Punk's not dead!

Yes, the title doesn't ring a bell to anyone outside Finland, so let's give a hand. "Punk's not dead" was/is a slogan used in badges in the 70´s/80´s. If referred to punk rock of course, desperately ignoring the truth. While 'punkki', which is a Finnish translation of 'punk' means also a mite. And mites are starring in this episode of 'Alive in Finland' - dead and alive. So, watch out, Grissom, LOL!

Yup, it's the red mites (Dermanyssus gallinae/lintupunkki/ fågelfästing = my own translation in Swedish) in question this time. No more silver fishes anymore, although I have seen one in our house too. Dermanyssus gallinae is a mite that is detected close to birds' nests. According to a quick browse on wiki pages, it's difficult to get rid of, if you have a garden or even a yard.

A couple of weeks ago I was chopping wood into small pieces in our backyard. There is a birdhouse in a tree closeby with a bird nesting there, but I didn't pay any attention to it. It had probably gotten used to the noise we were making by then.

In the very same evening, I felt like something itching in my ankle. I thought that a spider or an ant had climbed in my rubber boot and bitten me. It was a long way to climb and land, for I had my huge black Nokia rubber boots on - kind of classics around here, if you will. It was a nasty bite but it was alright. These things happen.

Then in the following week I started to get more bites. This time in my knee, upper thigh... you know why I began to get worried, LOL! Luckily it stopped there. The bites itched like crazy, and I had to scratch them a lot. It took a whole week before the itching calmed down. It didn't help much putting some cream on the bites, but I was willing to try out everything. Spider and ant bites never felt like this, so I got pretty much confused.

Then I read about these red mites. Everything started making sense. Well, everything related to this anyway. I'm 95% sure that it was those mites that caused those evil bites on me. They will die in a week which explains why they/it never took a bite of my balls... No more I'm that excited about getting birds nest in our yard.

Don't get me wrong, birds are lovely. Yet it's amazing that after living more than 12 years in that house of ours, it had never happened until now. There's probably more to come, if we won't get a cat as a pet. That's even more unlikely to happen because of allergies, sadly, so I might have to get used to this possibility of another red mite incident...