What are?

[SeaCat]

What are the neatest/strangest things you have found?

Some of mine:

When I lived in Upstate New York we lived on a large chunk of property. One summer my father decided I needed something to do so he had me work at cleaning the trash out of an old shallow well at the back of the property. This wasn't a lot of fun aas the water in the well was cold and the bottom of the well was filled with a shitload of old rusted metal. I had to wear golves, which were always wet and soggy as only leather gloves can get. About halfway through the job I pulled out an old Copper Flashlight. It was slightly corroded but the case was intact and the lens was unbroken. It took me a while but I cleaned it up and got it working again. I still have and use it.

I was helping my father collect bike frames and parts at the local town dump when I went to kick a cigar box out of my way. I almost broke my toe. Curious about a taped up cigar box weighing that much I went back and grabbed it. It ended up in the back of the truck and I quickly forgot about it. That evening I remebered it and retrieved it from the truck. The damned thing must have weighed a good five pounds. I put it on the workbench and cut the tape with a knife. You can imagine my surprise when I opened it and found it filled with silver coins. (Mostly foreign and all more than 100 years old.)

I was getting ready to move from Cape Cod to Florida when my father enlisted me to help him take down a half destroyed barn for a friend of his. I was unhappy with this but because it was my father asking and his friend was half crippled I agreed to help. When we showed up the old guy told us if we found anything in the barn we wanted we could have it. The barn was weathered and half down already. My father and I went in to see what it would take to knock it down the rest of the way. (Not much it turned out.) As we were knocking the place down something caught my eye. I went back to look and found what my father calls a rabbit rifle. It is a single shot .22 rifle made in Europe. The trigger guard is actually a lever that opens the breech so you can load in a single round. To cock it you pull back a knurled knob at the back of the breech. There is no safety and the entire rifle is 2'6" long. (There are no manufactorers markings on it and I have never seen another like it. It is in near mint condition and actually shoots quite nicely.)

Cat

 

[rgraham666]

I think the coolest thing that ever happened to me was when I was taking a walk in a park here in Toronto.

This bird flew out of a patch of woods, landed on a tree and started hammering away at it. It was, I thought, way too big to be a woodpecker as it was about the size of a crow.

Then I realized it was a woodpecker, a pilieated woodpecker in fact. My jaw dropped as I never hoped to see one. They're kind of rare.

I watched for twenty minutes. Couldn't get closer than ten mteres, it was pretty shy. It's a good thing they're rare because there wouldn't be a tree standing if they were common. The chips literally flew when it was working.

http://www.lies.com/wp/images/pileated.jpg

__________

A few years later I was at a friend's farm, wandering around a field. I noticed something on a tall plant, heather I think.

Leaning close I saw it was a bunch of aphids. Nothing too interesting. Until I noticed a number of ants wandering through them.

That's when I realized I was looking at an ant herd.

Some species of ants keep herds of aphids. The ants milk the aphids for honeydew that the ants store in a special stomach, take back to the nest and store it for winter.

I watched for a while and saw all their behaviour. Milking; an ant goes up to an aphid and taps the aphid with its antenna. The aphid squeezes out a drop of honeydew that the ant then swallows. Grooming; the ants keep the aphids clean and free from disease. And protection. A robber fly, a type of parasitic fly that lays eggs on its victims, was buzzing around. Every time it got too close an ant would chase it off.

It was one of the most interesting things I've ever seen.

Here's a picture of how the ants store the honeydew in their nest. I didn't get to see that, of course.

http://ant.edb.miyakyo-u.ac.jp/BE/Kingdom/3637/39_1.jpg

 

[cantdog]

Our camp ("camp" has a specific meaning in Maine, different from what the word means elsewhere) is shaded by three enormous hemlocks. One year they were attacked by these innocuous looking centimeter long larvae. Little caterpillars or inchworms, a cheery green. They climbed up the trees and then dropped down on threads of silk, to climb up anew. Moths, they turned out to be, of a species called Hemlock Loopers.

They were killing the trees. Now, these trees are not quite a hundred feet tall, say, thirty plus meters. They overhung the camp buildings. Three giant dead trees would pose a real hazard, yet we were loath to lose them. The huge trees sheltered and shaded us. They kept the bulidings from being obvious from the lake, as well. Reading about them, we could not find a good reliable way to rid the trees of this infestation.

One day, a flock of birds arrived, which liked nothing better than to eat these green worms. They came, feasted, twittered, squabbled, and left, all in a day. When they were done, all the loopers were gone. The thing is, we never found a picture in any bird guide which answered to the appearance of these birds. Dozens of other birds had come and gone, and none of them seemed to consider the loopers to be a food source, but these fellows did. In one afternoon they disposed of the whole colony of hundreds and hundreds of loopers.

