There are critters all over my small yard. There are probably a fair number inside the house as well, despite my best efforts.

Except for the cockroaches (which I refuse to honor by writing about) the most numerous are the "Taters". I did my requisite websearches and concluded that they can only be pill bugs, because they ball up when threatened...as well as the fact that nothing else looks even slightly similar. I was fascinated and engrossed in the sites I found that helped nail down the bug IDs: mainly www.whatsthatbug.com and www.bugguide.net , both of which I highly recommend. I couldn't bring myself to look at the maggot pages, though...

Anyway, about my Pill Bugs: they're greyish-brown ovals, about 1/2" long and 1/4" wide, visibly segmented with legs almost completely hidden underneath the body. They're so numerous that I could go outside at any time of day and find one immediately, and not infrequently do enter the house. They cause no problems that I know of, and seem to be very enthusiastic about congregating to break down any dog deposits on the lawn that I may have missed (picture barnacles on a ships' hull, unless you're easily grossed out). The young that I've seen are smaller, and pale to the point of translucency, but in every other respect mirror the adults.

The first strange thing is that both my wife and I somehow picked up the habit of calling them 'potato bugs' even though they're not even close to a real potato bug, which is a big ugly bug that I never want to see in my yard, let alone my house. Though we now know the truth, old habits die hard- thus we still refer to them, almost endearingly, as 'taters'. There seem to be many nicknames for these critters; wood lice, rolypolys, doodlebugs, and sow bugs (the latter is used only for that handicapped branch that can't roll itself up). I can remember seeing them while playing in the dirt as a kid, on the other side of the country...

The really strange thing is that I understand pill bugs breathe through gills...they're isopods, closer to crabs than to real bugs. Yet we live on the outskirts of Las Vegas, in the arid Mojave Desert. Even with the climate changes brought about by increased habitation and development, one would assume that the moist factor around here just isn't up to sustaining gill-breathers. Back in Upstate New York, where I grew up, there's plenty of wetness to be found no matter how long its been since the last rain. Here, on the other hand, even the deepest pile of compost dries out pretty quickly. Can these little guys (especially in such huge numbers) survive on the brief, thrice-a-week spurts of my sprinkler system?

The Taters belong to the favored group of critters- those that I will liberate, or at the very least ignore, when I see one inside. Most spiders belong to this group as well. Nine times out of ten, even Black Widows will get a trip out the door rather than the rolled-up magazine treatment. The odd moth that comes inside has my sympathy; personally, I'll leave it alone...but my cats make no such promise. There are other critters, however, that get an instant smushing...aside from the ones that I won't discuss, ants are always destroyed on sight, as are any flies that are clumsy enough to be hit by a nearsighted klutz like me.

The same treatment is given to another common critter around here, referred to as the "Worm on Wheels". My wife came up with the phrase, which is evocative but inaccurate- they're not worms, and they don't have wheels. They do, however, have a slender flexible body (the worm reference) and move quite fast (the 'on wheels' modifier). At first I decided they were a type of silverfish, and then I drifted more towards the earwig family, because of the pincers at the end of the abdomen. All the ones I've seen around here are black, and generally much skinnier than the typical earwig. I've also never noticed any wings (originally the name was 'earWING', according to some sources), but the classification states that only some can fly; some have wings that are undeveloped and some are hardened or carried so close to the body that they might escape my attention...and still other eagwigs may have none at all. I sympathize with people who use taxonomy regularly; classification is tricky, deciding when you need to keep looking and when the description is 'close enough'.

A few nights ago my wife called my attention to one that had become stuck in a hanging web on the patio. The poor critter twisted and coiled frantically, and finally went limp. Though I crush them as soon as I see one inside the house, I still felt a little sad for the poor tangled WoW. I just hope the spider comes back to gets a snack out of it, because it is so dry out here that I imagine dead bugs dessicate very quickly- and the average WoW doesn't look like he has much meat on him to begin with.

I could get a whole 'nother story out of the eight-legged situation...maybe sometime I'll tell you about the Black Widows, and the many other spiders with which I share my home. I could probably even manage a decent story about the intermittent ant infestations. But I will never write about the roaches.