What's the rarest or most unusual animal you've seen?

[CannyDan]

Reading this thread I was having “déjà vu all over again”. Took me a while (my search skills apparently aren’t that good) but I finally found this threadfrom 2007. Quite a few real rarities in that one! Crotalus, your wild bog turtle sighting still has me jealous! Repeating it in this thread may be what triggered my dim memory. A number of others are also impressive. I offered (in part):

@CannyDan

Once, back in the late 1970’s, I followed an Ivory Billed Woodpecker around the Big Cypress Swamp for about an hour. I had both binoculars and a 35mm camera with 200mm lens, but alas not a speck of film. I would have double-exposed any already used film for such shots. The bird, a male, flew casually from tree to tree, occasionally drumming. I followed, covering perhaps a mile during the encounter. Several times I was within 50 feet of the bird. There was no mistaking its identity. The only similar bird is the Pileated Woodpecker, and I’m quite familiar with them. Finally, I just got bored following the bird. I made my way out to my car, drove like a maniac a dozen miles to a gas station/tourist dive, grabbed a roll of film, threw some bills on the counter, and drove even more maniacally back. Of course, the bird was nowhere to be found.

Colibri is kind enough to say

@Colibri

You may have me beat.

Coming from him, that’s quite a statement! But I’m not so sure, as he also said

@Colibri

I worked with the New Zealand Wildlife Service from 1981-1985, and got to see some of the rarest animals in the world during my stint with them.

My favorite is the Kakapo, or Owl Parrot - a giant, flightless, nocturnal parrot. I worked with an island translocation program for them, and handled about 10% of the world population - which was about 50 in total at the time.

My own bird, which I was doing a study on, was the Stitchbird, or Hihi, at that time restricted to a single island, Little Barrier. I estimated the population at that time to be about 5000 birds.

Other species I’ve seen in the wild include Takahe, Saddleback, Kokako, Little Spotted Kiwi, and Tuatara. <snip>

Several months later I saw an Ivory Billed in flight at a distance, in the same area. Obviously I cannot know if it was the same bird or another, but back in about 1973 there was at least one living representative of the species in Florida.

But I just briefly viewed these. New Zealand rarities would be on my ‘bucket list’ and Colibri, you didn’t just see them, you worked with them! Too cool.