On a cruise in Alaska I was up on the deck enjoying some hot chocolate when a whale surfaced not a hundred feet from the ship, blew, and flipped its tail at me. Awesome. But, we were told there might be whales in this particular part of the water and to keep an eye out, so that might violate the OP.
Completely accidentally, I’ve seen many an alligator from a boat, but that isn’t very exotic. Saw a red shouldered hawk take a rabbit not ten feet from where I was standing, but also that’s not very exotic.
ETA - oh, also on a boat in Hawaii I saw a lot of stuff, but notably a huge sea turtle. Then again, we were there to see the wildlife.
Since I used to work for the New Zealand Wildlife Service, I’ve had quite a few exotic encounters. My favorite is the Kakapo, a large, green, flightless, nocturnal parrot.
I was working on an offshore island refuge, Little Barrier Island, in the early 1980s when the decision was made to transfer many of the surviving ones from elsewhere in New Zealand there. At the time there were only about 50, including only 10 females.
I got to handle about 10% of the world population. When helicopters arrived with birds to be released, I and others carried them up into the forest in burlap sacks and let them go.
I only saw a few after release. Once we were doing a survey during their breeding season to see if they were giving their booming courtship calls. I camped out at night and listened from a high lookout point on the island. A male came shuffling along, climbed a tree, and began calling between me and my tent. I waited for hours before I decided I wouldn’t spook him by sneaking past him and going to bed.
Another time the rest of the crew were out all day searching for a bird whose radio transmitter had died, while I stayed back at the cabin. We had just dug a new six-foot-deep rubbish pit because the old one was full. When I went out to throw out the trash, lo and behold there was our sought-for bird trapped in the pit!
I also went on trips looking for them in the Tutuko Valley and other high valleys of the Southern Alps and also on Stewart Island off the south tip of the South Island. I heard a few, but never got to see any others.
Golden Eagle, Caribou (Lake of the Woods, Canada), camels (Morocco), and even a bird crane of some kind growing up back home in the Midwest - nearly ran my car off the road, as that was always very very unusual back there. Sorry, not much backstory to those - just animals I saw whilst traveling.
Gee. It depends where and when. It also depends on what you consider exotic. In Panama I encountered sloths, caymans, bushmasters, fer de lance and one jaguar (fortunately he wasn’t interested in me).
In California, a mountain lion and red tail hawk - both in my back yard. I’ve also seen coyotes and deer here (but not in my yard). And gators in Florida.
Encountered a Tarantula while hiking in Utah. I was my my arachnophobic then-girlfriend. To my surprise and delight, she didn’t freak out, but was amazed. “It’s so graceful!” she said, watching it walk with eight co-ordinated legs.
A friend found a Star-Nosed Mole at Boy Scout Camp in New Jersey.
I’ve seen large monitor lizards, cobras and elephants. And that’s just in the road behind my office in Bangkok.
Outside that, there was that whale shark in the Andaman sea, it was in a dive trip but it’s always a chance encounter with this animals. Gigantic bats in the Similan islands and the ultra rare and on it’s way to extinction Irrawady dolphin in the Mekong river. It’s estimated that there are less than 100 left so I’d say that tops it on the exotic list for me.
We have one of the mated pairs of bald eaglesin Connecticut in our woods. We are about 2 and a half miles from a small lake, but we think they like the fact we don’t begrudge them an occasional chicken in the winter, and we are a patch of about 80 acres of hardwoods and scattered pines, with fairly good hunting.
We did have a pileated woodpecker that suffered a mysterious accident in the second week of it’s pounding on the cedar siding on the house at the head of my bed during the days I was working night shift. I am sure that some critter in the woods found and recycled the body as food in the grand cycle of life. Worst case of birdy suicide I ever saw.
If by ‘encountered’ you DON’T mean “Viewed from a distance”, then I have to leave out the bears and elk and deer, and go with the fox I got to follow me around a little bit at Redfish Lake. The fox was obviously scavenging campsites <it was off-season> but wasn’t about to let anyone get near it. So…I ignored it, hunkered down in the sand like I had something cool, and started tossing sand around like I was burying something. It worked Cute little git.
