question about wood peckers

[DaNgEr_KiTtY]

welp i have an new wood pecker issue. i have a few large columns on the front of my house which are hollow. seems one of my little friends decided to celebrate memorial day in a different way.

i bought a new flag pole set & mounted it on one of the columns & it musta seemed like a perfect place to start peckin away. she hopped on the mounting bracket & began a little trail up to where she finally pecked out her perfect circle. i find it amazing how good they are at that cause i cant even draw a circle that well.

we seldom get folks knocking on our door & now we know who was pranking us :) if i am not mistaken this is the time for nesting for the wood peckers here in the shenandoah valley. i dont want to go to war with this bird cause they seem to win everytime. so i will accommodate her as best as i can.

i will have to install a lil overhang over the hole so that rain doesnt get in & rot my column. this one would cost a minimum $600 to buy new if i installed it myself.

i guess my main questions are as follows. do wood peckers continue to use the nest after the fledglings are fledged? & do they return the next season? i wanna patch this hole asap but dont wanna screw things up for the wood peckers family.

one of the things i love about living out here is the birds. i watch them everyday. i get a kick outta the wood peckers especially as long as they arent messin with my house too much. they are very intelligent & beautiful birds. we have 3 kinds of wood peckers here i see often. this one is a ladder back as we call em. correct me if i am wrong but i have even seen a few pilated peckers here which are huge compared to the others.

[bookwormom]

so what happened with the woodpeckers? I am really surprised it chipped a hole in your column. as if the woods were not full of trees. do you have bugs in your column?
I have seen a pileated woodpecker from my porch. There used to be this bird calling with an odd call, and my father in law would say, it is going to rain, the raincrow is calling. After we moved on our place I heard the raincrow, but had never seen one. so one day I prayed, dear God, please let me see a raincrow, and low and behold, it is the pileated woodpecker. The funny thing is, in my native land my folks said something similar when the green woodpecker called. I am wondering if originally it was called the rain cryer, the announcer of rain, which deteriorated into raincrow.