"You can almost see the perfect little holes he's been drilling into the mirrors," said Darren May yesterday. "I guess he figures he's looking at another woodpecker, and he doesn't like it."

Birds fighting their reflections aren't new, said Dick Cannings, a naturalist and former curator of the University of British Columbia's vertebrate museum. But it's the first time he's ever heard of a woodpecker taking on a car mirror.

"It's very usual for birds to fight their own image," Cannings said. "It's a bit unusual for a woodpecker to go after a mirror, which is pretty small."