About the author
Devon is a homeowner and native to the Phoenix metropolitan area who began hunting and logging Arizona bark scorpions around his property and his neighborhood in 2025. Not long after finding out there were scorpions in the area, one dropped from a kitchen ceiling vent a few feet from him and his young daughter. That event caused a chain reaction: he began a path he did not really want to go down, but realized that if he wanted to see a change, he would have to cause that change. He has recorded every find since, built a tracking app from the data, and writes this site from that field experience checked against published research. He is just getting started. There is a larger mission, and goals, coming soon.
How this started
The author did not realize he had bought a house with a scorpion problem, specifically a bark scorpion problem. Not long after he started the groundwork on hopefully getting rid of them with spraying, one of these bark scorpions fell about fifteen feet from a gap between the drywall and a kitchen air vent and landed a few feet from Devon, who was washing dishes, and his daughter, who was barely walking. He dispatched it with a pair of tongs and took it outside to destroy it and throw it away. He told his wife he was "going to do everything possible to make sure that never happens again," and spent the following nights looking for a real answer and finding mostly pest-control marketing. So he went outside with a UV flashlight, among other measures.
Field method
Since 2025 he has walked a fixed route through his neighborhood after dark with a UV flashlight; the path is about two streets, sometimes less. Then the OCD kicks in, and he has recorded every scorpion found: where, when, and what he noticed, generally removing them when possible. The 2025 season was logged in a diary; the 2026 season is logged in a spreadsheet updated almost nightly. His personal records show he has removed over 1,000 and counting, data he plans to build into something even more useful to other homeowners. In a single night, his record for total removals was around 50. At one house alone? In 2025 it was 12 scorpions in one hour in a neighbor's backyard. A year later, in 2026, a new record was set in that same backyard: 16 in one hour. Oh, and that house gets monthly sprays from a highly recommended pest control company. He built a self-contained tracking app that reads those logs and renders a dashboard, and he is working on a version that lets neighbors contribute. Selected data will be published on this site with the methods described.
What he is and is not
He is a field observer with several hundred hours of nighttime survey time, a careful reader of the primary literature, and the builder of his own tools. He is not an entomologist, a toxicologist, or a physician. Medical content on this site cites clinical sources directly and is labelled with its review status. Where the research is thin, the pages say so.