Bird mites and torture techniques of the Dutch Golden Age

For the last two weeks and three days, as I have scratched frantically at the seemingly invisible mites, it occurred to me in my sleep deprivation and following applications of recommended (and non-recommended) treatments, there were no mites left alive on me or in the nest or indeed within a kilometre radius thanks to a smorgasbord of poisons.  I was certain I was still home to some recalcitrant arachnids.  And I was in a psychologically fragile state although not quite insane since the itching had eased. 

     However, perfectly normal phenomena - the brush of a strand of hair against my neck, a loose thread along my thigh, an ant on my foot, a lost beetle tangled in my hair, a fly resting on my calf - still sent a hot flush through my body and my heart racing as I fear a mite.  I don’t know if it is anticipating the soft, tickling crawl on my skin and scalp is the problem or the fact I’ve had little sleep for over two weeks.  I am being tortured either by these creatures or my own mind.  If I wanted to torture or punish someone, I would unleash upon them mites.  And so I thought of Batavia’s Graveyard.

     Batavia’s Graveyard is more suspenseful than any fiction by Stephen King and Dean Koontz.  I’ve read it three times.  And it’s all the more thrilling because it is the factual narrative by historian Mike Dash of the passage to Java of the Dutch VOC flagship, Batavia: The charismatic, bankrupted and heretical psychopath Jeronimus Cornelisz plans a mutiny, but is disrupted when the ship runs aground on a tiny, unchartered cay in the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of Western Australia.  The Merchant-in-Command then sails for help in Java 1800 miles away and Cornelisz is free to execute not only his desire for power, but also each of the 200 survivors, one by one.

     Part of the allure of the account is the background of Holland’s Golden Age in the 17^th century and how someone so depraved as Cornelisz could have become so influential.  I was struck by the cruelty of the Dutch at the time and their use of torture to extract confessions and the punishments in general. 

     Readers are introduced early to being stretched on the rack.  Torrentius the painter was accused of being a black magician, a heretic and a Rosicrucian (a member of an illegal secret society).  He had joked that his paintings were created by spirits and he also turned his nose up at religion.  The verdict; a court ordered stretching on the rack because, “the magistrates of Haarlem had grown weary of Torrentius’s obduracy …” and failure to confess to the main charge of being a Rosicrucian.

     “Heavy weights were tied to the painter’s legs while four men hauled him into the air by ropes that had been attached to his wrists, he was left hanging in this way while more questions were put to him.” 

     After three sessions, Torrentius’s limbs had been pulled from their sockets and his jaw so damaged he was unable to eat.

     Water torture didn’t require the expensive and cumbersome equipment of the stretching rack nor a trained torturer. All that was needed was a funnel to force water into the mouth of the victim who wore a canvas collar and was strapped, spread-eagled, to an upright frame such as a door.

     Water kept being poured into the collar if the man refused to confess to the point that drinking was the only way to make breathing possible. Then more water was poured into the collar. The man became hideously bloated, his body “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead.”  Naturally he would become dizzy and weak and often faint. The prisoner was then cut down and forced to vomit so the torture could continue and then he was prepared to confess to anything put to him.

     When at sea, environmentally appropriate methods were in order.  Minor offences resulted in imprisonment for weeks in a matchbox-sized cell “at the forepart of the gun deck where the wind whistled maddeningly through the slats.” 

     The shipping company rules decreed, “Anyone pulling a knife in anger shall be nailed to the mast with a knife through his hand, and shall remain standing until he pulls his hand off.”

     Mutiny attracted 200 lashes of the whip, the man often being doused in sea water first to ensure the salt intensified the agony.

     Being dropped from the yardram involved a man’s arms being tied behind his back and a strong rope around his wrists and lead weights were bound to his ankles.  He was dropped 15 or so metres toward the sea till the ropes tightened and dislocated his shoulders.  Twice more he was hauled to the top and dropped again, this part more painful than the fall.

     My favourite in terms of creativity was keelhauling where a man’s arms were tied above his head and his ankles bound.  A long rope was passed under the keel of the moving vessel and the ends secured to the man’s wrists and ankles. He was then pulled from one side of the keel to the other and if he didn’t drown, he was either macerated by the barnacles or decapitated as he smashed into the hull. 

     With the overwhelming majority of crew being male, homosexual relations were inevitable.  Detection could result in the lovers being “sewn together into a sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean.”  Therefore most of the affairs were between officers since they had private cabins and the status and influence over lesser sailors.

     So, two weeks and two days after first being consumed by the mites and thinking that the Dutch should have included in their repertoire of torture and punishment, an application of mites to an offender’s person, I was driving home on the Herberton Highway on dusk.  A black and white flutter in the second lane caught my attention.  I pulled over and picked up an injured bird, a native peewee.

