Human infestation with bird mite, but What are bird mites?

Bird mites are found in the warmer regions of the world, including Australia.

There are several species of bird mite but the most common species affecting humans is the domestic Starling mite, Ornithonyssus bursa from the family Macronyssidae.

Bird mites are:

• small (less than 1mm long) mites with 8 legs
• very mobile
• semi-transparent in colour until blood has been digested when they appear reddish to blackish
• oval in shape with a sparse covering of short hair.

Bird mites are naturally found where birds (such as pigeons, starlings, sparrows and poultry) and their nests are located.

However, in the first few weeks after birds leave their nests, bird mites may infest homes in search of a blood-meal from humans. Bites from bird mites can cause severe irritation.

This is a report of a case of bird mite infestation which occurred in Wollongong in mid-December 1996. The individual suffered hundreds of bites, most of which were marked by itchy red papules 3-4 mm in diameter. Tiny mobile parasites (< 1 mm) collected from the skin and adjacent bedroom wall were identified as bird mites from the family Gamasidae, most probably from the genus Ornithonyssus. The source of the infestation was a starling nest under the eaves adjacent to the bedroom. The report summarises the ways bird mite bites can be distinguished from other insect and arachnid bites. If bird mite infestation is not correctly diagnosed, families who attempt to repeatedly treat it as if it were lice or scabies may incur considerable expense until the source of infestation is eliminated.

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June 6, 2008— — A Long Island woman was put in a quarantined hospital room Thursday night after emergency workers came to her home and found her skin crawling with nearly invisible parasites that doctors believe are bird mites.

The woman, Nina Bradica, 45, of Levittown, N.Y., called 911 complaining of chest pains. Police and firefighters placed the woman in a protective hazardous-materials suit to transport her to a county hospital.

“She is in stable but less-than-comfortable condition,” said Dr. Ken Steier of Nassau University Medical Center. “Based on what was found in her home, this may be a bird mite infestation. We’ve collected three specimens that appear to be mites and have sent them to the CDC.”

Bird mites are tiny parasitic insects about a half a millimeter long and are usually invisible to the the naked eye. People infested with mites break out in red bumps that can cause intense itching and irritation.

Steier said Bradica is in “a clearly marked quarantined room. Those entering must wear caps, gowns, gloves and shoes and no one is permitted to come in direct physical contact with her.”

He said there were “no documented cases of bird mites causing severe internal illnesses” but called them a “nuisance that produce extreme itching and scratching. They can live in your clothes, sheets, linens and closets. They don’t really suck your blood, but live on the skin.”

Steier said there was a nest of wild birds on the roof of Bradica’s house that connected to the woman’s bathroom through a vent.

“Mites are ubiquitous in wild birds of all types,” the doctor said. “They live on birds and when the birds leave their nests they look for a mammal host; sometimes those mammals are humans.”

She is being treated with “intravenous fluids, local skin care and benedryl for the itching.”

When contacted by ABC News, Bradica referred calls to her lawyer, Kenneth Mollins.

Mollins said Bradica was a tenant in the home, which records indicate is owned by Louis and Nancy Demetro.

The lawyer said the home was divided into two apartments with another individual living in the other apartment.

Mollins said his client had complained for months to the landlord about the infestation and had shown the mites to an exterminator.

“She doesn’t plan on moving back into house,” he said.

County public health officials will not characterize the infestation until tests confirm the bugs are actually bird mites.

“Objects that appeared to be mites were collected and sent to a lab,” said Dr. Maria Torroella Carney, the Nassau County Commissioner of Health.

“It is still unknown what is really there. Out of that concern, we will act with caution. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with here,” she said.

Carney said investigators will be looking at the home to determine if there was a bird’s nest on the roof and if that was the cause of the infestation.

“Presumably, if there is a nest in the home, the potential for mites is there.”

Carney said that the infestation appeared to be localized to Bradica’s home and there was “no public threat and no need for alarm.”

She said Bradica’s neighbors had not been warned of any potential threat.

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At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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What about starlings? Starlings are cavity nesters and will use vents and ducts in homes to build nests and raise young

European starlings are widespread across North America. They eat a wide variety of foods and are willing to use a wide variety of places to nest and roost. This flexible nature helps them thrive in cities and suburbs as well as on farms. They are one of only a few birds who live in otherwise barren industrial urban wastelands.

