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.”[1]
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.”[1][2]
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.[2]
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.”[2]
He obeyed it, and says he was right to. “Well, I never did. And thank God I did.”[2]
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.”[3]
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.”[3]
And then the night the precaution proved itself: “which the tarantula was on my mini fridge one night at 3 a.m.”[3]
Asked whether it becomes normal, he said it does not. “Oh, it’s — you don’t get used to it.”[4] On whether tarantulas spin webs, he could only report what he saw: “not that I ever saw.”[4]
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.”[4][5]
His final ranking was unambiguous: “but it was the scorpions and the tarantulas that really got to me, because they’re everywhere.”[5]