My cat is a very special boy and there's no other cat like him. Does that count?
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Only if you named her Kat. So i could call it Kit's kat.
...I'm just now realizing that I've missed an incredible opportunity.
I'll allow it.
Polar Bear on the Hudson Bay coast in northern Ontario.
I'm Indigenous and I've gone hunting and trapping with my relatives a few times in my life. On one of those trips we happened on a polar bear on the mud flats of the bay during the late autumn. We drove by in our freighter canoe (a very large oversized canoe with a 60 HP outboard motor) and the bear swam near us and then walked by a few hundred feet away. It wasn't afraid but we were. We watched for a while and then fired rifle shot into the mud next to it to scare it away. From the moment it started to run to the point it disappeared as a speck on the horizon was about a minute or two. I went up later to look at the prints and the clay mud looked like a tractor had driven over it. I couldn't believe how fast it could move on the mud. I quickly sank in my boots and could barely walk around.
One paw print was about the size of my head. I never left camp without someone nearby or a rifle in my hands.
I'm told that the time it takes a polar bear to discover, stalk, hunt, kill and partially devour you is on the order of 10 minutes.
Most people do not survive a polar bear passing them in the bush.
I guess nobody can tell how big they are from photos. There's never someone standing next to them for comparison.
Seriously! They're the biggest land carnivores bar none. If you're 5' - 5'6" a bigger polar bear will be able to look you levelly in the eye while on all fours* and on its hind legs, it'll be more than half your height again.
*survivability of said staring contest is low
Probably a TakahΔ in New Zealand but in captivity.
In the wild I've seen kiwi, kea, KΔkΔ. I took a trip to mana island in the late 90's, the kiwi were just wandering around during the day.....
I've never seen the takahΔ.
I too saw a kea in the wild near the Milford Sound! Sadly I didn't see any of the others in the wild. The takahΔ was also in Zealandia.
I saw takahΔ 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 takahΔ 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.
I petted and fed hay to the last male northern white rhino in Kenya some years ago.
He's dead now and the remaining two females will likely die without giving birth and the species will go extinct :-(
It's both cool and sad that you could interact and give witness to a species before its inevitable collapse.
Mainly sad.
Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal--pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.
I traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet, drove hours on dirt roads, hiked another hour through deafening wind, and then crawled on my stomach to the edge of a a 1300' cliff, and hung off of it it just to take a picture of a puffin with my cell phone.
Coulda just flew to Oregon for that one lol. You can catch them up on haystack rock.
I bet it was still an awesome experience you had none the less.
Those are the angry looking puffins, not the cute ones.
Uhh, in the wild? I've seen some pretty uncommon wetland birds a number of times. Some pretty weird bugs too, although it's hard to say what they were.
I've seen big moose really up close, and that was epic, and would have been terrifying if there wasn't usually a car-stopping amount of wood between us. They're not rare, though, just shy.
In December '94 I was running through Banff at a speed that was ridiculous for winter driving even before we consider it was a white '91 geo metro and 1am in a snowstorm.
And there it was. But, night-zoned and lulled by the hyperspace homage in snowflakes lit by the headlights, the first thing I saw was just a series of knees.
"Oh fuckfuckfuck," said my brain to itself as I executed a classic Moose Check maneuvre at an ungodly rate of speed in absolutely unsuitable conditions, missing the moose by a distance smaller than the amount of caring our conservative political candidate really has for the plebes he wants to manage for fun and profit.
After an interminable series of fishtails from trying to straighten up after going nearly sideways on the slippery roads in the blizzardy dark in a frightenly remote part of the highways, in a car that wouldn't be seen in the ditch or ravine by searchers or passers-by until some later Spring, I managed through luck and wordless appeals to a capricious god to straighten the attitude of the car and keep it on the roadway.
And my future wife woke up in the passenger seat and asked what was going on, sleepily wondering why the turns are so sharp and why I'm cursing.
"It's fine; but I saw a moose back there. Really close, too!"
In captivity: probably red wolves, or some critically endangered birds at the National Aviary.
In the wild: probably some plants endemic to Catalina Island.
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.
A dik-dik. It's a species of deer that is slightly larger than a house cat or maybe a medium size dog. It was super adorable but a bit uncanny feeling lol.
Giant Panda and Red Panda maybe.
A live cow
There was a stray firefly at my house one night. Like, singular. We're not even near their habitat, so I don't know what's up with that.
A wild beaver like a few miles from my house, and not a nutria, a real life flat-tailed beaver toothed fucking beaver. I was going to an artificial dam I use as a fishing spot and there he was. It was way bigger than I thought but I didn't want to disturb it so I turned around and went home.
In captivity? An Okapi? A rhino? Idk man I've been to many zoos and exotic zoos where you drive through and idk about the rarest.
I saw a numbat at the zoo. Very rare, almost extinct, pretty skittish so even if you do go to their exhibit they're often hiding from everyone
Wolverine.
I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
I saw a lynx cat in th3 backyard of a place I was staying at in Washington it was very cool.
A panda at Singapore zoo.
California condor at Big Sur
Either a black stork, a least weasel (actually pretty common, but difficult auf to see around here), Cerambyx cerdo (probably not as rare as most regulating bodies think), a Eurasian eagle owl (rare around Germany) or felis silvestris
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.
Saw a fishercat in an industrial area not far from a large swath of floodplain and high voltage transmission lines. So there was a lot of territory for it nearby. Looks like a tall badger. Apparently pretty rare. Was walking around 18 wheeler trucks in motion like it owned the place, peeking around the dumpsters most likely looking for the young raccoons that hang around.
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.
Outside of a zoo, maybe American Avocet or Painted Bunting
Tarsier
I was quite lucky to see an i'iwi when I went to Kaua'i Hawai'i. Unfortunately only a couple hundred left because of avian malaria.
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.
Your dad
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.