My jaw DROPPED when I got to the last few paragraphs! Great story indeed!
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Thanks Bug Guy!
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The things people believe, and spend money on. In the Dominican Republic, beaches get a lot of trash (although the resorts probably clean their sections up). One of the strangest items I found was a very small bottle with its label still on. “Elixir del Amor,” it said, and went on about its effect of enhancing sexual performance, with directions about when to drink it. Then I looked at the ingredients. It was a multivitamin supplement, nothing more.
Cool binoculars! I am in the process of refurbishing a really nice birdhouse that I found in a creek, washed down against the tules. I put up a notice on Nextdoor asking if anyone had lost it – possibly in a flash flood – but nobody ever replied.
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Quite a lot of them for that kind of stretch, maybe a shipping container went overboard?
Hey @broacher , thanks to open so nice topic and take care the environment. I share two (of many), these from the same valley, Quisma in north Chile.
The strong guy on his way up. We didn’t know whether to offer him water or sunscreen. Too focused to answer, the fact is that he ended his march in the garbage.
And this piece of paper, found it at the place I was putting some slings to be able to abseil a wall. Usually in these situations I wonder what the hell I was doing there, but this time I wondered what on earth was a shattered piece of a page caught between a crack. By surprise it was a piece from the book Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (in Spanish). I loved the movie when I was a child, so treating it as if it was an original Egyptian papyrus I happily saved it in my wallet, but minutes later, back to my business, I wondered if this paper was not used on a gastrointestinal emergency…
If you were intrigued, typing some sentences on internet I found out it’s the part that Axel met Hans, the Finnish guide.
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Either (a) several sofas in a random suburban woodland or (b) everything I found on a trash pickup on a Costa Rican roadside, from an American college ID to intravenous drugs to condoms to a diaper to an entire pair of jeans.
I was hiking around Lake Meredith during the 2011 drought and found a classic car. Not enough of a car guy to give make or model)
I found a really rusted out bicycle on the Fox Loop trail in Palo Duro Canyon back in the early 00s. I’d stepped off the trail to pee and there was this rusty old kid’s sized huffy…actually poked around a little bit but didn’t find anything else. Wanted to assuage my mind and make sure there wasn’t a body near it or anything. It’s a bit a longer trail and I know from experience it can be pretty daunting in the summer–it’s the one I got heat exhaustion on.
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I found this kind of amusing. Escaped from captivity and human servitude in a quest to become a ‘real fish’.
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Looks like a Hedon topwater lure, probably worth $5-10 bucks USD, not the best choice for fishing around the plants unfortunately.
a little more fun than the countless yards of fishing line, netting, rope and other trash commercial fishermen ditch for us to pick up off the beaches here.
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This is a spot where stuff blows up against the shore. I doubt anyone was fishing right there. There’s a little pedestrian bridge further along the shore where a creek flows out of the lake. Often there are quite a few bobbers stuck in the trees there - although I’ve never actually seen anyone fishing from that bridge and it would be a poor spot to fish from since it’s narrow and must accommodate bikers and hikers. I love that you know what brand that is!
Very familiar with this equipment; highly effective if used properly under the right conditions, generally at sunrise or sunset when fish are visibly feeding on the top of the water, very popular with speckled trout fishermen in south texas and lousiana.
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Loose fit. I can’t believe green lacewings (trash bugs) actually carry the exoskeletons of their meals as a disguise.
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Crazy, right? While looking for galls, I saw a bit of detritus moving on a leaf, so I took a video. Later, a closer look at the video showed some legs!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/115601233
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Update to this: Was hiking on the same mountain yesterday, different trail but not far (couple hundred meters) from the portapotty door & base/seat, and I found the rest of the components…three side walls and the roof!
Needless to say, stumbling upon this I was literally cackling outloud and its probably good only my dog heard me!
I also found this, which made me do a double-take because I reached down to pick up the “interesting looking nut” (it is about size of a walnut or something) to find it was metal (brass?) and realised I’m on a base and we had UXO (unexploded ordinance) training for a reason…slowly set it back down…and then realised it didn’t look like anything in the training, and it is clearly an ornate top from something. A few minutes of heart pounding for sure.
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I’m used to these flowers growing at the edges of popular trails in black and shades of green. I was stunned to find this pink variation up high in a tree!
Note: Tree is actually a Rhamnus ilicifolia
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While it was in a rural park, I think it was strange nonetheless. While I was going for an evening walk, I notice this in the sky.
A balloon! It just floated along until it was out of view. The real question is, is it a 9 or 6? 
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Reminds me of a time I saw a dark dot in the sky, too far for my eyes to distinguish any shape to it. I photographed it with all my optical zoom and then blew it up with digital zoom and saw to my surprise, Minnie Mouse! True Disneyland is near by, but I wasn’t expecting to be able to resolve that level of detail.
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Happens more often then you’d think, huh?
