scorpion season?

Last week a northern visitor posted a photograph of a scorpion on one of our local Facebook pages and asked if it was poisonous.
 
Because there is always one in every crowd, a self-appointed grammarian pointed out that scorpions are not poisonous; they are venomous. He then answered the question.

A couple of the comments included an interesting phrase. At least, it was interesting to me because I had never considered it. The phrase? "It is scorpion season."

Scorpion season. I didn't know there was one. I had always imagined scorpion visits to be merely transactional -- like being visited by the plague or politicians selling life insurance policies.

One of the useful things about writing periodic essays is that the archives can be an understudy diary. I write about enough daily occurrences that I should be able to determine if certain phenomena happen in discernible patterns. Such as, is there a scorpion season.

Using the search function (up there in the left corner of the page), I discovered a baker's dozen of essays dealing with my past scorpion encounters: December 2009, April 2010, March 2011, July 2011, June 2012, January 2016, April 2017, May 2018, June 2018, August 2018, December 2019, October 2020, and August 2021.

I draw two conclusions from those dates. One, scorpions can show up any time of year (though summer seems to be the season with the most sightings). Two, I write about scorpions far too often.

I can now add February to that list. As I came out of my bedroom onto the patio this morning, I almost stepped on this beauty.

He would have been easy to miss because he was one of the tiniest scorpions I have seen. A mere lad setting forth in the world. But he was fully armed with his venomous tail to kill prey or to defend himself against the Brobdingnagian giants his mother warned him about.

Rather than kill him, I scooped him up and took him across the street to the lot where the chickens hand out. Chickens consider scorpions to be delicacies. In effect, I entered the scorpion in the Gallinaceous Hunger Games. I am not certain I did him a favor.

Under normal circumstances, my initial encounter with the scorpion could have gone bad for both of us. I usually walk across that stretch of patio barefoot. But it was also a reminder that when I clean out the planters with my bare hands, his siblings could be hiding amongst the detritus. 

Worrying about scorpions here is a bit like obsessing about yellow jackets in Oregon. They are just there as part of the natural background.

Will the encounter help remind me to wear sandals when trotting across the patio or to wear gloves while picking up fallen leaves and flowers? I would like to say yes. But I will not lie to you. It won't. I will always do what is convenient for me at the moment.

Just as my encounters with scorpions are transactional, the manner in which I deal with such dangers are merely part of life's static.

Life is too short to worry about the things that go bump (or sting) in the night.