Grill Babies

For the second year now, a momma sparrow of some kind has built her nest inside our grill on the back porch. So instead of steaks, we have chicks. We all kind of like it though, because every few days we lift the lid and watch the little tykes grow.

They've gotten pretty big, with only one egg not hatching, and yesterday I lifted the lid to see how they were doing. I took one cute picture until vaguely realizing my hand holding the lid up tickled. When I looked at it, there were tons of tiny little bugs crawling all over me. 

After the initial panic I ran inside and washed my hands thoroughly then called my mom and Jeff to find out what bugs they were. Jeff said they were probably lice. I googled that and came up with bird mites. Upon close inspection, they were crawling ALL OVER the handle and lid, as well as the nest and all four babies. Disgusting little buggers.

They can infest your home, but I think that's a little on the extreme side. I'm still removing the nest as soon as the babies fly away, to avoid an infestation. Anyway, here's the one good picture I got of the chicks before being attacked. If you look close, all the little white dots on the birds and the nest are the mites.