Scary Animals

Fun sign in the Arizona desert.

But keep this in mind:
Number of snake bites I've sustained, after living more than 20 years in Arizona: 0
Number of scorpion that have stung me:  0
Number of ticks that have burrowed under my skin in the approximate 3 years I've lived in tick country:  6

I've only even SEEN 8 or 10 rattlesnakes in the wild, and I hike and camp.  My Dad worked for the Forest Service in the Arizona desert for years, often out in the field.  The only one of his colleagues ever to get bitten by a rattlesnake was holding it in his hands, trying to explain how NOT to hold a snake.  We've had scorpions in our house, of course, and my brother had a painful and somewhat scary encounter with one at his place.

But those ticks in other places...some of them can kill you with encephalitis or Rocky Mountain spotted fever.  They can give you life-long lyme disease and transmit a bunch of other nasty things I can't pronounce.  Yet we're not as scared of them.

We have scary critters in Arizona, but they're plane-crash scary:  horrific and dramatic, but not likely to actually happen to you.  It's those ants and dogs and hamburgers that we should really be worrying about.  

***Knocking on wood as we speak***.