We've recently built our new home here in Achill and have discovered a problem in our pantry. There seems to be an infestation of tiny mites over all the food, dishes and shelves and especially on the flour and rice. These mites are creamy white with a beige head approximately 0.5mm in length (like a minute sesame seed!). There is also a distinctive smell, close to the smell of camphor. - Amanda and Ronan Halpin, Achill. These sound like the flour mite,
Acarus siro, which will live on all kinds of floury and dried foods that have a moisture content of more than 12 per cent. Packets left open will become gradually damp, especially in western seaboard conditions, and encourage an infestation. The food is then tainted and unpleasant.
ON February 20th we saw a badger moving around within 100 yards of the summit of Lugduff, overlooking Glenmalure in Co Wicklow. This is bleak bogland, well away from anything I would have thought of as the natural habitat for a badger. Denis Cahalane and Brian McCarthy, Dublin 7.
In their book, Wild Wicklow, Richard Nairn and Miriam Crowley say that individual badger setts can be found even on the slopes of Lugnaquillia which is across the Glenmalure Valley from Lugduff. There would not be enough food for groups of badgers, which is the social unit they prefer, but individuals could survive on roots and beetles.
Overlooked by Killiney Hill Park, we have lots of busy bird life which I like to feed. The blue, coal, and great tits are particularly voracious, taking away as many as 1,000 peanuts in an hour or so. Not many fly back into the trees, but into a small spinney in the middle of our lawn, repeatedly. Given the tiny size of the blue and coal tits, I find it difficult to believe that they can eat more than one peanut (if that) at a time. It would be like a man eating a nut the size of a football at one sitting!
Can the spinney be a staging post, and do they, like squirrels store the nuts away somewhere else? - Frank Robinson, Killiney, Co Dublin.
As I said a couple of weeks ago (Eye, 19/02/00), in winter, blue, great and coal tits require, respectively, a daily intake of at least 11, 20 and 12 calories, and spend, respectively, 85 per cent, 75 per cent and 90 per cent of daylight hours feeding. They also drop nut-particles to the ground from feeders as they bite the nuts through the grid. Coal tits also hoard food, usually behind the bark of trees; great and blue tits hoard only occasionally. But great tits will follow coal tits and raid their hoards, and that may be what is happening in your garden.