The Rabbits have Bird Mites.

Ridiculous. And gross.

If you don't like bugs, I wouldn't read on.

Monday night I was hanging out in the rabbit room giving Snoopy a rubdown when I noticed a tiny red speck crawling on his back. I didn't freak out, but my mental reaction was "Oh no! What IS that?!" because I knew it wasn't a flea and so it must be some kind of mite. Lucky for me, when I called the vet in the morning, they had an opening that afternoon and we were able to get the bunnies checked out.

The vet was grossed out, but after catching a couple of the "bugs" on some tape, she left to go stick them under a microscope and see if she could figure out what they were. She came back with a big text book, that looked like it must have been left over from her college days, open to the page of parasitic mites. These little bugs are Dermanyssus Gallinae, or most commonly known as Chicken Mites, or Red Mites.




















I took this handy bit of info from Wikipedia:
Dermanyssus gallinae, also known as red mite, is an ectoparasite of poultry and birds in general. The mites are blood feeders and attack resting birds at night. After feeding, they hide in cracks and crevices away from daylight, where they mate and lay eggs. Under favourable conditions the life cycle of the mite can be completed within seven days, so populations can grow rapidly, causing anaemia in badly affected flocks of poultry.




















Our vet and ourselves are a bit confused how we end up with bird mites in the apartment, but what I think may have happened is that construction is being done on our apartment and they required us to remove everything from our deck, forcing us to bring all of our planters and stuff that was on the deck inside. However, we've never had, or at least seen, birds on the deck. But we hear crows on the roof a lot, so maybe the mites migrated down? Anyway, if they were hiding in the cracks of the stuff on the deck that may be why they're in the apartment now.

Great. So, $150 later, the rabbits each got a dose of Revolution and two more were sent home with us to apply in a week or two. If the mites leave their feeding grounds in the day, then that should make it easier to deal with them. We'll remove the buns, maybe take them to Jason's mom's house, and then clean and vacuum the crap out of the apartment, then spray it all down with mite spray, and then dust everything and everywhere with Diatomaceous Earth, which is a handy dust made of ground fossils of prehistoric fresh water diatoms. It's like dust made of razors at the microscopic level. It'll be like walking through a field of razor blades for those mites, and it's safe for pets.

Hopefully that will fix it. I don't know how long that will take though. We'll have to remove the two layers of rugs from the rabbit room and dust and spray under and over the carpet and try to get the stuff in behind the baseboards. I've read that these things can be hard to get rid of. When they're the size of Horton's Whos, they'll be hard to find, and if we miss just one that lays eggs after a single feeding, we'll have the problem to deal with all over again that quickly.

I'm not looking forward to dealing with this.