Starlings only nest in cavities and are happy to use those provided by people—stove, dryer, and exhaust fan vents, for example—are popular nest sites, along with the bird houses we put up.

But people also complain about starlings getting in the trash. And settling in numbers onto lawns, where they are undoubtedly providing a service by eating insects.

More seriously, large flocks—up to tens of thousands of birds—sometimes roost in urban places where their noise and droppings are extremely unwelcome.

Source

At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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There are top 3 woodpeckers problems

Woodpecker Problem #1 – The most commonly given reason for woodpeckers hammering on your home is that they are searching for food, however this is NOT correct. Woodpeckers are most likely not searching for food when hammering on your house. If you have wood shingles, you may want to have an inspector look for insect problems, but it is unlikely an insect problem that you have could be a woodpecker food source.

Woodpecker Problem #2 – Woodpeckers are hammering (or drumming) to announce their territory, much like a cardinal singing his song i
in spring. The drumming is loud, but generally not very destructive or as long-lived in duration as the third reason. This is most common in late winter and through the breeding season, i.e. late-February though June.

Solution: This kind of activity can best be stopped by making the drumming site unsuitable for noisemaking. This can be done by covering it with noise-deadening material such as canvas, foam rubber, a sheet, newspaper, heavy plastic, or ¾ inch bird netting attached to the building across the focal area. For specific exclusion methods, see Woodpecker Exclusion Method section below.

Woodpecker Problem #3 – The third reason entails the real “nuisance” issue. It is called excavating (or chiseling) whereby either a male or a female constructs a nest or roost hole with a cavity that would typically be placed in trees. This is the most common cause of damage and can be very destructive. If you see a hole at least 2 inches in diameter, you most likely have a woodpecker that is excavating a nesting cavity. Unfortunately, some woodpeckers try to place such a cavity in the side of a house, barn, utility pole, fence post, or other man-made structure.

Solution: Problems of this nature may be avoided by leaving dead snags or by hanging woodpecker nest boxes. Installing a bird box, much like a bluebird or purple martin box, at the site of excavation with either deter the bird or it will use the box for nesting.  Many stores sell bird boxes for those not choosing to build their own. For other exclusion methods, see following section.

Source

At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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Revival of the Passenger Pigeon? Not to be confused with the carrier pigeon (a domesticated bird trained to transport messages), the passenger pigeon is believed to have constituted 25 to 40 percent of the total U.S. bird population at one time. Its main nesting area was in the region of the Great Lakes and east to New York, where it relied on mixed hardwood forests to protect and sustain its massive flocks of up to 5 million birds at a time on a diet of beechnuts, acorns, chestnuts, seeds and berries, along with worms and insects in the spring and summer. Passenger pigeons built low-hanging, flimsy nests that often left eggs on the ground, but were able to successfully reproduce thanks to their sheer numbers: Predators such as raccoons, foxes, possums, hawks, eagles and snakes could gorge themselves on pigeon eggs without exhausting the supply.

This system, known as “predator satiation,” quickly broke down when humans became the species’ primary predator. Though humans had long used passenger pigeons for food to some extent, and farmers had killed them for causing damage to crops in such huge numbers, this didn’t reduce their numbers–until a mass slaughter by professional hunters began in the 1800s. Ironically, the birds were particularly vulnerable to such hunting because they nested in such large numbers. With no laws restricting the number of pigeons killed or the way they were taken, hunters placed baited traps or decoys, shot at nesting sites, knocked the birds out of their nests with long sticks or placed pots of burning sulphur under the trees so that fumes would daze the pigeons and cause them to drop out of their nests.

By the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of passenger pigeons were being killed for private consumption or sale, sometimes for as little as 50 cents a dozen. The cheap pigeon meat was fed to slaves, among others. By 1860, people noticed that the number of passenger pigeons had decreased, but no action was taken to stop the mass killing. Passenger pigeons had largely disappeared from American skies by the early 1890s, and the last known sighting in the wild occurred in 1900. “Martha,” the last known surviving passenger pigeon, lived all of her 29 years at the Cincinnati Zoological Society. After her death in 1914, she was frozen into a 300-pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was mounted for display as part of the museum’s bird collection, one of the largest in the world.

