Insect and Spider Identification: Need bug ID: birds irritated/dying,could these be the cause?, 1 by laramie6

laramie6 wrote:
I raise a small colony of rare quail in a half indoor/half outdoor enclosure and recently found one of them dead with no obvious cause of death...since then the rest of them seem to be pecking and scratching themselves a lot more and there are many loose feathers on the ground of the pen so I'm concerned that this means they may have mites or some other type of insect bothering them and possibly killing them. I'd treat for mites except the treatment options are all toxic and could potentially be more dangerous to the birds than the mites themselves, so I don't want to go that route unless I'm absolutely certain that there's a problem. Which brings me here...I looked around both the inside and outside areas of the pen for anything resembling mites, but I'm not an expert by any means so I don't actually know what it is I'm looking for. I didn't see anything on the birds themselves but I did find a variety of insects in the area which I took photos and videos of with a macro lens and am hoping to get help identifying.

I think the most likely candidates for what's bothering the birds are one or more of these little red bugs I found. I first found a very small one on the wooden door of their pen that looked like a tiny red crab and moved around very fast. The attached image is of that bug but since it moved so fast I couldn't really get a very good picture of it, so I took a short video which I think is more useful:
http://www.vimeo.com/laramie2/bugvideo

The footage of the red crab-looking bug starts at about the 40 second mark in that video; the bugs shown before it are the other bugs I found crawling around the pen that looked like they could be possible culprits. After the clip of the red crab-looking bug there's a clip of another red bug I found that moved much slower and was fatter with a slightly different shape; it can be seen from 1:08 - end in the video.
I went out again today and found yet another red crab-looking bug on the outside of the enclosure and then another red bug on the ground inside the pen. I caught the one I found on the ground inside a plastic cup and took it inside to get a better look...it looked similar to the fatter/slower red bug but was slightly smaller. I made another short video of the red bug inside the cup which I uploaded here:
http://www.vimeo.com/laramie1/redbug

So what are these things and could they be the cause of the birds' irritation and/or death? I did a google search for "red mite" but found many kinds (red mite/dermanyssus gallinae, red velvet mite, spider mite, predatory running mite etc) and none of them seem to match up exactly with what I've found so far. Any help on the matter would be *much* appreciated!

P.S. I made another thread on a poultry board that contains more photos and info in case anyone's interested:
http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=6821...