A pest control crew received quite the surprise when it cut into the walls of a North Bay home: 700 pounds of acorns stashed by woodpeckers.
Nick Castro, the founder of Nick's Extreme Pest Control, said he found the secret stash last month when he was working at an Airbnb in Sonoma County.
Castro said his team was initially called to the house to investigate a report of maggots coming out of a wall. When they cut into the drywall, they found the woodpeckers' massive cache of acorns.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
"Bird was a bit of a hoarder," the pest control company wrote in a Facebook post. "Never came across something like this."
The birds had been trying to store the nuts in the house's chimney, but the acorns ended up falling into a cavity behind the walls.
Castro's company had to cut four separate holes in the walls to remove all of the acorns. In the end, they filled up eight 50-gallon garbage bags.
The acorns had mealworms rather than maggots lurking inside them.