We have never seen that species of bird since, and no one remembered seeing them ever before.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I bought one of those notorious Old Locked Trunks, at an auction in Pennsylvania. Inside it were books-- all pre-war, and some of them were children's books, which are quite rare as they mostly got turned in to the paper drives during WW2.I have two of Don marquise's 'Archie And Mehitabel' books, plus a bound collection of his New York Times column "a line o'type or two"
And an author named Eleanor Farjeon, the woman who wrote the lyrics to "Morning has Broken" so I have three of her books of short stories. They are really well written and beautifully illustrated.

 

[glynndah]

In a locked tackle box from a country auction I once found, among all the old-fashioned real pearl and bakelite buttons, a couple of German coins from the 1930's and a gold crown (tooth, not tiara.)

 

[oggbashan]

I too bought locked trunks.

I had recently moved and I wanted a couple of trunks to store things in my loft which wasn't boarded.

There was an auction held weekly. I was off work one week doing odd jobs and I remembered the auction. At the viewing I saw a pile of seven trunks. I thought that one or two would be useful so the auction day I bid the minimum of three pounds for the first one. No one else bid. The auctioneer asked if anyone else wanted any of the trunks. No one answered. He knocked the seven trunks down to me for ten pounds in total.

The top four trunks were empty and I put them in my loft. The fifth was full of books, mainly cheap editions of classic literature. I kept a few and gave the rest away.

The sixth trunk was also full of books but included a run of "The Imperial Calendar and Civil Service List" from the 1930s to the 1960s. They show details of my father's and father-in-law's careers and other relatives. I still use them for family history.

The seventh and largest trunk was locked. It wasn't as heavy as the fifth and sixth trunks, in fact so light that I thought it might be of heavy construction and empty. It took me about twenty minutes of fiddling with a piece of bent wire to open the lock. Inside was a complete gentleman's dress outfit, tail coat, monkey jacket, stiff shirts, braided trousers etc. They were remarkably small with a 32 inch chest. There were also some papers with the clothes that identified the owner.

He had been a fighter pilot in the First World War when light pilots were essential. He had been wounded and thereafter walked with a cane but remained in the RAF in administration. Later he had been posted to Washington as part of a team buying aircraft and aircraft parts in the late 1930s, continuing there throughout the war. He had been attached to the British Embassy and had worn the natty gent's suiting at Embassy events.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the US's entry into the war, he had changed into his RAF uniform and packed his civilian dress clothes away, so this trunk had been packed in December 1941. He and his wife had opened it from time to time to add mothballs and a note about the circumstances.

When he died, his wife had predeceased him. Most of the valauble family possessions he had distributed to his children in Australia and everything left had been sent to our local auction.

I gave the clothes and the note to our county's museum. I kept the trunk.

The seventh trunk was too large to go through our loft hatch. I looked at it closely to see whether it could be dismantled and reassembled in the loft. As I examined it I found a small tarnished plaque. With a few minutes polishing it read "Packard Car Inc.". The trunk had been an extra for a 1920s Packard, to be carried on the trunk rack that had been a feature of Packards in the 1920s and early 1930s.

I contacted a club for pre-war American Cars and asked if anyone wanted a Packard trunk. An excited Packard owner rang me and eventually drove 150 miles to see the trunk. Not only did it fit the year and model of his Packard but it was the correct colour. I wanted to give it to him - free, but he insisted on giving me ten pounds - the amount I had paid for all seven trunks.

Og

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

My parents died young, and I never met 3 of my grandparents. In grad school one of my projects involved my genealogy, and I couldnt do it because I knew nothing.

Later I became interested in genealogy and collected large amounts of information, documents, photographs, artifacts, etc. Recently an 1860 diary came into my posession, that illuminated the life of one ancestor when she was 16 years old. It includes a detailed description of her physical appearance, extensive quotes, and many of her daily activities.

But the greatest mystery was my mother's father. She never met him and had no idea who he was. Her mother concealed his identity. I assumed she was a love-child. And I assumed she had a strong dose of hispanic blood because of her coloring and physical characteristics.

I found her father. Our home sat across the street from a cemetery. In this cemetery I found his grave. He died young. I found her parents marriage record. My mother was 2 years older than she thought she was. I even located a woman who was at the wedding. She knew my grandfather, she thought he was okay, and my grandparents divorced soon after the wedding because " Agnes and Arthur just didnt get along." Both remarried. I located a 1st cousin of mine, who is his grand-daughter, and she sent me several photographs of him, plus photos of his parents, etc.

My mother wasnt Mexican, she was Indian-Swiss. The Indian, Cherokee, was on her mother's side. My Cherokee ancestor came to Florida to fight the Seminole, and settled here. He actually had a farm adjacent to a Seminole community, way out in the boonies. Seminoles are really Creek, and there was a lot of bad blood between Cherokee and Creek in the old days.