Now, nearly a century after Martha’s death, scientists believe they can bring her species back to life, using techniques worthy of the 1990s science-fiction/action blockbuster “Jurassic Park.” With funding from Revive and Restore, a group dedicated to the de-extinction of recently lost species, the young biologist Ben J. Novak is spearheading efforts to use DNA taken from passenger pigeon specimens in museums and fill it in with fragments from a living species, the band-tailed pigeon. The reconstituted genome would then be inserted into a band-tailed pigeon stem cell, creating a germ cell (an egg-and-sperm precursor). When the germ cell is injected into young band-tailed pigeons and these pigeons reproduce, their offspring would come as close as possible to expressing the passenger pigeon genes. The “de-extinction” process is different from cloning, in that it uses a variety of DNA from different passenger pigeons, meaning that the offspring produced would be as unique as any bird from an original passenger pigeon flock.

Most experts acknowledge that recreating the passenger pigeon in this way is technically possible, based on the success scientists have had mapping the woolly mammoth genome by using elephant DNA, among other experiments. But significant challenges still exist, particularly when it comes to reintroducing the passenger pigeon into the wild, given the vastly different ecosystem it would encounter in the modern world. Much of the bird’s breeding and wintering habitats are gone due to deforestation, and its primary breeding season food (beech mast, the nuts of a beech tree) now exists only in limited quantities. And with likely flocks of only a few thousand of the new pigeons (as opposed to 5 million) the species’ mass tactics of survival wouldn’t be able to protect them from predators.

Novak, for one, told the Washington Post that he believes people are sufficiently committed to the de-extinction of the passenger pigeon to overcome such obstacles. History may help his cause, as the extinction of the passenger pigeon did play a significant role in arousing public interest in the need for stronger conservation laws. In any case, only time will tell, as scientists estimate it will take at least a decade to produce a flock of new passenger pigeons large enough to release into the wild.

Source

At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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Japanese pigeon skips local race, lands on Vancouver Island instead

A Japanese racing pigeon truly went the distance, after he overshot a 1,000-kilometre race in his native country and instead traveled across the Pacific Ocean and ended up on Vancouver Island.

The remarkable bird was tracked back to Japan, where he was released May 10 in the northern province of Hokkaido to take part in a local race.

The one-year-old bird was set to compete along with 8,000 other pigeons in his native land, but instead was discovered on June 6 at Canadian Forces Base Comox near Courtenay, B.C.

The bird was turned over to the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society, where staff nursed him back to health.

Maj Birch, founder and manager of MARS, told CTVNews.ca Friday that the male bird was very ill.

“He was very weak, very thin and we did a test and found that he had a very heavy parasite load,” she said, adding that the bird was treated with a combination of fluids, food and medication.

Birch said she is not sure how the pigeon was able to make the trans-Pacific crossing, or which route he took. She added that this is not the first bird from Japan to end up on British Columbia’s shores.

“We don’t actually know whether he took that route or whether he managed to catch a freighter or several freighters” she said.

“There’s no way of knowing that, so we can only imagine that he had a wonderful journey,” she said with a laugh. “Because he was found at our air force base, maybe he rode the plane.”

Thanks to a tag on the bird’s leg, the society was able to identify and later contact the owner of the champion pigeon.

Owner Hiroyasu Takasu said he was shocked to hear the bird had survived.

“(Birds) usually reach their limit in a week, with no food or water. This is a superior pigeon,” he told ABC News.

He noted that only around 20 per cent of the birds that raced last month were able to finish the race.

He added that the bird was never given a name, because pigeons are only named after they return home.

However, Takasu declined to have the bird returned to Japan by plane, citing fears that excessive travel might put added strain on its health.

This led to some initial searching to find the pigeon a home, as he is essentially considered an “illegal alien” who arrived on Canadian shores without being imported, Birch said.

“I was concerned that there may be issues in trying to find a home for him here,” she said, adding that the society is not a sanctuary but a rehabilitation centre.

Luckily, an official with the Mid-Island Racing Club in Nanaimo, B.C. has agreed to adopt the bird. The club is reportedly considering breeding it to produce more “superior” pigeons.

This may be a smart move, as it was the pigeon mother who reportedly won the local Japanese race.

Source

At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca

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