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Showing posts from December, 2009

Are Bird Mites Real? Do They Infest Homes?

What are bird mites?   This image below shows a mite, and human hair for scale, that was collected from a hummingbird feeder in mid-summer. The mite was carried to the feeder on the beak of a hummingbird. The dark patch visible inside the mite is hummingbird blood on which the mite had fed. This dark coloration is why the mites are sometimes called " black pepper mites ". Birds/poultry and rodents all harbor a group of ectoparasitic mites that live in their host animal's nest and feed on its blood. When these mites leave the host animal's nest and enter our homes, or we otherwise come into contact with them, the mites are called bird mites , nest mites or sometimes rodent mites depending on which host animal nest they came from. These mites only leave the host animal's nest if the nest is abandoned or if the animal dies. So a typical scenario might be that a bird nest located outside a bedroom window, perhaps attached to the eves, is infested with these parasiti