what happened to my old collection

[kevinkk]

Booze and babes.  Be wary of both. My apologies to our female members who I'm sure are very nice. I just used to make bad choices.
Now I'm older and less impulsive.
I had a lot of great stuff that probably couldn't be obtained now, dead stock purchases and caught specimens. In the D.R. I went as a 16 year old,
and was the envy of many in the group, I found papilio pupa around the lodge, some even hatched before the collecting trip was over, I don't recall
the species, there was Prepona, a great longhorn beetle I climbed a roof to get, a monster that looked like Callipogon, many more, all probably dust
by now.
Live and learn.

[trehopr1]

For me, I just kept improving my specimens with time. Whenever, I caught another
something which I had I replaced the older one with a "better" looking and prepared
specimen. I was always on a learning curve with the hobby...

Therefore, I can't say I miss any of my earliest collected material.

However, just (once) my collection had a "mild" dermestid situation occur
and I did lose at least a half dozen things (self caught) which I couldn't
hope to ever replace from my old collecting haunts. All those places are long
gone...

[kevinkk]

My earliest stuff were pinned with sewing needles, so not exactly keepers. I did get a big boost out of a newspaper article about me and
my hobby, which led me to the Lepidopterist's Society, and a local person gave me some homemade display cases and a nice field box with pinning
boards and materials.
My Grandmother hooked me up with someone she knew that had moved to Lesotho South Africa and he sent me a lot of things just out of his yard.
It's amazing how prices have gone up though, I had Dynastes hercules when I was a kid, and Callipogon armillatus, all in excess of 100 bucks nowadays.
Things change, you can't go back and expect to find things the way it was.
I'll probably go back this next spring to my favorite, and somewhat close spots for some night collecting, it'll be interesting because
one area is pretty close to Detroit Lake, Oregon, where the town was just about burned to the ground in wildfires.