Is that a red tick?

I was using a manual posthole digger on Monday, March 6, when I noticed something bright red in the dirt. It looked like a small tick and was certainly big enough to be one.

Of course I grabbed my cellphone and took a few photos.

The little red bug was moving very fast, and I allowed it to crawl away. Knowing that ticks have eight legs, I zoomed in on the image on my cellphone and confirmed that it had eight legs.

After researching to identify this bug, I found it is called a red mite. Red mites are arachnids closely related to ticks. There are more than 45,000 different kinds of red mites worldwide. Red mites vary in size. Some are very tiny, and all are small. Most red mites feed on plants such as clover and pose no threat to humans. Chiggers are also red mites, but they feed on humans and other animals. Chiggers are too tiny for my cellphone camera to photograph.