Lice Infestation!! Oh, No!

The Bayou has received copious amounts of rainfall in the past few weeks.  Normally, I love a good rainy day but this is a tad ridiculous!  Just this afternoon, we have received more than five inches in the gauge and the forecast calls for another six or so tonight.  That is a lot of water to come tumbling from the sky!  Everything outside is soaked and even inside the Little Bayou House, things feel dank. 

With all of this moisture comes mold, mildew and all sorts fungi and lichens.  Mushrooms are popping up in every square foot of the yard and lichens cover most every tree.  In the lichens, I found Bark Lice. These small bugs have quite the "ick" factor about them for no other reason than there are just so many of them!  They seem to cluster together in wads of about a hundred or so on the oak trees in the front yard.  If the rainy season holds, the oak tree trunks will eventually be covered with the fine webbing that these bugs form.  This gives the old oak trees a bit of a ghostly appearance which is a bit unnerving to some folks.  Homeowners become concerned that some critter is infesting their trees!  While the infestation part is true, it is not true that the bugs mean any harm.  They are "people-friendly" and "tree-friendly"!  Although the webbing and clusters of bugs might be a bit unsightly, they do not harm the tree whatsoever.  As far as I can tell, they feed on lichens and not tree sap!

Anyway, I found a goodly sized wad of the Bark Lice near the birdbath.  There were many, many of them on the oak trees but one cluster of them decided that a piece of driftwood would suffice as their home.  I watched the bugs for a bit and was highly amused by the fact that they seem to run around randomly bumping into one another for no apparent reason.  The group was like a bunch of bumper cars at the carnival!  Bump, turn, bump, turn, bump.  Perhaps this was some form of communication but it sure looked a bit awkward to me!