Announcer: We’re going hunting for scorpions. The valley business that doesn’t just kill creepy crawlers.
Female Anchor: New tonight. You’ve all heard of the Crocodile Hunter but here in Arizona, it is the Scorpion Hunter.
Male Anchor: Just watching these scorpions at night. Makes your skin crawl.
Female Anchor: Makes your skin crawl.
Male Anchor: Yes it does. The Arizona Bark Scorpion is the most venomous in North America. And right now they are out in full force.
Female Anchor: 3 TV’s Preston Phillps is live in Tempe tonight. With a local company that just got some national props. We’re talking about from the New York Times, Preston.
Preston Phillips: Yeah, pretty cool write-up in the New York Time yesterday. I’ll introduce you to one of the guys in a second. This alley we’re at in Tempe now, so dark and with our camera light. If you shine it on the wall here you can’t really see anything. Once you flick on the black light, check it out. Here they are, those Bark Scorpions. They are all over this neighborhood here. What we have been doing tonight, is walking along these walls and plucking them off the walls. See this one down here, this one too, they are really everywhere. I’m joined here tonight by Scorpion Sweepers, a guy named Toby Riley here with the company tonight. Toby, you guys don’t squash these things, you don’t kill them with chemicals. You guys actually pluck them off these walls and off different places and you remove them. Tonight we’ve gotten over thirty in the short time we’ve been here. So tell me a little bit about why you guys do what you do, the humane part of it?
Toby Riley: We don’t want to bring pesticides into people’s yards. People have kids and dogs and pets and it’s easier and more humane to just remove them. We slowly put them to sleep in a freezer. We find that that is the best way to remove them from people’s yards.
Preston Phillips: We are live on 3 TV at nine. We’ve gathered about 10 or 15 since we’ve been out here. Real quick, with the few seconds we have left. Show us how you pluck these off the wall and how you kinda relocate it. It’s pretty cool.
Toby Riley: You come in real quick and snag it.
Preston Phillips: And there you go. Show it to the camera really quick so they can see what it looks like. Trying to sting it there, look at that. You don’t want to get hit by that sucker man. Painful. Lee knows all too well how that feels, they invaded your house a few years back.
Male Anchor: Yeah a while back. Two years ago, Preston, I got stung twice in a matter of three months. 75 of those little suckers climbing all over my house.
Female Anchor: EWWWWWW
Preston Phillips: Check that out. It’s incredible.
Male Anchor: By the way, as you’re seeing here. This is incredible live video that you are showing us right now. They don’t just sting you once man. When I got stung, it felt like someone just kept stinging me and stinging me over and over again.
Female Anchor: It’s just creeping me out watching you guys.
Preston Phillips: Let’s give it a shot. No, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Look at the backside of this thing. Flip it around real quick. Look at the backside of this thing. The exoskeleton doesn’t follow all the way around, so you can actually see its’ insides. Which is something not many people see, you don’t really get this close. We are live, and we are going to continue collecting these suckers. You guys have a great weekend. We’re live in Tempe for now in this wonderful alley, collecting Bark Scorpions.
Female Anchor: Yeah, sweet dreams.
This two and half minute segment features one of our sweepers Toby Riley being interviewed by Channel 3 reporter Preston Phillips. This piece has our team walking through an alley in Tempe, Arizona collecting scorpions, talking about our service to control scorpions. At the end of the segment, one of the anchors discusses his experience with scorpions and how he was stung multiple times.
Channel 3 and CBS 5 news contacted us wanting to do a story about our pest control business after reading our article in the New York Times. Excited for the opportunity, we brought them to an alley in Tempe, Arizona. These two stations are owned by the same company so the two segments were shot about ten minutes apart. You can see the CBS 5 segment here.
Before the shoot started Toby checked the alley and collected scorpions for about twenty minutes Just six feet into the alley the first scorpion was seen. The scorpions in the shot used to show what they look like with and without UV light were not placed, they were found beforehand.
This was filmed the weekend before bulk trash pick up day. So there were tons of pile of leaves, branches and other large items that are perfect habitats for scorpions. This alley has many unsealed property walls that provide a great habitat for the scorpions and allow access points into homeowners walls. A great way to limit the scorpions in this location would be to Seal The Property Walls.
