Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal–pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.
Probably a Takahē in New Zealand but in captivity.
I saw takahē in captivity too, in Zealandia. You can sort of see why they almost went extinct - their big defence move is to sit reeeeally still. Big silly chooks.
Yeah I saw the takahē in Zealandia and one other zoo. Would have been cool to see in the wild if possible in the preservation areas the have.
I’m happy just to know they’re there, living their lives.
Giant Panda and Red Panda maybe.
A live cow
I got a brief but good look at a wild Jaguarundi in south Texas nearly twenty years ago. I thought it was a bobcat at first, but it turned so I could see its tail and profile, and there was no mistaking it.
Wolverine.
Outside of a zoo, maybe American Avocet or Painted Bunting
In the wild: Florida scrub jay. key deer. carracarra. Indigo racer. I don’t know how to determine what is rarest. There are a lot I have seen.
Tarsier
Panay monitor lizard.
My buddy was trapping monitor lizards for us to eat and we caught one of those. He recognized it and told me that they were endangered.
We did NOT eat it. It went back into the forest, unharmed.
I saw a lynx cat in th3 backyard of a place I was staying at in Washington it was very cool.
Well that need the disclaimers of “outside a zoo” and “of which i was aware of”, but probably Hummingbird hawk-moth, it might not be very rare, but i was like “wtf a hummingbird in Poland?” and i managed to get close enough to see it’s in fact a moth.
About a year ago my wife and I did a zoo date and when we got out of the car there was this bird walking around the parking lot. Not sure what kind of bird, flew off after like a minute but I thought it looked really cool.
