at 6:43 a.m.) that I sat bolt upright in bed out of shock from the noise.



It sounds like this: brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... bbbbbbbbbbbrr... brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... and it's so loud that even my earplugs do nothing to stop the noise, and I have taken to wearing them every night before bed, just to make me feel like they might do something...

See the metal vent (attached to the heater next to my bed) poking out of the roof?:

That's where the little shit sits and drills into the metal.

I guess metal pipes (or maybe it's just my apartment) fall under the category: "periphery and diseased areas"... at least to a blind and apparently mentally challenged bird who is destroying her beak on man-made material and getting no food out of it whatsoever.

In case you were wondering, I know it's a female Gila Woodpecker because I was so pissed off yesterday that I went outside at the cusp of dawn to stare at my roof until the bird returned to begin hammering away again. I clapped my hands and agitatedly told it to scram, but the bird just might be deaf too, as it went right on pecking . This morning I pounded on my heater so the vibration would scare it away, but then it returned again right as I was falling back to sleep... as expected.

I know this is a minor concern compared to the terrible things going on in the world, but when I'm wishing for a bee-bee gun at 6:52 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I believe I have issues...