Garden Detective

Yesterday's column was about birds. So it's kind of eerie that yesterday a Levittown woman was led out of her house in a hazardous materials suit and brought to the hospital, where she was found to be infested with bird mites.

Her chest and pelvis are covered with the mites, which look like tiny, crawling black specks. Ordinarily, they live in bird droppings. But somehow they made it into her second-floor bathroom, outside of which birds apparently were nesting in a vent.

I'm so incredulous, I'm totally speechless. I can't even comment on it. But, according to birdmites.org, this isn't as rare an occurrence as you might think.

"I feel biting, just like someone pricking you with a needle, and you can feel them crawl, like a piece of hair is tickling you," the woman said from her hospital room yesterday. And now she's complaining of unrelated chest pains. I'm getting chest pains just thinking about it.