     Squawks and shrieks erupted from the trees in the middle verge of the road, its parents warning me away. I considered the young bird's fate if I left it on the side of the highway – roadkill - so I tucked it under my shirt (it was instantly calmed) and drove home to call Tableland Wildlife Rescue.

     That night, as I was about to drift off to sleep, the tell-tale creepy crawly sensation started – in my scalp, in the crook of my knee, along my bikini line, my armpit - worse than the last few nights.  I broke out in a hot flush and my heart beat furiously.  It occurred to me that rescuing the peewee had reinvigorated the mite lifecycle.  I groaned out loud.  Could I change my order for the torture and have 200 lashes?  I’d even go for the solitary confinement in the shoebox and savour the maddening wail of the wind.  Stretching on the rack was finite.  Please!  Not mites, not more mites. 

How my girls kept cool this summer!

Myna birds and the law of karma

I’ve always been attracted to the Buddhist principle of not harming animals whether for food or otherwise and I find some logic in the idea of karma.  I am not a Buddhist and have read lightly on the matter.  I simply like the idea of not intentionally hurting living creatures and I certainly don't want to acquire any bad karma.  

     I have no problem exterminating pests like cane toads and cockroaches providing it’s painless and or quick.  Suffering to a human where the pesky creature survives is not desirable so delivering a humane death, I reckon, is necessary for one’s sanity.  

     I collect toads by a loving hand and slip them into the freezer where they fall into a permanent sleep.  Cockroaches, I squash with a heel and mosquitoes, a palm, always delivering the force with awareness.  Had I found under the sink a carbon dioxide canister (Sutchy’s suggestion), I’d have emptied it into the mynas' home and waited for them to fall asleep for the last time.  But I’ve never known anyone to keep carbon dioxide at home.  So on Friday, a clear and sunny morn, when I went off to the Salvos, the myna chicks were alive and screaming and I prayed they would expire in the cavernous heat from the tin roof.

     Four hours later on my return, when the sun was overhead and burning my skin as I alighted the car, I was accosted by screeching from both babies and parents, the latter from the fence, clothesline, neighbour’s roof, bottlebrush tree, as they flew, paused, and they continued to fly frantically.

     I jumped up on the couch and started bashing at the ceiling, determined to make a hole so I could give the chicks some food and water and allow the parents access.  The damn things would have to grow wings and fly away.

     “Mum,” said Sutchy.  “They’re pests.  Leave them.”

     I screamed at him something about not letting defenceless creatures suffer and to “get me a hammer or something.”

     Sutchy is a big animal lover and I wasn’t surprised when he pushed me out of the way.

     “Let me do it.”  I offered to find him a hammer.  “I’ve got one.”

     Within seconds, he’d smashed a black hole in the white sheeting and blades of dry grass drifted onto the couch.

     “There,” he said and jumped down.

My new veranda ceiling!

     I broke some homemade bread onto a plate and covered it with water.  When I inserted the plate into the cavity, I felt a soft, almost feathery sensation on my arms then my face and neck.

     Bird mites. They are minute, more like invisible and live where pestilent birds nest.  While they can’t live on humans they love to feast on them and I was about to become the blood-meal.

     The parents were reunited with their young and I settled at my computer.  An object dropped from the hole to the couch.  It was one of the babies, fairly developed and able to hop and flap a little.  It was terrified and it eventually made its way under the couch where I slid another plate of water-soaked bread.  A few hours later it was gone.  I was hoping the other chicks would make it out the same way. 

Myna baby

I placed the second myna baby in the garden, out of the wind.  Immediately it cried for its parents who went to it.

      That night I was unable to sleep.  From ten, I tossed and rolled and constantly scratched at the crawling under my skin.  It was bird mites injecting their saliva as they fed on my flesh.

     At three a.m., unable to bear it any longer, I had an idea. 

     Our favourite hen, Billie had recently been paralysed by scaly mites that burrow in the leg scales of poultry. The most effective treatment is Vicks Vaporub which suffocates the mite.  I had used three tubs on Billie (who made a full recovery) and was out.  But the next best thing was Pestene, a powder treatment against lice, mites and fleas in poultry, dogs, cats, horses, calves and goats which I had dusted in Billie’s feathers and in her coop.

     I scattered Pestene on my bottom sheet and pillows then re-read the directions more closely, particularly the Restraints, Not to be used:

·              *on kittens or puppies under three months,

·              *lactating does where milk is intended for human consumption, and

·              *for any purpose, or in any manner contrary to this label.

     That was all I needed to know.

     I dusted my pyjamas and rubbed it into my hair and skin.  Then I slept soundly till half-past nine.  

     No one else had been affected and I’ll buy some Vicks Vaporub for tonight.  The parents have been bringing food and I’ll pray to Buddha to hurry along the mynas’ departure (and forgive me for exterminating the mites - there are limits to my suffering).  I‘ll scratch and bear my itchy insomnia for a few more nights, if necessary with clear sinuses and powdery linen and without bad karma.  The chicks will surely be gone by then and I’ll board up the hole.

