The Newest Desert Critter

Well, I had had it! Franz found yet another scorpion in the house on Monday. This guy, if you were to unroll his poised tail, would probably measure 3 inches long. Since I had no desire to touch him, we will have to forego the actual measurement. Sorry, folks. Well, he took a nice final bath in the toilet, and I called the pest control company. (Seriously, Jackson is days away from crawling, from the looks of it.) We have had a major run of scorpions this year, and all of them in the kitchen area. One of these was on the wall by the sliding glass door. Apparently, he was a bark scorpion, since they are the only ones that can crawl up walls. They are also the most poisonous and dangerous of the Arizona varieties. I don't know what the rest of them have been, but I'm guessing the same kind. There are 3 species of scorpions that make Arizona their home. If you check out the hyperlink above, they elaborate on the arachnids of our Sonoran Desert.

I've been harboring a theory that the two sliding glass doors from our kitchen table that lead directly to the outdoors are the likely entry point. When my pest control guy showed up today, that was his assumption, too. He informed me that scorpions can fit through a 1/16 of an inch opening. Yeah... That's very, very small. There is an expansion joint right at the exterior base of these doors, and he believes we have a substantial scorpion population that lives there during the day and comes out to hunt at night, squeezing through miniscule openings in the glass door structure. Since they are very territorial, they would not spread throughout the house, but would stay close to the entry point. This jives with my experience - they have all been in the kitchen.

So, they sprayed insecticide along the interior and exterior base of the doors, and laid down diatomacious earth on top of the pesticide outside. He believes this will kill off the population over the course of the next three weeks.

Looks like I'll still have to have Franz do the scorpion hunt in the kitchen every morning before the kids go down, at least for a little while.

Oh, and I almost forgot: just before the pest control guy arrived today, I found a new spider type dead in the garage. I put it in a jar and showed it to him. "Oh, it's a Vinegaroon!" he said. A what?! Arachnid. Same family as those freaky Sun Spiders we found in the garage a month ago. Apparently considered good and helpful by most people other than ME!

By the way, this is not me or anyone I know holding the freaky Vinegaroon above. It is another internet picture, and if you want to read stats on this bug and see the picture at its source, click on the hyperlink in the above paragraph. The one I found was a baby, thank goodness, and not nearly this size.