I’m a parent of young children in New Zealand, and it’s a really big thing here too. Painted rocks everywhere. I know lots of people who love it, but like you I have mixed feelings. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago I would have said fairy shrines aren’t a thing here, but recently I found some ‘fairy doors’ nailed into some old native trees. I like the idea of getting your kids out and about, but they’ll be so busy looking for these ‘treasures’ they won’t see all living treasures around them.
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I’ve seen these in Canada too, though not as extensively. These painted rocks were mainly found in public parks. The ones I’ve seen read “Every child matters” is light of the discovery of a mass grave of over 200 Indigenous children who were murdered by the Residential School system. Something like this rock here:
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The local Open Space Authority has staff and trail maintenance volunteers remove painted rocks, etc.
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Years ago, I found a light grey “rock” that was 3 small joined, rounded shapes. I thought it was fossilized poop…years later, my cousin pointed out that it was probably just a few globs of spilled concrete.
[Addendum: pic added. It looks brown instead of hrey because the lighting was off]
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I’ve had a similar experience. There’s this one area that has all of trees with globs of concrete on them. I keep thinking their lichens, so I get out my camera just to get disappointed over and over again.
Not too long ago, they repaved the road and sidewalk by where the trees are. I guess the workers were a bit messy with the concrete.
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Not in New Zealand. They are proliferating like you wouldn’t believe.
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Oh Well, it’s a fad; likely it will pass soon. I dont mind them much in developed areas.
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How long ago was this? Must have been circa 15 years ago.
I headed south out of San Diego into the Tijuana Slough area, which at that time was largely undeveloped open space. I saw magpie-jays! They aren’t supposed to be found that far north, but there’s no mistaking a magpie-jay. When I got close to the Tijuana River itself, I found the ground was thickly covered with plastic trash, so much that it would have taken many days for even a dedicated cleanup crew to get it all out. Among all that trash, there was this plastic skeleton:
I finally emerged near the International Border – a fence on the beach – at Border Field State Park, and who should I run into but the U.S. Border Patrol. I verified my identity (and nationality) for them and explained how I got there. They told me that the area I had just passed through was closed, because recent floods had contaminated the area.
Needless to say, I made the skeleton into a necklace, which I do wear. Because after an adventure like that, who wouldn’t?
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lol, it really does look scary 
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Our Spouse occasionally will put a “free” sign on old furniture that still functions. We got rid of some lime green chairs from the 70s that had been our Grandmother’s (we had slip covers on them when we used them). Spouse was glad someone took them and speculated about how they would live on in now a third home.
Late in fall we were on a walk in our neighborhood park when we found the chairs soaking wet and abandoned on a soccer field. They had been used in a summer fort in the woods and were now park trash. Spouse was not thrilled but is able to laugh about it now
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The strangest thing I have found was a car’s undercairage, with both axles and some of the wheels still attached. I have found many chunks of cars at locations here, even an abandoned semi truck, but what made this one unusual is that it was at the bottom of a wadi. To give the picture, this is a narrow canyon with at least 200ft cliffs on either side, around 100-150ft wide at this point, with a large chunk of car submerged in a seasonal pool. The car must have washed into it during a rare rainstorm. Hopefully no one was in it at the time.
I have also found all kinds of other unusual litter, including TV’s, various items of furniture, a one hand scythe, full sets of snorkel gear, life jackets, an ATC belay device (was very happy about this one), many a goat skeleton that had been slaughtered and eaten on the spot, hundreds of dead pufferfish, enough rebar to last a lifetime, chickenwire, standard trash such as water bottles, stirfoam, masks, and the Oman national flower, the blue plastic bag.
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Ugh, there’s a lot of these around where I am - I hate them, but I generally don’t touch them, because so many people seem to be involved with them. I’m sure they’d just spring right back up again. Another trend seems to be glittery dollar-store items in the forest as memorials for miscarried or stillborn babies… definitely not something I’d feel comfortable “cleaning up” but also not something that’s very good for the local environment either.
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Here a big problem is someone gathering all the sticks into some kind of stick garden, I once saw an old lady doing something in that spot, but honestly that place is creepy, and it’s not really a spot either, it’s around 100x100 metres and on a territory of national park, where you can’t even do that, it involves small sticks in small piles and huge branches in big constructions, so it all looks like a witch could live there. I know it’s an international problem, because when I still used facebook, another user wrote a “rant” post about how this is a big problem in the UK, it destroys microhabitats and wood will take longer to dissolve too.
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hmm looks like badminton cock, those hooves in this must be place for feather, someone has put led like thing in it I guess
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Not sure if it’s the same OKI, but perhaps it’s some kind of dot matrix fax or send-only fax machine from the 1980’s?
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Having lived through the 1980s myself, it’s rather sobering to look at a discarded artifact like this as if it’s a broken cooking pot from some pre-Columbian archaeological dig site.
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This wasn’t my find but someone else’s but it was still a bit unusual. Years ago I owned an old VW Bug that had been in a front-end accident so the hood was crushed. But it still drove fine. I was doing some reptile surveying at a remote spot out in a desert area and I typically parked my vehicle at an illegal trash dumping site and then hiked to my survey site. One day I was out there and could see my vehicle parked in the distance and saw that someone was messing around near it. I hustled back to my car to find a kid who had gotten into the car, thinking it was abandoned because who would drive a piece of junk like that? The kid was all apologies but I had to laugh.
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Just seeing this
New Zealand to ban cigarettes for future generations
and to be seen this is the context
TINY BUT DEADLY: CIGARETTE BUTTS ARE THE MOST COMMONLY POLLUTED PLASTIC
Cigarette butts are actually the most abundant form of plastic waste in the world, with about 4.5 trillion individual butts polluting our global environment.
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