It’s been a lot of years since I’ve been anywhere with wild animals …. But I live in an urban area and am amazed by how regularly i see coyotes. I’m used to thinking of rats, pigeons, and squirrels as adjusted to city life, but I guess coyotes are becoming so too
Before that, maybe i saw a right whale on a long ago whale watch?
That really bad taxidermy lion that was / is a meme.
Endangered Monk seal when I was snorkeling in Hawaii. Dude was just suddenly there! Saw sea turtles and plenty of fish. Like some finding Nemo shit.
Wild turkey.
Probably my cat. There’s only one of her.
Probably a mole. Not rare in itself, but as they mainly chill in their caves, seeing one by just walking on an official track in a forest is probably relatively rare. The cute fella just stuck his head out, and before I couldn’t really react, he apparently already heard me and vanished again.
This goes back to around 2000. Snake hunting in the Everglades middle of the night, my friend and I saw a black panther. I know, I know, impossible, Florida doesn’t have them etc etc etc. we both saw it clear as in a zoo in the floodlights of his truck. 100% big cat, 100% black.
Me and a bunch of guys saw a lynx at a remote airstrip in western Australia.
I remember driving around Florida and seeing a sign with a panther on it. It might have said panther crossing or it just implied it. Wish I could remember where it was.
Plenty evidence of them in the UK, I see no reason they couldn’t be in Florida!
I saw a big white owl. It looks like as tall as a toddler. Then it flew away before I can even react.
A wolverine. A kamoshika.
My buddy is an entomologist and one time I tagged along while he went to collect beatles in the highlands. When we got back to the lab one of the specimens I had collected turned out to be a species that was thought to be extinct in the region and hadn’t been spotted in a very long time. He was wildly jealous
You found Pete Best?
Underrated
Not super rare, but a wolverine
Quokka on Rottnest Island (Western Australia)?
Followed by trying to stop fuckwits from playing “quokka soccer”. 🤭
I’m big into (responsible) nature tourism and I believe Mountain gorillas are the most rare. Black rhinos are also pretty critically endangered but there’s successful breeding programs at zoos for them so I would think they’re less threatened.
I went to the Galapagos once and some of the islands have some very rare species. But their habitat is protected and isolated so it’s not like endangered species that are threatened by habitat loss or war or whatever.
Not sure how rare they are, but I’ve seen wild crested caracaras a few times.
If we’re including captive animals, the one that stands out the most to me is a Chaco Owl. It’s not considered endangered yet, but it’s only found in one particular area of the world, at the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina.
In the wild, I’ve come across porcupines on a few occasions, and I almost had a fisher cat run up my leg. I didn’t know we even had them in my state, so I was very freaked out as to what this long, furry thing coming at me was. I wish I had maintained my composure so I could have gotten a better look at it, but it’s also the kind of thing in glad we figured out what each other was before I was in biting range!
