I worked for a time on Bird Island, South Georgia with albatrosses, and a colleague once found an intact light bulb high up on the meadows of the island, that could only have been swallowed at sea and regurgitated by a Wandering Albatross.
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Our hikers kindly leave them hooked in a eye level branch. For the Dog Poo Fairies.
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The doggie poo bags also always make me shake my head (why…why??..why???).
My best find was (although close to a hotel in the mountains in Crete): when you really gotta go potty…
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Stumbled across what I thought was some sort of puffball in the forest, only to turn it over and find what appears to be a tiny lightbulb and a switch.
I’m still not quite sure what it was that I found…
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How…how did it even get there?
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I found this.
It now lurks on my shelf looking pleasingly demonic. I think it was some kind of dog toy.
I also found a sheet of lead on the bank of a river. It had been wrapped into a parcel and was covered with rat teeth marks. Apparently rats like the flavour of lead but someone also told me that there are pagan rituals where items are wrapped in lead and thrown into a river as a curse. If there were contents they were long gone but maybe the rat was trying to get to something that was hidden inside.
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Weird. Clearly puffballs are not real and are actually surveillance devices placed in rural areas to monitor suspicious human activity.
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Just a wild guess. It’s a toy rubber ball with a built-in LED flasher. (Dropped out of a kid’s pocket?)
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That would make a good follow up topic: What’s the best trash-treasure you’ve found?
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Haha! Though that won’t explain these giant ones I found last fall. (Note: I did NOT pick these. There was at least two dozen in one real small are, but when I discovered them, somebody (and maybe their dog) had kicked them around like soccer balls. Since that looked like it just happened, I figured I might as well harvest the ‘roadkill’)
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So glad I checked out this thread, finds have been incredibly entertaining.
I once found a massive pile of hundreds of bags of unopened english muffins, all moldy. That was the strangest.
Not sure if this qualifies as trash but it was certainly mystifying; on a recent trip to Death Valley I found some scat that had a 6 foot long USB cable in it, that certainly gave the impression that the cable went all the way through the animal https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/116982283 (warning: poo)
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Be sure to check them for hidden devices.
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I was examining some coyote scat once and one of the scats consisted entirely of a Jimmy Dean sausage wrapper. It was well-shaped like a coyote scat and you could even easily read the label.
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Shotgun shells high up the list for me. Not the most common, as cars and tires are probably moreso common. But of the things that fit in your pockets conveniently, I seem to clean up more shells than anything.
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In the US Southwest, old cars are sometimes used as bank stabilization structures in incised arroyo or stream channels in rural areas. Tires also, although they tend not to stay in place during floods. Unfortunately I’ve never photo’d any of these but it’s quite the unsightly sight.
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Well, they’ve always warned us about learning how sausages get made.
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It’s like you’ve discovered the remains of Stephen King’s boyhood treefort.
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Apparently, what’s outside, doesn’t matter.
I salute the total honesty in your closing phrase!
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