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 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
My cat is a very special boy and there’s no other cat like him. Does that count?
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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
In the wild I’ve seen kiwi, kea, Kākā. 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 takahē.
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 takahē was also in Zealandia.
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.
In captivity: probably red wolves, or some critically endangered birds at the National Aviary.
In the wild: probably some plants endemic to Catalina Island.
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.
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 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.
I saw a lynx cat in th3 backyard of a place I was staying at in Washington it was very cool.
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
Wolverine.
Giant Panda and Red Panda maybe.
