pecked

we have a dead tree just outside our garden wall - a locust tree.  Two rather more healthy locust trees are in the yard itself.  really, I should have chopped this down years ago.  But I've resisted, since it serves as a very handy bird perch: there were about thirteen finches and a couple of bluebirds in it this evening.  And more than this: it's become a kind of trainer tree for our family of young flickers, who are taught by their parents that there are many, many little bugs inside it, if only they tap their beaks hard against the trunk.  I still don't understand how flickers and woodpeckers don't get horrible headaches.