I have not one, but 2 (two) Leatherman multipurpose tools (y’know, the pliers/pocketknife/etc combo) that I didn’t pay for. One was laying in the street in front of my house. The other one was under a chair in a riverside vacation cabin. Both were in like-new condition. 
Anybody else?
I found a $20 bill once lying in the snow. It was near MSU, so at first I thought it was some one’s pyschology experiment.
I also once found a girls high school class ring, about 80 miles away from the high school in question. My son (who was about 5 at the time) was with me, and he asked me what I was going to do with it, I told him that I was going to try to locate the owner. I found the owner, and sent the ring back.
about 2 weeks later, I got a phone call from some one who asked me if I knew 2 people, then named by Grandpa and Grandma. Yep. I said. The person had found a gold medallion that I’d dropped out of my purse that commemorated their 50th wedding anniversary. Unrelated events, but still cool lesson for my kid.
It’s an old wine bottle. I found it in my parents’ back yard when they were having some landscaping done. it’s a beautiful light green shade with grape vines and grape clusters adorning the sides. On the bottom is a date 1931 and the bottler was a place about 40 miles north of my parents’ town.
What I found really neat is the fact that now the bottling town has an “exclusive” resort by the same name as the wine.
That same week, I also found an old glass inkwell, also light green glass. I can imagine the stories behind these items.
(I admit it. I’m a scavenger in the big sea of life.) 
Timberland hats seem to have the strange ability to appear in perfect condition on the side of the road. A couple of weeks ago, i was biking to a bar with a friend of mine. While stopped at a light, we noticed a floppy, fisherman’s-type hat lying on the side of the road and bearing the Timberland logo. With no one else around, my friend picked it up and put it in her bag. Then just this past Saturday, while riding to the park, i found a knit wool cap, also Timberland, just lying there. This one even had the price tag still on it. Since it was starting to get cold and i was looking for such a hat anyway, i considered it a lucky find. 
Perhaps you live downwind from the Timberland Hat Orchard ™.
Gunslinger you lucky so-and so. My best finds are a 2AA-cell Maglite and a Snap-on 3/8" drive 10mm socket. I’m still looking.
Zyzz: Maybe convertible/Jeep Wrangler drivers wear Timberland hats?
When I took up bicycling, I noticed certain things in profusion that were unnoticable while riding in a car:
[list][li]roadkill[/li][li]used condoms[/li][li]cans and bottles of booze (full)[/li][li]clothing (especially footwear)[/li]
The amount of roadkill, in particular, is amazing.
Nothing particularly useful except for the booze, but I think a furrier could make a nice living from the dead animals.
One time I found a beautiful piece of round sandstone, about 3 inches thick, and 6-8 inches in diameter.
Perfectly preserved in the centre of the sandstone (not artificial) was a pawprint from what appeared to be some sort of larger cat, possible the size of a cougar.
Also, when our town was expanding a mass-transit route near our house and had been digging up the rock in the area, there was an abundance of fossils to be found. Some were so large and striking, that you could spot them while walking along the sidewalk beside the area. The fossils are in some sort of dark, sheet-type rock, and look like some sort of proto-clam. Whatever they are, they are no longer living on earth, and were living at a time long long ago when my city was once under water. That’s cool.
But the most unusual find ever, happened a few years ago:
I used to have this tall thin orange-handled screwdriver, and it worked on almost all types of screws Philips, flat, Robertson, some star types, you name it. It was wonderful. Anyways, I lost it when I was younger, and living in a different province.
So one day, in a completely different province, my wife and I come back home from an outing, and when we open the door, there it is: the orange-handled screwdriver, missing for years, inexplicably resting on the kitchen counter. To this day, neither of us has any idea where in hell it came from. We like to make up funny stories about it getting lonely, and hitchhiking across Canada to finally find me again. We were going to make a comedy “documentary” of it’s experiences. You know, it could be hitchhiking, with a little sign saying “Ottawa” on it, and have a car drive by and kick up dust on it, and then show it holding a little sign saying “Screw You!” That would have been a scream, but we don’t have a camcorder…
While I was foreman for the restoration of an Edwardian home, I was spotting the bobcat operator to make sure he didn’t dig out critical foundation parts and the like. In one corner as he excavated, out came some old metal screw top beer “bottles” and the real prize, a perfect condition amber glass bottle with the words SANI-CHLOR indented into the shoulder of the flask. It was bottled up in San Francisco and contained a quart of household bleach. It now rests in my collection.
