Today, in the early afternoon I joined Esme on our roof. The sun was shining, and she was doing some washing. Some time ago I had looked between the stones and tiles on our roof for scorpions, but didn't put them back into a nice stack. So I decided to do that now. And when I lifted the last stone to put on the new stack, I noticed a scorpion, a female Centruroides flavopictus. I carefully shielded the scorpion from the sun with my hand (don't try this at home, the sting is painful) and asked Esme to get a plastic cup and a piece of paper. When she came back I put the plastic cup over the scorpion, and tried to moved the piece paper underneath the scorpion. But somehow it escaped... I had to move some more stuff, and then it ran away again. Then I made the scorpion walk onto the piece of paper, lifted the paper, and with a smooth move the scorpion ended up in the plastic cup. Esme complimented me (You're getting good at it) and we both had a good peek at the scorpion. It looked certainly like a female.
At the opposite side of the new stack, I have a much smaller stack, mainly consisting of floor tiles standing. Months ago I decided to split the then single stack in two, doubling the chance of finding a scorpion. Last time I checked this smaller one, I found "our" house gecko hiding between the tiles.
So I decided to check that stack as well, just curious if the house gecko was still using it as a place to hide. And about halfway browsing through the tiles, I saw a much smaller scorpion, probably 4th instar. It ran away, and hid under the standing tiles. So I moved those away as well, and when I removed the last tile, I saw the small scorpion, and the house gecko. The latter on the low wall that surrounds our roof. After a few seconds the gecko ran away. After a few attempts I was able to capture the juvenile scorpion, also species Centruroides flavopictus, as well.
I guess that the few days of much warmer weather brought scorpions back to our roof. The last time I captured scorpions on our roof was 4 months ago.