Here is one of the Best BUG Stories I have… well, one of them anyway!
My first ‘official’ very, very cool BUG experience was a field trip to Andros Island in the Bahamas. It was Winter break in 1986. And it was amazing!
One of the most interesting times of the trip was the day we went to Owenstown, the former logging village owned by Owens Illinois. It was then a “ghost town,” abandoned in the early 1960s when the Bahamian government outlawed logging of Bahamian Pine. Bahamian Pine was highly sought due to its natural pest resistance and hardness. Andros Island was an ideal spot to manage shipments of this commodity to the United States as it was the largest land mass in the archipelago, very sparsely populated and the last land before the US mainland. Andros also is engraved with numerous inlets from the ocean they called rivers.
In Owenstown, they had build roads up to the rivers and a small cluster of buildings to house the loggers and the work of shipping the wood. When the logging stopped, the locals scavenged the material Owens Illinois didn’t take with them, and by the time we got there, Nature was scavenging the rest. There were concrete foundations among the remnants of cracked roads and scrub. We were exploring for large centipedes, spiders, crickets and other open area BUGS like that.
There were about seven of us wandering this area in groups of two or three. We had arrived on the back of the pick-up truck we used to get ferried around the island. The plan was to explore for a couple of hours and meet back at the truck around noon for lunch. The habitat (and the classroom introduction to it we had received that morning before heading out) was making me feel a little nervous walking around out there!
We hadn’t been out more than 15 minutes when we heard shouting and noticed our guides back at the truck, waving their arms over their heads to signal us back prematurely! There was a very large, yellow backhoe next to the truck, with a native guy driving it. Clearly, we wanted to know what was going on, but we were hushed and hurried onto the back of the truck.
The big, yellow backhoe led us down the road a short way to a roadblock made from old, wrecked cars, piled three high across the road! As you drive around the island you see wrecked cars along the roadways regularly as they do not have adequate junkyards for them. People’s cars die and they just get out and walk! The backhoe driver used his big shovel to clear the cars on one side so we could pass, replaced the barricade, and returned to the site. We continued on at a fast pace until we came to another, similar roadblock of cars. With no backhoe in sight, we had to figure out how to pass this obstruction. The road fell off to either side into a ditch and it didn’t seem we could just go around. A few of us ended up rocking the cars on the end back and forth until they slid over enough to creep the truck past, nearly toppling it off the road.
Back at the field station, our local guide explained the native man had said two white men gave him $2000 to block the road so nobody got in and nobody got out. Apparently, in the absence of the logging company, the commercial pathways Owens Illinois created were being exploited for the illegal drug trade. Out little entomological expedition had happened upon one of their transfers. It seems they drop ‘cargo’ from low-flying planes (you see crashed fuselages all over the place, too!) into a convenient area like Owenstown and then load it onto boats to smuggle into the United States mainland.
We only got to leave because our guide explained we were only students doing some field research and didn’t know anything about anything. I guess the native man forgot to mention the second pile of cars!
So, I guess this story is more about drugs than it is about BUGS, but it was still a memorable experience!
Share your best BUG Experiences on our Facebook Page!
My first ‘official’ very, very cool BUG experience was a field trip to Andros Island in the Bahamas. It was Winter break in 1986. And it was amazing!
One of the most interesting times of the trip was the day we went to Owenstown, the former logging village owned by Owens Illinois. It was then a “ghost town,” abandoned in the early 1960s when the Bahamian government outlawed logging of Bahamian Pine. Bahamian Pine was highly sought due to its natural pest resistance and hardness. Andros Island was an ideal spot to manage shipments of this commodity to the United States as it was the largest land mass in the archipelago, very sparsely populated and the last land before the US mainland. Andros also is engraved with numerous inlets from the ocean they called rivers.
In Owenstown, they had build roads up to the rivers and a small cluster of buildings to house the loggers and the work of shipping the wood. When the logging stopped, the locals scavenged the material Owens Illinois didn’t take with them, and by the time we got there, Nature was scavenging the rest. There were concrete foundations among the remnants of cracked roads and scrub. We were exploring for large centipedes, spiders, crickets and other open area BUGS like that.
There were about seven of us wandering this area in groups of two or three. We had arrived on the back of the pick-up truck we used to get ferried around the island. The plan was to explore for a couple of hours and meet back at the truck around noon for lunch. The habitat (and the classroom introduction to it we had received that morning before heading out) was making me feel a little nervous walking around out there!
We hadn’t been out more than 15 minutes when we heard shouting and noticed our guides back at the truck, waving their arms over their heads to signal us back prematurely! There was a very large, yellow backhoe next to the truck, with a native guy driving it. Clearly, we wanted to know what was going on, but we were hushed and hurried onto the back of the truck.
The big, yellow backhoe led us down the road a short way to a roadblock made from old, wrecked cars, piled three high across the road! As you drive around the island you see wrecked cars along the roadways regularly as they do not have adequate junkyards for them. People’s cars die and they just get out and walk! The backhoe driver used his big shovel to clear the cars on one side so we could pass, replaced the barricade, and returned to the site. We continued on at a fast pace until we came to another, similar roadblock of cars. With no backhoe in sight, we had to figure out how to pass this obstruction. The road fell off to either side into a ditch and it didn’t seem we could just go around. A few of us ended up rocking the cars on the end back and forth until they slid over enough to creep the truck past, nearly toppling it off the road.
Back at the field station, our local guide explained the native man had said two white men gave him $2000 to block the road so nobody got in and nobody got out. Apparently, in the absence of the logging company, the commercial pathways Owens Illinois created were being exploited for the illegal drug trade. Out little entomological expedition had happened upon one of their transfers. It seems they drop ‘cargo’ from low-flying planes (you see crashed fuselages all over the place, too!) into a convenient area like Owenstown and then load it onto boats to smuggle into the United States mainland.
We only got to leave because our guide explained we were only students doing some field research and didn’t know anything about anything. I guess the native man forgot to mention the second pile of cars!
So, I guess this story is more about drugs than it is about BUGS, but it was still a memorable experience!
Share your best BUG Experiences on our Facebook Page!
