DubiaW
Arachnobaron
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2017
- Messages
- 471
I spend a lot of time night hiking and cruising the desert these days looking for Scolopendra heros for my breeding project. There are very few people out there at night but often times I see the same people and the same vehicles over and over again and wonder why they are there. From time to time I slow down as they pass and they will stop to talk. They want to know the same thing, "Why am I out in the desert on a wednesday night at 11 pm?" A question which I don't usually answer completely, especially when I am stopped while cruising in my hot spots. On occasion they are herp enthusiasts, big game hunters, ranchers, photographers or even just people drunk driving for fun. They call it four wheeling around here.
So far I haven't ran into any invert enthusiasts but locals can still give you good information on what you are looking for just by showing them photographs. Some of the encounters can also be terrifying or terribly strange. People are by far the scariest thing you can find in the desert. This is a story about a strange encounter that led me to the location of a superpod of Orthoporus ornatus.
It was about two weeks ago and I had just collected two S. heros plings under some rocks on the moss covered rocky mountainside I've been visiting pretty frequently. It had been a week since finding any so I was feeling pretty good about the night and packed up early after getting worn out flipping a bunch of big rocks anticipating more. Heading down the mountain pass in my car, as the sun was fading and the orange glow of the sunset was fading to black, I noticed an SUV that had been parked on the side of the dirt road on several other occasions. It was pretty far down the road and the owner was getting inside and packing up whatever he was doing out there. Curiosity begged me to stop and say hello like a cat on its eight life. Sure why not? Actually I had a really creepy encounter with a drunk guy the day before. He just stood there cleaning his gun on his tailgate with headphones in and wouldn't acknowledge me at all. I even honked the horn so he would acknowledge my presence less than ten meters away from him. He didn't even looked up as I turned my vehicle around in front of him. Pretty creepy! Not every encounter is that bad and chances are the guy loading his SUV would be much friendlier than the drunk guy with the gun. Statistically speaking. So I pulled my pistol from its holster and set it on the passenger's seat just in case.
I slowed the car down and the guy gave me the customary nod of acknowledgment that people give around here when they are receptive to an encounter (as opposed to indifference the customary signal for go away). Strange place Arizona. He was pulling out to turn around but stopped when he realized I wanted to talk. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was a professional photographer of sorts and that he liked to take pictures of the sunset. I laughed and accused him of being new to Arizona (every new resident has at least a photo album's worth of sunset photos in a file somewhere). Turns out he was actually born and raised in Arizona and he just really liked photographing the sunset. He was a retired university trained forensic scientist and police officer. After a few minutes of talking I finally decided to tell him what I was really doing (since he wasn't a collector). We were next to my hotspot and I had previously told him that I was looking for tarantulas. Afterall I had two new plings to show off. I pulled the deli's out of the bucket on the seat of my car and asked if he wanted to see them. I warned him that there was a gun on the seat. He laughed and said he had a gun on his seat too and that he didn't mind as long as I didn't mind the fact that he wasn't decent. I knew that he wasn't wearing a shirt already and expected the worst, but sure "I'm alright with that."
He opened the door of his SUV and got out wearing nothing but flip flop sandals and boxer briefs (all bunched up around his butt in a sweaty wad). He was bald with a big beer belly and a long grey moustache and long curly silver hair all over his sweaty chest. He limped over as I opened the car door to illuminate his view. He said he had never seen an S. heros before and pretended to be very impressed. He stopped and said, "Hold on! Wait right here!" He hobbled to the back of his SUV and popped the back open and grabbed a black object and came around the corner. My heart jumped when I saw the outline of a sawed off pump shotgun in the fading sunset. Oh god not again! I hope he just wants to show off his new gun or something. He walked closer and pulled on the barrel and to my amazement it telescoped out. It took a second for my brain to process what I was looking at in the dark. Then he pulled the magazine and it telescoped out, and then a third telescoping part. He spread the legs of the tripod and aimed his camera into the dark and then pressed the shutter. "Click.". He stood there quietly for about thirty seconds and the shutter snapped again. "Click."
He showed me the photograph of the darkening sunset he took with a thirty second exposure, and then a series of shots of cactus and an old barn lit up with a wandering flashlight on a long exposure. As he showed me all this he told me that his mind and memory was starting to go and he couldn't remember what he had taken pictures of before so he had to start new every night taking pictures and then compare them to his old pictures to see if he had photographed something before. He told me about his life and his wife and how she worked in Juvenile corrections. He told me a lot of stuff. When he was about done telling me his life story he repeated that he had never seen a giant centipede before but that he had seen giant millipedes. He said he was out on the beat one night and stopped because there was a wash running across the road. At least that's what he thought it was, but when he got out he saw that it was a huge train of millipedes so thick that it resembled a running wash. He told me exactly where it was too. We stood there for a while longer as the naked old man told me more stories before parting ways. It was a pleasant encounter that took over an hour. That kind of encounter is actually very common in Pinal County Arizona. It's hot. My neighbor built a wooden facade of a western town around his entire yard in a pair of yellow stained tighty whities and flip flops while drinking beer. It took him two years. I've never seen the guy in clothes.
