knock knock who's there?

Today, while I was in the shower, I heard a sharp knocking that sounded like rapid gunfire.  The army was training unusually early in the morning, I mused.  We can hear the firing ranges at Fingringhoe and the testing grounds down at Shoeburyness, but they don't generally get going before nine.  Once I'd switched the shower off I could hear the noise more clearly, and it didn't sound as though it was coming from the direction of the ranges, more as if it were coming from somewhere closer to home, and in the direction of our wood.

It didn't sound quite like machine gun fire either, otherwise I would have been worried, and it was definitely coming from the side of the house facing the wood.  In fact, it sounded as though it was coming out of the big built in cupboard that sits under the eaves in the corner of the bedroom.  I shoved the rug and my grey rubber exercise ball out of the way so that I could peer inside. Everything looked normal, but the noise seemed to be coming from the chimney of the study stove, which runs up through the cupboard (heavily insulated) in its bid to clear the overhanging eaves of the first floor.  The building practice of jettying was not quite dead in the 1960s in north Essex.

We used the stove the previous night, but even if the chimney were still cooling down it had never made a noise in the past.  I wondered wildly if it were something to do with the boiler or the central heating, but no hot water pipes go anywhere near that corner of the bedroom.  The noise happened again, a sharp, resonant, repeated rattle.

Inspiration struck.  I looked out of the window, and a spotted woodpecker immediately flew away from the end of the house.  I remembered articles I'd read about the damage woodpeckers have caused to wooden shingles on church roofs, and didn't feel especially reassured, but when I went to inspect the wall once I was dressed it didn't look as though the woodpecker had touched the wood cladding at all.  Instead there were fresh marks as if someone had been at work with a chisel around the entrances to two of the starling boxes.

We put up the starling boxes as compensation when the Systems Administrator blocked the hole in the roof above the bedroom.  Starlings, we had discovered, make fiendishly noisy lodgers.  Ours used to start banging on the ceiling at four in the morning, which is not a great sound when you have to get up at half past five to commute to London.  The starlings have never showed the slightest interest in the boxes.  We still have a family nesting over the spare room at the front of the house, where they amuse themselves poking bits of grass through a small hole in the ceiling but don't otherwise disturb anybody, but the ones that used to nest at the back moved on.  Unless they have come to an agreement about cohabitation with the ones at the front, that is.  I couldn't honestly tell one starling from another.

Bumblebees used one of the boxes last year, and this year another had great tits nesting in it. Having spotted woodpeckers living on the end of the house would be rather cool, so long as they don't start drilling holes in the cladding.