I might be smarter than a chickadee.
Last spring, a bird kept pecking on the side of our house, near our second-floor bedroom window. It drove us crazy! We bought a fake owl to scare it away, and we would shoot nerf darts at it through the window, and eventually it stopped. But this Spring, he was back and just as determined as ever. He was smaller than a woodpecker, and from my description, I was told he was a flicker of some sort. But this year, after the cats killed one of his cohorts and presented him to me, I studied his markings thoroughly and looked him up online. He's definitely a "Mountain Chickadee" - but why would one be pecking on the house? So Monday found me leaning as far out of the bedroom window as I could, feeling down the side of the house around the area where he'd been pecking. A-ha! there was a small knothole in our wood siding that had caught his attention. Apparently he was trying to enlarge the hole a bit more. I could already get a couple of fingers in there and feel the nice, fluffy insulation - a nesting site that would surely impress any female. It was almost big enough for him. So, during my lunch break on Tuesday, I ran over to Ace Hardware and bought a birdhouse that could be mounted on the side of our house. As soon as I got home, I dragged our ladder out, and Jonathan climbed up and first filled the existing hole with Great Stuff sealer, then we screwed the new cedar birdhouse to the side of the house so that the opening was just about where the knothole had been. And ever since, it's been perfectly peaceful.