Before I could properly discount the naked detective's story of a river of millipedes I checked out his story. The spot he told me about wasn't very far away. I asked some of the locals that live in that area about seeing millipedes and they told stories of thousands and or even millions of millipedes everywhere. No one could back up his claim of a mass migration of a superpod or a river of millipedes but he did tip me off to the location of another very large superpod and I'm grateful for that.
So far I haven't ran into any invert enthusiasts but locals can still give you good information on what you are looking for just by showing them photographs. Some of the encounters can also be terrifying or terribly strange. People are by far the scariest thing you can find in the desert. This is a story about a strange encounter that led me to the location of a superpod of Orthoporus ornatus.
It was about two weeks ago and I had just collected two S. heros plings under some rocks on the moss covered rocky mountainside I've been visiting pretty frequently. It had been a week since finding any so I was feeling pretty good about the night and packed up early after getting worn out flipping a bunch of big rocks anticipating more. Heading down the mountain pass in my car, as the sun was fading and the orange glow of the sunset was fading to black, I noticed an SUV that had been parked on the side of the dirt road on several other occasions. It was pretty far down the road and the owner was getting inside and packing up whatever he was doing out there. Curiosity begged me to stop and say hello like a cat on its eight life. Sure why not? Actually I had a really creepy encounter with a drunk guy the day before. He just stood there cleaning his gun on his tailgate with headphones in and wouldn't acknowledge me at all. I even honked the horn so he would acknowledge my presence less than ten meters away from him. He didn't even looked up as I turned my vehicle around in front of him. Pretty creepy! Not every encounter is that bad and chances are the guy loading his SUV would be much friendlier than the drunk guy with the gun. Statistically speaking. So I pulled my pistol from its holster and set it on the passenger's seat just in case.
I slowed the car down and the guy gave me the customary nod of acknowledgment that people give around here when they are receptive to an encounter (as opposed to indifference the customary signal for go away). Strange place Arizona. He was pulling out to turn around but stopped when he realized I wanted to talk. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was a professional photographer of sorts and that he liked to take pictures of the sunset. I laughed and accused him of being new to Arizona (every new resident has at least a photo album's worth of sunset photos in a file somewhere). Turns out he was actually born and raised in Arizona and he just really liked photographing the sunset. He was a retired university trained forensic scientist and police officer. After a few minutes of talking I finally decided to tell him what I was really doing (since he wasn't a collector). We were next to my hotspot and I had previously told him that I was looking for tarantulas. Afterall I had two new plings to show off. I pulled the deli's out of the bucket on the seat of my car and asked if he wanted to see them. I warned him that there was a gun on the seat. He laughed and said he had a gun on his seat too and that he didn't mind as long as I didn't mind the fact that he wasn't decent. I knew that he wasn't wearing a shirt already and expected the worst, but sure "I'm alright with that."
He opened the door of his SUV and got out wearing nothing but flip flop sandals and boxer briefs (all bunched up around his butt in a sweaty wad). He was bald with a big beer belly and a long grey moustache and long curly silver hair all over his sweaty chest. He limped over as I opened the car door to illuminate his view. He said he had never seen an S. heros before and pretended to be very impressed. He stopped and said, "Hold on! Wait right here!" He hobbled to the back of his SUV and popped the back open and grabbed a black object and came around the corner. My heart jumped when I saw the outline of a sawed off pump shotgun in the fading sunset. Oh god not again! I hope he just wants to show off his new gun or something. He walked closer and pulled on the barrel and to my amazement it telescoped out. It took a second for my brain to process what I was looking at in the dark. Then he pulled the magazine and it telescoped out, and then a third telescoping part. He spread the legs of the tripod and aimed his camera into the dark and then pressed the shutter. "Click.". He stood there quietly for about thirty seconds and the shutter snapped again. "Click."
He showed me the photograph of the darkening sunset he took with a thirty second exposure, and then a series of shots of cactus and an old barn lit up with a wandering flashlight on a long exposure. As he showed me all this he told me that his mind and memory was starting to go and he couldn't remember what he had taken pictures of before so he had to start new every night taking pictures and then compare them to his old pictures to see if he had photographed something before. He told me about his life and his wife and how she worked in Juvenile corrections. He told me a lot of stuff. When he was about done telling me his life story he repeated that he had never seen a giant centipede before but that he had seen giant millipedes. He said he was out on the beat one night and stopped because there was a wash running across the road. At least that's what he thought it was, but when he got out he saw that it was a huge train of millipedes so thick that it resembled a running wash. He told me exactly where it was too. We stood there for a while longer as the naked old man told me more stories before parting ways. It was a pleasant encounter that took over an hour. That kind of encounter is actually very common in Pinal County Arizona. It's hot. My neighbor built a wooden facade of a western town around his entire yard in a pair of yellow stained tighty whities and flip flops while drinking beer. It took him two years. I've never seen the guy in clothes.
Before I could properly discount the naked detective's story of a river of millipedes I checked out his story. The spot he told me about wasn't very far away. I asked some of the locals that live in that area about seeing millipedes and they told stories of thousands and or even millions of millipedes everywhere. No one could back up his claim of a mass migration of a superpod or a river of millipedes but he did tip me off to the location of another very large superpod and I'm grateful for that.
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