Springfield home faces bird mite issue
Gayle White hasn't gotten a good night's sleep in weeks. She spent one sleepless cycle wearing swim goggles and ear plugs, a layer of Vaseline smeared over her nose and a black light humming near a mattress stripped of sheets in a bare room.Her tormentors, little-known, nearly invisible and insidious: bird mites.
"My husband has been in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia - multiple combat zones. This has been worse. He calls them Tali-mites, because he fought the Taliban for so long," said Gayle L. White, a certified public accountant who lives with her husband of 22 years, retired U.S. Army Col. Stephen P. White, and the couple's 17-year-old daughter.
Their beloved, 20-room house on Worthington Street with its fine draperies and thick antique carpets has felt more like a prison with a million buggy legs since the couple began cleaning a multitude of birds' nests from the exterior in January.
"We must have had 1,000 to 2,000 birds nesting on our house," Gayle White said, noting that sparrows, starlings and pigeons took flight from the ivy, the dormers and other nooks and crannies.
“Look there, a ruby-throated humming bird,” he said. It went on that way for the next hour and a half as Mauro, a junior high science teacher with the Onondaga Central School District, dissected the sights and sounds of the nature center's fields and