PREFACE
Counting this Preface and Introduction, there are ten sections to this post. Each may be accessed with the tabs at the top of every page. The first four were necessarily part of this project when it was conceived. The last six should be considered preliminary investigations, as they took advantage of data not assembled for that purpose. I do not doubt the results, but they will need a more considered approach to be conclusive.
Although what I have written here and elsewhere might suggest I am displeased with cachers and caching, I want to state that is not the case. There are segments of every demographic who cheerfully exploit the best intentions of others. By its semi-secretive nature, the efforts of serious geocaching practitioners are low-hanging fruit for others who, in the absence of consequences, are inclined to behave badly. I am simply measuring the behavior as it occurs.
There are hundreds of cachers who have visited my containers, and thousands who have handled my trackables. Since I read all my logs, I recognize the caching names of the best of them. They provide timely logs and replace containers as found because it is the right thing to do. You know who you are...thank you. shellbadger--March, 2021
Counting this Preface and Introduction, there are ten sections to this post. Each may be accessed with the tabs at the top of every page. The first four were necessarily part of this project when it was conceived. The last six should be considered preliminary investigations, as they took advantage of data not assembled for that purpose. I do not doubt the results, but they will need a more considered approach to be conclusive.
Although what I have written here and elsewhere might suggest I am displeased with cachers and caching, I want to state that is not the case. There are segments of every demographic who cheerfully exploit the best intentions of others. By its semi-secretive nature, the efforts of serious geocaching practitioners are low-hanging fruit for others who, in the absence of consequences, are inclined to behave badly. I am simply measuring the behavior as it occurs.
There are hundreds of cachers who have visited my containers, and thousands who have handled my trackables. Since I read all my logs, I recognize the caching names of the best of them. They provide timely logs and replace containers as found because it is the right thing to do. You know who you are...thank you. shellbadger--March, 2021
INTRODUCTION
The serendipity of trackable travel is one of the things that fuels my interest in geocaching. I get a rush when I see one of my bugs has made it to Tasmania, Lichtenstein, Bolivia or the Seychelles after having been released near the small West Texas towns of Gail, Post, Turkey or Tulia.
One of my favorite trackable journeys is from my Art series and is neither the oldest nor the most-moved of my trackables, but it is still active. TB7F101, Hokusai’s Great Wave, was taken by a Swiss cacher to a museum for the 19th century artist in Tokyo, Japan. The image at right was taken in the gift shop. That travel bug had been placed in a roadside container near the ghost-town of Clairemont, in August of 2016. As of 13-Dec-20, it had survived for 4.4 years and had been moved by 27 cachers, for a very good average drop-interval of 59 days. Besides the United States, Switzerland and Japan, the bug has also visited Mexico, Jamaica, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, and France.
The serendipity of trackable travel is one of the things that fuels my interest in geocaching. I get a rush when I see one of my bugs has made it to Tasmania, Lichtenstein, Bolivia or the Seychelles after having been released near the small West Texas towns of Gail, Post, Turkey or Tulia.
One of my favorite trackable journeys is from my Art series and is neither the oldest nor the most-moved of my trackables, but it is still active. TB7F101, Hokusai’s Great Wave, was taken by a Swiss cacher to a museum for the 19th century artist in Tokyo, Japan. The image at right was taken in the gift shop. That travel bug had been placed in a roadside container near the ghost-town of Clairemont, in August of 2016. As of 13-Dec-20, it had survived for 4.4 years and had been moved by 27 cachers, for a very good average drop-interval of 59 days. Besides the United States, Switzerland and Japan, the bug has also visited Mexico, Jamaica, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, and France.
One of my oldest travel bugs (TB40CX0) is a keychain pendant from my WW II series. It came from the Silent Wings museum which commemorates the gliders and their pilots who ferried troops behind enemy lines on D-Day. The pendant was released near Harlingen in April of 2011. It has been moved by 48 cachers and has visited such disparate places as Iceland and Sri Lanka. The image at right shows the TB in the Mierlo War Cemetery, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands. The bug has been in the hands of an Austrian cacher since April 2019. At this writing, we are still a month short of a year, but once that time has passed without a log, the probability the bug will show up again is firmly in the diminishing single-digit percentile. It is especially sad for me to see a bug with this history drop out of circulation.
Another interesting story involves two trackables (TB55RXY, TB4XYFJ) released separately near Dickens and Guthrie in 2012 and 2013. The image at right shows two long-time best friends who live in California and sometimes meet to hike and cache together. On this occasion, in Arizona, in November of 2014, they discovered they had each brought a trackable from my Love Bug series to their meeting....they had independently picked them up in Arizona and Ohio. Best friends retrieving a heart-shaped travel bug from the same owner…what are the odds? They later dropped both bugs in the same cache in California. The blue bug on the left made 17 drops before it went missing in Nevada, never having left the US; the gold one on the right went missing in Norway, in 2017, also after 17 drops.
However, as rewarding as these events are, they are exceedingly rare. It is frustrating in the extreme that so few of my trackables get out of Texas, much less the United States. Despite making multiple changes in construction and re-editing of the mission statements, I have been unable to improve overall survivorship among my trackables. It is probably not necessary to state it, but every one of my trackables is marked as not collectible.
It has taken years, but I have finally accepted that the fate of my bugs is completely in the hands of mostly-anonymous others. All I can do is prepare my trackables as though they must last for years of handling by many cachers. It is a task undertaken with the certain knowledge that half the bugs won’t survive even one year, won't survive handling by as many as six cachers, and that 10-13% will disappear after each release (see here). That said, I also know a handful of my trackables are 10+ years old and others have been moved by 60+ cachers. So, I just keep on keeping on, dwelling on the successes.
My catalog has basic information (numbers, dates, locations) for every one of my released trackables, starting in 2010. The total number of those releases is finite and I follow the activity of every one of them. However, except for that first year, when I still believed all my bugs had a future, I have never known how many of them are active at any one time. So, ignoring the high attrition rate among most of them, countered by the improbable endurance of a select few, I thought I would try to obtain an estimate at the end of 2020.
It has taken years, but I have finally accepted that the fate of my bugs is completely in the hands of mostly-anonymous others. All I can do is prepare my trackables as though they must last for years of handling by many cachers. It is a task undertaken with the certain knowledge that half the bugs won’t survive even one year, won't survive handling by as many as six cachers, and that 10-13% will disappear after each release (see here). That said, I also know a handful of my trackables are 10+ years old and others have been moved by 60+ cachers. So, I just keep on keeping on, dwelling on the successes.
My catalog has basic information (numbers, dates, locations) for every one of my released trackables, starting in 2010. The total number of those releases is finite and I follow the activity of every one of them. However, except for that first year, when I still believed all my bugs had a future, I have never known how many of them are active at any one time. So, ignoring the high attrition rate among most of them, countered by the improbable endurance of a select few, I thought I would try to obtain an estimate at the end of 2020.