A few weeks ago my boyfriend and I were guests at a dinner party in North Scottsdale. Our hosts were our friends -- who happen to also be our landlords -- who live in a newly finished 7,000-square-foot Southwest-style home that is utterly gorgeous (if not a tad outrageous), nestled into some Arizona foothills.
One of the great things about our friends' new home is that it's on the outskirts of town, therefore they have peace and quiet, privacy and excellent unobstructed views for miles and miles.
One of the not-so-great things is that there are a lot of unwelcome creatures and critters lurking around just outside of town, including, but not limited to: rattlesnakes, javelinas, bobcats, mountain lions (yes, mountain lions) and scorpions.
[If you're wondering what a javelina is, Wikipedia can help with that. That main lesson, though, is that they're wild hogs. I know they don't immediately look like cold-blooded killers, and I will admit that the baby javelinas can sometimes be cute, but make no mistake, the adults have sharp tusks that can do some major damage. Each year dozens of domestic dogs are reported as having been killed by javelinas.]
And on the night of this particular dinner party, our friends and my boyfriend and I found the largest any of us has ever seen of one of the above-mentioned species of vermin -- up close and personal ...
Yup, a mountain lion.
No, not really. Thank god, no. That would have been one seriously tragic dinner party!
What I meant was, we found several of these guys crawling around the property:
(A Very Poor Primer on) How to Hunt For Scorpions
1. Do not hunt for scorpions alone. Take at least one person with you, preferably more, say, a half dozen. This will ensure that someone is able to call 911 if events should turn in that direction. (Important: see #2.) Note that the odds of at least one person being able to dial 911 greatly increase with the number of people accompanying you. This is particularly true if you take into consideration #2 and #3.
2. Take a cell phone with you. Just do.
3. If you are hunting scorpions after perhaps many, many (many) glasses of wine, be aware that wearing flip-flops on the excursion is not a good idea.
4. Actually, wearing flip-flops to go scorpion hunting is never a good idea.
5. Things you will need: A pair of pliers. A spray bottle filled with a lethal concentration of ammonia. And a black light flashlight. Of these, the black light flashlight is probably the most important. Why? Because for whatever reason, scorpions ...
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GLOW!!!(And no one knows why.)
At any rate, the pliers you will need in order to grab the little buggers and keep them from moving. The spray bottle you will need to then stun and annihilate your victims. (The ammonia makes the exoskeleton disintegrate. Yum.)
6. Also, take a camera.
7. Good luck.
Scenes from a Scorpion Hunt
**No humans were injured during the course of the events described above. However, the same cannot be said for the scorpions.**
Photos by Sway Sovay
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