We have a delightful small fountain in our yard with a boy on two dolphins spouting water. It is not only a pleasure to gaze at but numerous birds use it to drink each day. They also freshen up by doing a canary flutter.

We have robins, starlings, swallows and once even a flicker.

This is okay with me but Elsbeth can't stand it when big herking crows use it. So she decided to put cubes of chlorine we bought for the hot tub in the fountain to discourage the cawky nest robbers.

It worked. Today we watched as old daddy crow took a drink, spit it out, got a disgusted look on his beak and looked over at the house.

Then he hopped up on the dolphin boys head and dropped a deposit on the little kids’ cement head.

Just about everybody you talk to has some problem with birds even though most enjoy feeding and watching them. There is something hypnotic that fascinates you.

But we have a neighbor who can do without the fascination. Woodpeckers love pecking holes in her stucco finish. Holes as big as golf balls dot her stucco chimneys and walls.

Ornithologists explain to her that only females do the dirty work and only at certain times of the year. It is the foam insulation under the stucco, they say. Kind of like pregnant women getting a fierce craving for ice cream or watermelon.

No real harm is done except that the house looks like Swiss cheese and she is afraid of mice, so she brings a crew in each year and repairs the damage.

She tried plinking the birds with a slingshot but is a lousy shot.

When legendary builder Hank Bakken built our house and hundreds of others from Alki Point to Dash Point, he put screens over the ventilation holes in the attic to block nesting swallows.

It worked fine for several years till starlings found out they could peck the screens out. Then they set up housekeeping in the cozy insulation, laid some eggs and started a family.

Elsbeth could not abide the noise they made in the vent pipe over the bathroom, which provided a three-inch-wide apartment house for starlings.

I solved the bird problem by cutting some two-inch aluminum squares and drilling air holes in them. I managed to nail most of them in place but it was no fun reaching the ones 24 feet up.

And if you do have this problem and want to permanently bar entry, make sure you do it when the nesting season is over and the birds have flown the coop. Not good having bird die in there.

Fortunately owls, seagulls and hawks are not interested.

Call out the fire department. A woodpecker punched a fist-sized hole in the side of Alexander Sasonoff's building in Seahurst and could not get back out.

The poor thing was down at the bottom of a six-foot-deep space about four inches wide. Burien/Normandy Park Fire Department ladder laddies tried dangling a six-foot rope down the hole in the siding hoping the bird would grab the hemp in its beak and let itself be pulled up -- without success.

At press time the hapless feathered flyer was still jumping around. They were going to try pouring sand into the hole till the trapped bird rose to the top and could emerge. It could work.