cool!

So, this morning I went to a beautiful piece of prairie to the southwest of Chicago, in the largest roadless area left in Illinois. The plants were super-abundant, and the man I was working with is an awesome guy, a professor of biology at a local college who is trying to make a former parking lot into 2 acres of prairie - that is a *hard* task!!!
When we finished monitoring, we were sitting at the side of the road we came in on, near the entrance to our prairie as well as the entrance to the woods. While we were sitting there, two four-wheelers came out of the woods, each with a driver dressed entirely in camouflage. Each driver had a big belt with lots of tools on it, including a pistol. They were government guys, and each one had a huge bundle of plants on the back of his vehicle. My first guess was marijuana, then I thought, no, it can't be - this seems so unlikely, and that is a *lot*. Then we both looked closer, and, yes, indeed, they were in the midst of a drug bust, taking someone's pot crop out of the woods. The steward I was working with told me that happens frequently in those woods - it's just such a vast tract of land that it's not too hard to grow things unnoticed, but now the authorities are onto them, so it's more difficult to make it to harvest.
It was something different for my field day, anyway.