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.
Saw a hulking Florida Panther on a lonely creek in NW FL. Wikipedia says there’s only a small population in the very south.
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.
A bobcat. It casually sauntered through the neigborhood and hung out at a local park. I watched it for about five minutes from about 30 feet away.
Not super rare, but a wolverine
No idea. But if I were to randomly guess, I’d say it was a bison during their endangered days.
For me it has to be an Arctic Blue Fox. Saw several on a trip to the Aleutian Islands. Not really rare or endangered, but as someone who lives well south of their territory it was certainly a rare thing for me.
Quokka on Rottnest Island (Western Australia)?
Followed by trying to stop fuckwits from playing “quokka soccer”. 🤭
Red squirrel
Polar Bear this year in Southern Greenland
Did you poop your pants and play dead?
I was on a boat, about 10 meters away. It’s actually illegal to be closer than 250m but try telling that to a Greenlandic skipper who wants to show you something that even locals have rarely seen.
He sure is a chonky boi.
I feel like the water and ten meters are not a large enough barrier for me, but that is a cool picture
Yeah, it really wasn’t. OK the skipper was experienced, but that could have gone sideways very quickly I feel.
Probably my cat. There’s only one of her.
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.
Captive animals, I’ve seen countless exotic animals. Wild animals are a cooler experience.
A wild black bear in the northern Lower Peninsula.
A loggerhead sea turtle in Calibogue Sound.
A baby Atlantic bottle nose dolphin riding waves at a beach in South Carolina.
I saw a group of 25k redhead ducks together floating on Lake St. Clair in 2022.
Not rare animals, but the sight was. I saw a bull shark eat a sea gull that was floating on the water.
I also saw a dead alligator that was bloating up from rot get stuck on the bow of a boat on the Savannah river. A guy tried to kick it off and his foot went through it and it was the most putrid thing I’ve ever seen.
Little blue heron. Not so much rare but very rarely seen here.
Kemps Ripley sea turtles
When I was a kid, on a trip to Paris, I went to the zoo, and the highlight of the whole trip was seeing an Aldabra giant tortoise (listed as vulnerable by IUCN). Now, even when this was 1990, I was still like “ooooooo cool turt”. I didn’t expect the buddy to jump around and munch pizza. Just a tortoise doing tortoise things slowly.
(The other highlight of the trip was seeing a public Minitel terminal. Holy shit guys, we were only mildly approaching that level in Finland.)
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!
