Last Thursday Rachel mentioned she was itchy from various bites. I too had noticed I had been bitten a few times. I thought it was fleas given the kind of bites I had. Having just moved to the 'country' in Sausalito it didn't seem too improbable that the cats had gotten fleas, even though they are indoor cats. A quick combing revealed that they hadn't a flea on them. However I did get a tiny little bug about the size of a spec of dust off Wooderson. Looking around on the internet we found there are a variety of mites that bite humans, most notablely rat mites and bird mites. Our cat Wooderson has taken to sitting near the bathroom staring at various spots on the walls and we have heard some scrabbling noises in the past, so we assume we have rats or mice in the walls. Thus we must have rat mites. Gross! While trying to press my ear up against the wall to listen for rodents I found another mite on the wall. Needless to say we stayed up way too late looking up stuff about mites on the internet.

Friday Rachel took our captured and frozen mites to work with her for hopeful identification by the entimologists she works with. However, none of them are mite specialists and there are something like 45,000 known mite species so it is a bit hard to pin down. They did however image the mites for her, so as you can see in the gallery we have a lovely picture of them. All the evidence did point to rat mites though, and a specialist I emailed the pictures to definitely thought it was a rat or bird mite (they are quite similar) after a quick glance at the photos. Great, we have biting mites in the house.

My upstairs neighbor Kevin and I went poking around under the house Saturday to see if we could find any holes the rats could get in. Given we are built out over a canyon this is actually quite an undertaking as you end up on scaffeling 10-30 feet up in the air. I went out and found a variety of animal crap on the scaffeling (cat or racoon) and a good sized hole under our tub with various chew marks on it. I took a bunch of pictures (including jamming the camera up the hole) which indicated there was at least one rat living there, possibly under our tub. We put a rat trap by the garbage thinking that was were they were getting food, but no luck. Unfortunately I managed to get myself and my clothes covered in mites and didn't figure that out for several hours so got super bit up and got lots of mites in the apartment. I sprayed with RAID but Rachel and I slept in the livingroom anyway that night.

Sunday Kevin took the fight to them, we went back under the house with a gallon of spray and lots of mesh wire. He got up on the scaffeling this time and sprayed all over the place, up in the holes, the piles of animal dung (and swept said dung off the scaffeling) and then went and stapled metal mesh over all the holes. I was there for moral support, suggestions, and to call 911 if he fell off the scaffeling. ;) Quite an undertaking! Afterwards I went and sprayed some more in the bathroom in a hole by the toilet and under the baseboard by the tub which also has a hole behind it. I've only squished 4 or 5 mites since then, so hopefully we managed to wipe most of them out. They can't live without their host rodent for more than a couple of weeks so if we keep killing them and the rodents can't get in we should be good. If not, well, I think the landlord will have to call in the professionals.

Quite the weekend.