Needless to say, the owners of the house were very eager to take possession of it. So a few months later, in a thrift shop, I found an identical one for a couple of bucks and gave them that one instead.
Being a scavenger since I was a kid and always having the habit of looking down frequently when I walk, I’ve found a few things, like;
A small diamond ring on a dirt road.
An industrial drill on same dirt road.
A glass fishing float on the beach.
A big aluminum net float on the beach.
Two professional fish traps washed ashore on two different river islands after a storm.
The casing of a fighter jet night flare washed ashore.
A genuine 1950s A&W rootbeer heavy glass mug!
A strange S shaped nail puller from sometime in the 1920s.
A set of binoculars.
A hand ax.
A $10 bill.
A 1930s ferry tug. (It was imbedded in the sand in the middle of a mangrove thicket by the remains of an old ferry dock abandoned sometime before I was born. Pretty much still intact, but someone, years ago, had cut open the hull and salvaged the engine and anything worth anything.) I left it there.
A whole bunch of old medicine bottles (over the counter type) in an abandoned house with part of the roof caved in.
A fossilized animal tooth.
**That’s ** where it ended up??? ok, now can I have it back???
Outside of the small central Texas town of Granbury, there is a place called Comanche Peak. It is a large mesa or elevated flat topped hill, in the middle of a realativly flat area. Back in the old west days, the Comanche Indians hung out on top of the mesa as they could see for miles in every direction. (hence the name)
Comanche Peak was privately owned, and very few people got to go up there (may still be, I don’t know). When I was in high school in the early 80s our Young Life group got to have a cookout on the top of the Peak. Boys being boys, we decided to go look around. We found a gorge that had been carved out of the rock by a long since dried up creek. At the top of the gorge, on the top of a high mesa in central Texas, we found a fossilized sand dollar.
A friend snagged it, but it was amazing to find a sea creature in such a remote location. I hope he still has it.
Found $20 in fives and singles rolled up and lying in the upper corner of the escalator at the mall once.
Found a guitar pick with a hole in it in front of Wal*Mart; I now wear it on a ball-chain necklace.
Found a pair of leather gloves with holes over the knuckles in the supermarket parking lot. I wear them for driving gloves.
Found a cigarette lighter with The Rock on it in the mall a few weeks ago.
That’s funny.I found one of those as well, only mine is a Gerber. Oddly I found it in my apartment, so I reasonably figured it belonged to somebody I knew who had visited my place. But when I asked around, nobody claimed it. So I’ve still got it, and I use it often (especially the screwdrivers).
Back in my nondrinking days in the late 1980s I used to have a great time going around nightclubs I went to with my friends and collect stuff off the floor that drunks dropped and forgot. I had a deal with the doorman, who was a good friend of mine: if no one claimed the stuff in a reasonable amount of time, I got to keep it. In this way I found:
$120 cash rolled up in a wad (actually, as a desparately broke student at the time, I didn’t mention that to the doorman)
A black leather sash-type belt
Two 24K gold rings
Several turquoise rings and bracelets
A nice pewter flask
Three butterfly knives, two Swiss Army knives, and a crappy switchblade
Two laminated backstage passes that are now highly coveted by rock memorabilia collectors
Tons of guitar picks and drumsticks
Studded leather wristlets galore (did I mention this was a Metal club?)
And of course at least five or six bucks worth of quarters and dollar bills each night.
Ah, those were the days! Now I’m one of the drunks who goes around dropping stuff - maybe there’s something to this karma thing after all!?
I found the ticket book of a fish and game warden on my way out of the fishing hole…after he had written me up for a bogus (in my opinion) charge. He’d apparantly put it on top of his vehicle as he was getting in and forgot about it. It’s been 10 years or so ago now and I still haven’t made it to court. I have gotten a lot of use out of the metal folder (tatum) over the years.
ooohhh…i WISH I had a scanner! I found a picture of someone once on my friend’s front lawn. No one in his family knew who it was. None of his neighbours knew, either (he only has two, cuz he lives out in the boonies…). So we can’t figure out how the picture got there, and we don’t know who it is. I still have the pic, and occasionally show it to random people and ask them if they know who it is. If I had a scanner, I’d ask all of you, too!!
I always wanted to put up a website saying
“Have you seen this man?
:
:
:
Can you tell us who he is?”