Need bug ID: birds irritated/dying,could these be the cause?

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=6821670

i don't know what miticide you were looking at when you researched but they do make a very good bird miticide that wouldn't be harmful. you can check with a vet, hopefully a "farm" vet to get the proper kind...or a good feed store should be able to help you too.
my sister worked at the st. louis zoo in the bird area for years and a miticide was always part of the health program.
on the good side, all birds, to my knowledge, carry mites and i don't think it normally ever kills them but maybe a heavy infestation would. i don't know.

What miticide are you referring to? Do you know the name or where I could get it?

I checked my local feed store and they have four options: Sevin dust (which is highly toxic), Prozap Garden & Poultry Dust (active ingredient is Permethrin, also toxic), Gordon's Permethrin-10 Livestock & Premise Spray (again, Permethrin, which is toxic) and Ultracare 8 in 1 Mite & Lice Bird Spray (active ingredient is Pyrethrin which is less toxic than the others but comes in a very small can so I can only spray the birds with it, not the entire pen/enclosure itself). I've already used the safe/natural stuff (diatomaceous earth) but it hasn't worked and isn't really supposed to be used once mites are present, rather as a preventative measure before they arrive...and I'm not sure what other options there are.

let me ask my sister.

she said that the means used by the zoo were not always the way she would have done things...the zoo had so many birds, etc.
she said mites can debilitate and kill birds and there are different kinds. she suggested googling as she doesn't remember the name of what she used on her pet birds (finches). she bought it at a good pet shop and she says even a pet smart will have a pretty good selection. if you can use it on a small finch, canary, etc. then it should be safe for your quail.
i know i'm not being all that helpful but here are some great links. i read almost all of them on this first page. i was intrigued by the use of wood ash as a dusting agent....and of course, cleanliness is of the utmost importance. good luck with what you find: http://www.google.com/webhp?sa=N&tab=lw#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=mites+on+chickens&pbx=1&oq=mites+on+&aq=2&aqi=g5&aql=f&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=0l0l1l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=69f83cf5fcf1a69&biw=1125&bih=592

Just thought of something: could those red bugs be chiggers?

The red bug inside the cup in my second video (http://www.vimeo.com/laramie1/redbug) definitely looks like the photos of chiggers I found when searching for them on Google Images...here are two examples:

http://imagess3.enature.com/insects_spid/insects_spid_l/is0151_1l.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lkOPHZJetNI/SfmsxcB7TlI/AAAAAAAAE4g/TQPjo9tb1TY/s400/Chigger+1.jpg

However, I've found several sites that claim that chiggers are practically invisible due to how small they are...specifically, "Chiggers are barely visible to the naked eye (their length is less than 1/150th of an inch)" although I'm not sure if that applies to them in all of their stages (larvae, nymph, adult). If they are in fact chiggers it seems like that would be the cause for the birds' constant irritation, but the size thing throws me off. Any thoughts?

i think chiggers and mites might be related but i don't think birds get chiggers. they get mites.