I am not going to count innumerable snakes and frogs that used to get into the house, or the nutria, raccoons and possums that have wandered through my neighborhoods. Not counting spiders, either. Or birds; eagles in Alaska aren’t quite as regal as one might think, at least not in spring
I see several types of woodpeckers and racoons all the time, deer, possum, and porcupine fairly often too, so exotic really does depend on where you live, doesn’t it?
I saw an ermine on my road, and I thought it was exotic (or a hallucination) but it turns out that they’re NH natives. Oh well. They are so much smaller than I thought - barely chipmunk size when I figured them for ferret size.
Probably the most exotic animal I encountered would be Barrow’s Goldeneye, which is from the west coast of the US and eastern Canada; probably our visitors were from the Canadian branch of the family. A few hung around where I worked (the property was surrounded by an estuary) before going on their way.
Ten years ago this week. There’s a 0.000001% chance I saw an Ivory Billed Woodpecker on a longleaf pine in our front yard after a massive snowfall affected the woods behind us. The 99.999999% chance, of course, is that it was a Pileated Woodpecker, which would be a unique experience for me by itself.
I forgot another one - when I was learning to sail a schooner in Maine, one day a young seal swum along in our wake for a good hour. I’d never seen one of those actually in the water outside of a zoo.
Bald eagles aren’t all that exotic in the South Carolina swamps, but once we were in a boat and watching the Majestic Bald Eagle carrying a stick to its nest over our heads. Then the stick moved. There were some very snake-averse people in the boat.
Back about 1979, I was out riding my horse alone on the trails thru the woods behind the barn I boarded at in southern Indiana. I heard crashing coming thru the trees to my left, and I stopped the horse, assuming it was one of the many deer.
It wasn’t. A terrified rabbit came racing out of the underbrush, across the trail about 20 feet in front of me. Hot on the rabbit’s tail was a bobcat.
The cat came to a dead halt there on the trail right in front of me. My horse was tense but stood motionless. The bobcat didn’t move, just stood, staring at us for a good 20-30 seconds, then flipped his tail at us and stalked back into the woods.
When I got back to the barn, I was telling EVERYbody… and no one believed me. They all insisted it was just a stray dog I had seen. But I know the difference between a dog and a bobcat. I was pretty close to him/her, it stopped motionless. I got a GOOD look at it. I sure wish I had had a camera with me.
I have had a couple run ins with Black Bears. One ran right in front of me and I jumped into my bf’s arms. The other one was on a mountain where we were eating lunch and my bf had to shoot the gun to get him to take off. I have also taken off from the toll booth and had a Moose galloping along side my car. That was sure strange. Luckily he ran into the woods because they can do a lot of damage. They are bigger then a Quarter horse. My son and I got attacked by a huge white Owl coming down a mountain path. It kept dive bombing us and scared me half to death.
My fav though by far was playing hide an seek with an Otter on a partially frozen inlet stream. He came right up to the canoe and then back under the ice. You would paddle a ways and he would pop up right in front of the bow. They have the sweetest faces.
Last summer, I was turning into the entrance of a local park, at about 6:30 AM, when I had to stop to let a gigantic wild turkey cross the road. Seeing a wild turkey at all seemed pretty unusual to me, but considering that I live in a major metropolitan area, I was pretty blown away by it.
Bears, Angel Sharks (scarier then a bear when their jaws shoot out), bat rays, Opahs (couldn’t find a picture of one unharmed), Mola Molas, lots and lots of different fish.
I’m from the DC area, so we’ve seen George and/or Martha the bald eagle in our backyard. There was also a hawk who made my neighborhood a home for a while.
I’ve seen feral zebras in San Simeon, CA; their ancestors escaped from Hearst’s zoo.
Saw some dolphins jumping and frolicking in the waves while in North Carolina.
Cute little git.
