"Twenty years ago," recounts ornithologist Mark Peck of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, "I spent a week in a small cabin in the woods near Madoc. Every morning around five, a yellow-bellied sapsucker would act as our alarm clock by hammering on the metal roof. It was very loud, and very effective!"

Your downy is not misguidedly drilling for food, Peck says. Like many woodpecker species in springtime, it's setting up a territory, warning off other woodpeckers, and trying to attract a mate. No doubt, it's pleased as punch to have discovered your roof, where it can make such a satisfying racket. Both male and female downies drum, and will also use hollow trees, utility poles, and other handy noisemakers, moving around to various sites in a chosen territory, calling attention to themselves.

There's probably not much you can do to scare it off permanently, although - since you've been rudely awakened anyway - you might consider exacting temporary revenge by charging out the door of the cottage and banging on some pots. In any case, the racket should let up once the birds settle down to serious breeding, probably by about mid-May. After that, they'll be kept busy making their familiar, more attractive drumming sounds as they hunt for grubs and insects for themselves and their young in hollow and decaying trees.