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.
I have a shirt of a black panther holding a shotgun.
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.
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.
Plenty evidence of them in the UK, I see no reason they couldn’t be in Florida!
In the wild? Bald Eagle.
If you like eagles, visit Sitka Alaska. They’re as common as pigeons up there.
(Just bigger, and scarier. Have you seen their claws?)
I’m going next summer!
I see them a few times a year in Michigan. They are more common these days.
Had one perch in my yard last summer.
They’re pretty common in the rural areas of Florida.
Yeah that’s probably mine too. I didn’t think about them at first because they’re pretty common around here.
I was watching a bald eagle fishing yesterday from my window. They must have moved in to the area, bay of quinte in Ontario, which is good news for their numbers.
I once saw five different bald eagles on the same day. before that day I’d only ever seen one in my whole life, and I’ve never seen any since despite being in the area all the time.
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.
Tanuki
My buddy is an entomologist and one time I tagged along while he went to collect beatles in the highlands. When we got back to the lab one of the specimens I had collected turned out to be a species that was thought to be extinct in the region and hadn’t been spotted in a very long time. He was wildly jealous
You found Pete Best?
Underrated
I saw my first Praying Mantis yesterday.
those things freak me out
Very weird, this guy seems to have moved into our garage. Just saw it again!
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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.
He’s been eating tourists & paying off the boat owner
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.
Not super rare, but a wolverine
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!
I once got to meet a Tasmanian Devil baby at a zoo. The zookeeper was carrying him around in a little pouch to keep him comfy while his mom was getting a vet checkup. (The picture is one I found on google because the picture I took is buried in some backup folder from about 6 phones ago)
When I saw them in the wild their faces were covered in tumours. Sure would have been cute without those though. I think our tour guide might have said it was due to intra floral/fauna contamination between species like these who were historically isolated.
A lot of “tumors” seen on wild animals are fungal infections from invasive fungal species brought by humans. It really sucks because fungal infections are very hard for mammalian immune systems to fight without help from antifungal medications.
In this case it is a form of Transmissible Cancer.
That is a deeply unfortunate genetic mutation. As if life weren’t hard enough for them already.
Tasmanian devils are unique in that they have a cancer that can be transmitted from host to host.
Humans kind of have that with HPV. Get your vaccines!
I was at the old job, staring mournfully out the window at the world free of this drudgery, and - lo and behold - I see a black weasel-like animal galumph into view and disappear down a breezeway.
I couldn’t believe my eyes, as this was on Vancouver Island where we have no black weasels.
I looked it up, and apparently there were some mink farms in the area, and they shut down due to one or more problems, so now there’s a resilient invasive mink population up near Camosun and the old Insane Asylum.
Not sure how rare they are, but I’ve seen wild crested caracaras a few times.
No idea. But if I were to randomly guess, I’d say it was a bison during their endangered days.
There was an albino red fox that lived on a golf course near where I work, I I would see it running along the fence about once a week.
Recently caught a firefly for a few seconds to relive my childhood of catching jars full of them as a night light. I let him go, and was sad that he was so alone; there were only a few flashes in a field where I used to see thousands…
