The tarantula on the mini fridge
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The tarantula on the mini fridge is the centrepiece of John Kiriakou's account of the fauna at the Baja California resort where he spent a month filming in October 2025.

What he was looking at

His general verdict on the wildlife came first. "But I saw wildlife there, Ted. Half the time I didn't know what the heck I was looking at. The other half of the time I didn't want to see it."

The snakes were the first shock, measured against a lifetime's baseline. "I can count on one hand the number of snakes that I saw in the first, you know, sixty and a half years of my life growing up in Pennsylvania, and they were garter snakes and black snakes. No big deal. These were freaking rattlesnakes, and they're everywhere."

One he had to look up. "I had to Google it and see what the heck I was looking at. It was called the California rat snake. Things are big, too." The host's reassurance, rat snakes will do nothing to you, was accepted.

The instruction

The warning arrived before he did. "But then the scorpions, we were warned in an email before we went down there not to ever go barefoot. Okay, you're at the beach, for God's sake. Never go barefoot."

He obeyed it, and says he was right to. "Well, I never did. And thank God I did."

Three in the morning

The reason the instruction mattered nightly was where the refrigerator stood. "I have this habit, like most people my age I would suspect, where I get up in the middle of the night, I want to get a drink of water or something. Well, my little mini fridge was outside."

So each trip had a procedure. "So I'd have to shake out my shoes to make sure there are no scorpions or tarantulas in there, and then put the shoes on and then go outside. But I had to have a flashlight with me to make sure that the scorpions and tarantulas aren't on my mini fridge."

And then the night the precaution proved itself: "which the tarantula was on my mini fridge one night at 3 a.m."

Asked whether it becomes normal, he said it does not. "Oh, it's, you don't get used to it." On whether tarantulas spin webs, he could only report what he saw: "not that I ever saw."

The rest of the census

The list continued beyond the things that sting. "I'll tell you, I saw a deer. It was the biggest freaking deer I ever saw in my life, but it was completely grey", the size, he estimated, of a western mule deer. And "road runners everywhere. Never saw one flying, just running down the road, sometimes with as many as a dozen pals of his."

His final ranking was unambiguous: "but it was the scorpions and the tarantulas that really got to me, because they're everywhere."

See also

- The resort with no air conditioning
- The Fox That Ate The Scraps
- Kiriakou's acting career