The Tell-Tale Squawk: accessory to murder

Just after Christmas, a pair of myna birds started nesting in the eaves on along the deck.  In their native India, mynas are a symbol for enduring love because they mate for life.  Humans are drawn to love stories, even within the animal kingdom and I’m no exception.

     My bird-spouses found the safest of environments to raise their young after an aged section of cladding had fallen off.  

     Mynas have made the world’s 100 worst invasive species* but I find the chocolate body, charcoal head and sunflower yellow eyes and beak a stunning combination.  However, it was their singing, the melodic smorgasbord of whistles, clicks and light chirps that never failed to lift my spirits at a time when my own love story failed to endure.

     Robert the builder ordered some fibro sheets to repair the damage, but the festive season ensured their arrival was a long time coming.  And I forgot about the impending repairs.

     It wasn't long before the two mynas spent the days flying off and returning with morsels of food for their precious offspring.  What a delight when I heard the most delicate scratching in the ceiling cavity as the tiny birds scampered around.   I was determined to wait until the young had flown away to find their own lovers and happily-ever-after before the cladding was replaced. 

     The other day, I went out in the morning for a few hours and when I returned, the screeching hurt my ears.  A pair of mynas was flying this way and that and crying as if possessed, fragments of pale-coloured food in each of their golden beaks.  Imagine my horror when Robert called from downstairs and announced the noisy birds would be gone soon.

     He’d repaired the cladding.  The parents were frantically trying to find the entry to their home, now smooth, impenetrable fibro.  They cried from the veranda railing, screeched from the roof next door, squawked as they flew to the neighbour’s clothes line to the fence to the bottle brush tree before repeating the route, repeating the screams.  

     Their distress was like a dagger to my heart made worse when the scratching on the other side of the ceiling became louder and more desperate.  I pictured the little beaks wide open, primrose triangles pointing in opposite directions, waiting and crying themselves hoarse.  When weakness consumed them, they managed only hissing. 

     The frantic parents hopped and flew and screeched and the hungry young scratched and hissed hour after hour.  Only when the twilight faded, did mother and father bird seek shelter elsewhere, but the baby birds were invigorated by the darkness.  Their tiny claws scraped on the ceiling, their cries a scratchy hiss that went on and on.

     But they weren’t only in the cavity above the veranda. They were in the kitchen ceiling, the bathroom ceiling, my bedroom, my head.  Their deathly cries filled my sleeping ears. 

     I became the unstable narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Tell-Tale Heart.  He maintained his sanity even though the heart of a man he killed and dismembered continued to beat and drove him to madness.  Except my own tale was not a piece of short Gothic fiction.  It was a reality.

     I texted my brother and described my grief.  He replied, without empathy, “mynas will set up another nest elsewhere.” 

     Too true.  Mynas crimes are many - they destroy fruit and grain crops, they nest in roofs, ceilings and gutters, they are extremely aggressive to native species, breeding males will protect an nesting area of two acres, they breed easily, are noisy and smell.

     But their worst crime is they dispossess native species of their nests like rosellas and even large birds like kookaburras and galahs.  They can even evict sugar gliders from their hollows which is a death sentence for the marsupials.

     That aside, I wanted to save the tiny birds.  How bad would it be that two extra mynas joined the existing feral population? I bashed at the sheet of Masonite and managed only to dislodge only the sealant in the corner.  Short of finding something like a jigsaw to carve a hole in the ceiling of my deck, I could only cover my ears.  Except their screeching persisted in my head.

     I paced the house.

     “Mum, they’re pests,” said Sutchy. "Don't worry about them."

     I thought of trapping the parents and wringing their necks, but they are extremely intelligent and suspicious creatures and avoided even my pitiful gaze.

     The next morning I thought the ruckus in my head had pushed me into insanity. But when I stumbled out to the deck, the mother and father myna were flying around frantically, their babies chirping and hissing louder than before.

     I left for the Salvos, certain the midday sun on the tin roof would finally end my distress. Then the parents could establish a new nest and hopefully, despite their loss, their love would endure and they'd lay a more successful clutch of pale blue eggs.

     *IUCN Species Survival Commission, 2000

Holding a lifetime on a lap

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake (1757 - 1827)

This is my dear friend, Detta at the Cafe Gallery on Thursday Island in December, 2001. She was about to fly home for Christmas and with a half hour free before her ferry left to Horn Island, we grabbed a coffee.

     She is holding little Sutchy Rooster.  

     Below is Detta at the Cafe China in Cairns in December, 2015.  She had a few hours' layover before her connecting flight home for the Christmas holidays.  She is holding big Sutchy Rooster.