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.
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.
A quetzal in the rainforest of Panama.
Wolverine.
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.
Outside of a zoo, maybe American Avocet or Painted Bunting
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.
Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal–pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.
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’ll allow it.
Tarsier
Probably a Takahē in New Zealand but in captivity.
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 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 live cow
