The Boston Globe
An overzealous pileated woodpecker has broken about 20 car mirrors and one windshield in the last several weeks.
ROCKPORT — The culprit is a bird. Or birds. Or perhaps it’s the start of the great bird apocalypse of 2025, and history will record that it started in the Squam Hill neighborhood of this North Shore town.
For what is happening is so comically absurd that it feels like the beginning of a bad movie. Day after day, a pileated woodpecker has been smashing the side view mirrors on cars throughout the neighborhood. A rough count is about 20 mirrors, based on interviews with neighbors, but it’s hard to keep up because it’s still happening.
In one instance, the woodpecker cracked the windshield of a pickup truck while the driver was sitting inside.
“I was cleaning it, wiping off the seats and the dash, and I thought my girlfriend was knocking on the window,” said Mike Foster, who lives on Riellys Lane. “But I looked up, and he was just smashing his head into the windshield.”
He said it was both shocking and kind of funny, until he considered what a pain it would be to replace his windshield.
“This thing is looking at 20 years to life,” Foster said.
To say it has become the talk of the neighborhood is an understatement. A reporter who parked on the street was met by a neighbor rushing to tell him to push his side mirrors in lest he fall victim to the grim reaper of glass.
All around the neighborhood, side mirrors are wrapped in plastic bags and towels, anything that will deter the bird (or is it birds?) from fighting his reflection.
And the bird itself … well, it gets larger and more menacing in each telling.
“This thing is huge, and it doesn’t sound like a normal bird, it sounds like a monkey in a tree,” said Devin Mock, who said he came out of his Squam Road house recently to find four of them on the windshield of his brother’s truck. “I’ve seen little woodpeckers before, but these suckers are gigantic.”
The bird or birds in question have been identified as pileated woodpeckers, the largest woodpecker in North America, and easily identified by the bright red crest on the back of their head. Bird guides describe it as “crow-sized,” but many neighbors on Squam Hill say it’s more the size of King Kong.
“He’s beautiful and huge,” said Diane Francis, who had the side mirrors of her pickup truck wrapped in plastic bags in the backyard of her home on Squam Road. Parked just next to her was her father’s pickup truck, which has already had both side mirrors smashed. The neighbor directly across the street has also had both side mirrors on his van smashed.
“He’s the cutest thing, though,” said Terry Francis, her mother, who said she has watched him attack, using the same approach each time. He hops on the door handle of the car, makes his way along the rubber trim at the base of the side window, gets to the side mirror, and then … Bang! Bang! Bang! Break!
While pileated woodpeckers are not as common in Massachusetts as the more familiar downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, and hairy woodpecker, they are far from rare.
And for all the apocryphal talk in Rockport, it is well-known that songbirds will mistake a reflection for a rival and attack, especially during spring mating season. And this is a bird-friendly neighborhood, with feeders everywhere and abutting the massive Dogtown Commons, a five-square-mile wooded conservation area that covers much of Rockport and Gloucester.
“It’s likely a single male bird, establishing territory, perhaps for the first time, and when they see a reflection in the mirror, they view it as a competitive male,” said John Herbert, the director of bird conservation at Mass Audubon. “And this is the time of the year when their hormones and testosterone are at peak levels for aggression.”
Herbert said most birds simply peck at windows, but the pileated woodpecker has a bill large enough to break glass. But he said he’s never heard of a bird wreaking havoc on this scale and that it’s probably not over. It will be several weeks before the bird moves into nesting mode.
The incidents have been going on since March, but gained widespread attention after Janelle Favaloro shared some photos on her Facebook page on April 1. Many thought it was an April Fool’s Day gag when she wrote that there was a vandal in the neighborhood, and described him as “18-24 inches tall and wearing black and white with a red hat.”
Soon, neighbors were chiming in to say they’d also lost mirrors, the story was picked up by the Gloucester Times, and a local legend was born.
“It’s turned into such a nice thing for the neighborhood, because it’s getting neighbors to talk to each other, and it’s a nice break from politics and the stock market and Karen Read and everyone being awful to each other,” said Favaloro, who has had five broken mirrors between her house and her in-laws next door. On Tuesday, their other neighbor had the window of his Jeep broken.
“And, of course, it’s the male that’s doing it,” she joked. “It’s a guy thing. We rarely see the female because she’s trying to stay out of sight because she’s embarrassed by it all. We want to interview her and say, ‘When you met him, did you see any signs?‘”
