An unpleasant altercation while collecting

Greetings,

There do seem to be some common threads here - even down to the Highway 1 reference by John! I was collecting during the day on Key Largo along Highway 1 back in the 1990s. We had permits, and were told to place them in full view on the dashboard of the car, so passing law enforcement could see why the vehicle was parked there. I was about half a mile down the road, and an elderly woman in a red convertible sports car stopped and demanded to see my permit to collect butterflies. I told her I wasn't collecting butterflies, but rather beetles, and she called me a liar and demanded the permit again. I told her it was on the car's dash and directed her to go look at it. She insisted I had to have a copy on my person, so I suggested she drive me back to the car to save me the walk. She barked that no sweaty, dirty butterfly collector was getting into her car, so I taught her some synonyms for self-gratification and walked away. She drove off "to get the sheriff" but I never saw her again.

The ironic part is that on the first day in the Keys, a woman's body was found under a pile of trash near one of the powerline poles, and on our second day, a person was decapitated at the local marina in a drunken boating accident. I found Santeria relics in the hammock, and during a walk with a headlamp while blacklighting, I heard the distinct click of a walkie-talkie being activated somewhere in the dark around me. I found reflective thumbtacks on tree trunks and was told by the park biologist that those were used by drug runners to follow trails at night from the beach to the highway. With all this kind of stuff happening - this 70-something woman decided that stopping and accosting a young male stranger held no potential threat for her... wonder how old she lived to be?

On a funnier note - I had a woman stop her car while I was running a MV light sheet in an Ohio state park, and bring her two kids, maybe 5 and 7, up to the sheet. This was past 11:00 p.m. in a remote part of the park. Her question? She wanted to know if her kids could watch the "shadow puppet show". Idiot.

Cheers!
Bandrow

I was a wildlife and animal control officer - not police but similar uniforms. I was just that good.In writing a citation I also gave advice or resources for animals to prevent future problems. Sometimes out of my own pocket. I wasn't always thanked (one stated he did not recognize my authority- I told them we can solve the problem here or he can tell it to the judge) but people sometimes recognized me off duty and approached me to say the advice I gave them worked really well. That startled me because you never know who is ready to pounce... I was out when a new director took over. They let go the last director/veterinarian/USAF colonel and replaced him with a disgraced assistant county administrator....a mean little old lady..... And now we're back to the original type antagonist of this thread.

That woman lived in the gated community at the northern end of Key Largo. I mentioned the encounter to the park biologist that we were working with and she knew who she was. Apparently she confronted others on a regular basis - and I wouldn't doubt she was packing. The Keys in general were an eclectic mix of the wealthy, the tourists, the homeless, the professional beach bums - quite a mix of seemingly unmixable people, but somehow it all seemed to work! And the collecting was spectacular, until the mosquito planes came over at about 300' and dowsed us with insecticide. We learned to go inside around 5:00 p.m. to avoid that hazard...

Bandrow

I haven't been down there since 1994 - permits got hard to get and I turned my attention elsewhere. In 1993 and 1994 the collecting for 'bycids was phenomenal due to the amount of dead and damaged trees and branches down from Hurricane Andrew in August of 1992. Between those two trips I collected nearly every species known from the Keys. We went in the first week of June both times, but the season had shifted just enough from one year to he next that we got a different cohort of species each time, but cumulatively it was almost a synoptic set of the island's taxa.


Cheers!
Bandrow

This is priceless!

On a funnier note - I had a woman stop her car while I was running a MV light sheet in an Ohio state park, and bring her two kids, maybe 5 and 7, up to the sheet. This was past 11:00 p.m. in a remote part of the park. Her question? She wanted to know if her kids could watch the "shadow puppet show". Idiot.

Several years ago I was in the field with a couple of fellow Ohio Coleopterists on State Forest land that we had permits for sampling coleoptera. I had located a free standing Beaver lodge in a swampy area and was busy tunneling through to the interior to remove bedding debris for berlese sampling. There were several Beaver associated coleoptera of interest to me. This of course annoys the beaver but when finished they quickly make necessary repairs and all is good. During this adventure a car pulled up on the forest road near the location and a voice yelled out that they were going to call the law and report us for poaching beavers! As my vehicle was parked at the same spot I rounded up my dog and headed to the car to make sure that was OK and to confront the morons hollering at us and disturbing our efforts. Now when I say I rounded up my dog, she is a 140 pound, long haired Shiloh Shepherd. When wet she looks like a wolf! Upon approaching these characters, they jumped back in their car but did not leave. Apparently feeling a sense of self preservation upon seeing my dog! I approached them and informed them of our activities and proceeded to have a good conversation and parted ways on a good note. Not the first time my good friend Riley (the dog) has smoothed over a tense situation in the field...one involving a black bear in West Virginia...another story for another time!

When I was in the dom.rep yeas ago, we had a permit to collect butterflies. A friend got it somehow. When we walked there, some people came and told us, that fishing is not allowed. I don´t speak spanish and alle the conversation was translated. A day before, I asked what is "collecting butterflies" is in spanish. I couldn´t remember right and sais something like "get married with butterflies". But, mariposas are also the homosexual people. So we had a great laughter for a long time.