Pest control technicians removed about 700 pounds of acorns that woodpeckers had stashed in the walls of a house (Pictures: Nick’s Extreme Pest Control/Facebook)

These hoarders stashed their bounty in between the walls of a home.

A pest control technician who thought he was responding to a routine call received a big surprise of thousands of acorns when he cut a hole in a wall. Instead of a suspected dead animal, the technician found that woodpeckers had stored hundreds of pounds of acorns.

‘Came across this on a job. Bird was a bit of a hoarder,’ reads a Facebook post by Nick’s Extreme Pest Control shared late last month.

‘Filled up about 8 garbage bags full of acorns weighing in about 700 lbs. Unreal never came across something like this.’

It was something the owner of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control in Santa Rosa, California, had not seen in two decades in the business.

‘You can say this bird was a little bit of a pack rat,’ Nick Castro, 42, told the Washington Post. ‘This is crazy. It’s just not stopping.’

Thousands of acorns spilled into the house after pest control technicians cut a hole in the wall (Picture: Nick’s Extreme Pest Control/Facebook)

Castro said a customer in mid-December reported maggots and mealworms coming from the wall of their home in Glen Ellen. He and two other technicians cut a 4-by-4-inch hole with a knife and acorns spilled out to a pile that reached 20 feet high.

More acorns came out as Castro reached into the hole and moved them along. Castro and colleagues cut three more holes in the wall to remove all the acorns.

‘I was just kind of shocked and just wondering when it was going to end,’ Castro said. ‘We really expected maybe a couple handfuls of it, at most, but nothing like that. There’s no way you can even account for that.’

The acorns filled eight garbage bags (Picture: Nick’s Extreme Pest Control/Facebook)

They carried the eight garbage bags they filled with nuts out to their truck. That’s when they saw woodpeckers and more acorns outside the home, that led Castro to believe that the birds had made hundreds of holes on the chimney stack and stored the acorns over two to five years. The nuts appeared to have started falling into a hole in the wall.

Acorn woodpeckers are known to drill holes in houses and other places and hoard food, according to Paul Bannick, a director of the wildlife preservation group Conservation Northwest.

‘It’s a compulsive process,’ Bannick told the Post of the woodpeckers. ‘They’re going to collect and store as many as they possibly can.’

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‘Bird was a bit of a hoarder,’ said a pest control technician who removed thousands of acorns.