I've woken up having had a nasty dream about something I saw when I was a child that has (clearly) stuck in my mind.
I was walking home from school and I found a baby bird on the footpath. It had about eight bugs on it, clustered together. I remember trying to scrape them off the bird but they would jiggle around and move under the little feathers. I went home and got a Tupperware box, put the bird in it and brought it to a neighbour (my parents weren't home). The neighbour told me the next day that the bird had died overnight, which was inevitable I guess.
What on Earth were those insects? They were flat and a weird hexagon-shape. I think they had six legs. I wondered if they were ticks but ticks are more round in shape, aren't they?
Ugh. They were horrible; the memory makes me shudder. I've just never seen that type of insect since and have no idea what they were. Any ideas?