They were from yet another one in the North Bay, as a matter of fact. The main colony seems to be based at a nearby refuse disposal site, but I’ve not infrequently seen them roaming the roads of the adjacent hills, and even as far as a few miles away.
I just remembered another one. I saw what I thought was a worm in my mother’s dog’s water bowl (outside). Upon closer inspection I saw it had eyes and tiny scales. It was about two inches long, red, and as thin as a pencil lead. Looking it up I found it was a thread snake. I had had no idea there was such a thing. This was in Dallas, TX.
We saw a cheetah take down one of the many deer species on the Serengeti. The lions were usually too busy trying to stay cool and resting up for the night’s hunt.
One of the grimmer birds you will ever see is the Maribou Stork, which can get as tall as a man and looks very much like an undertaker. They’re carrion eaters and used to hang out at the slaughterhouse in Kampala.
Golden Gate Park has 1000’s of small earth mounds, and many small holes on the grasslands.
Many guess snake holes; I actually saw one hole pop up - it was a vole of some sort. They tunnel underground and pop up in the middle of a grassy patch.
They eat the grass around the hole, then resume digging, filling in the hole with fresh dirt. Hence the mounds.
I started placing fresh grass over the hole to coax the critter to surface. It woulld NOT leave the safety of the hole for even the tastiest of grasses.
One would come out, but left the tip of its tail in the hole. Any sound or motion would make it retreat.
I guess: When you are on the menu for every thing from a rat to an eagle, you had better stay hidden.
I suspect very, very few folks ever see one. I couldn’t find a species to match.
I’d wager large amounts on Botta’s pocket gopher, very common in the Bay Area. And, sorry, relatively commonly seen too. I’ve seen them many times, including in frankly stupid places, e.g., the off-leash dog park at Pt Isabelle.
Either that or your standard ground squirrel.
Not the wild, but not exactly a zoo, either: I watched a movie with two baby ocelots once (we spent the weekend at a sanctuary for ocelots and other rare creatures (including servals and bobcats) and during the evening, the host brought two ocelot cubs into the common room and they played around the room while we watched the movie. One of them sat in my lap for…oh…all of about five seconds.
I also got a hug from a full-grown female ocelot. It was amazing. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. She was a sweetheart. Ocelot purrs sound like low growls.
I would totally have a pet ocelot if it were legal and not a really stupid idea. 
When I was in the eighth grade, the official class science project was “bug collection” – each student had to gather and properly mount a selection of local insects (absolutely no spiders!). I had access to the filtration system at a local plant, so I had gathered quite a collection of neat (and freshly deceased!) insects, including an eastern hercules beetle. I spent a lot of time outside as a kid, but I had no idea we had beetles like that in our area. Shortly after I salvaged the dead beetle, a kid in my class showed up to school with a live eastern hercules beetle. He let it scamper around the hall for a little while – it could even fly short distances. Very cool! I haven’t seen one since.
[Moose graze in my yard.](http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r148/enipla/Moose10.jpgMoose graze in my yard.) That’s Fredrick.
We saw one of those elusive roadrunners one time. In the headlights. Poor thing.
Wolverine. Not super-rare, but they tend to be pretty shy, so hard to catch out in the open
I’ve cuddled an echidna. Wearing gardening gloves, I hasten to add. They’re surprisingly silky in between the spikes.
The only other candidate would be the snake I nearly ran over on the bike track a couple of months ago, and I only say that because I googled “common snakes of Victoria” afterwards and it didn’t look like any of them
Don’t worry, next second he would’ve been in a plane or on top of a train.
I’ve seen a leopard and her cubs up close on safari; it was amazing but game reserves are a little like huge zoos in that they are stocked, so I don’t think that’s in the spirit of this thread.
However, while diving I’ve seen an oceanic white tip shark, from underneath (not a comfortable few minutes) and while hiking in Scotland I was lucky enough to see a sea eagle, from above. We were at the top of a sea cliff and he slowly glided beneath us. So big, so awesome.
Not all that exciting; but I think my personal in-the-wild rarest has to be the chough (pronounced “chuff”) – Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax – the British Isles’ rarest species of crow: black birds with lovely red bills and legs. Found also in a few other parts of Eurasia; but in our islands, only in small numbers along the western coasts of Wales and Scotland, and Ireland; and a minuscule population (countable, I believe, on the fingers of one hand) at the far south-western tip of Cornwall. It was there some years ago that I had the good luck to see three of them, for several minutes, close to on the edge of a cliffside path.
My wife and I saw some kiwis when we were in New Zealand. Unfortunately, they were in a preserve, not the wild. We also saw a Little penguin while cruising Milford Sound and some crested penguins in Timaru. Also had to deal with a kea that took great interest in my watch. He even tried to get on the tour bus when we were leaving Mirror Lakes on our way to Milford Sound.
Dan, growing up in Baltimore was, in general, a handicap when it came to my interest in reptiles, but it did put me within an hour’s drive of bog turtle and wood turtle habitat.
Some interesting animals are very common on the navy base at Gitmo that are apparently very hard to find in the rest of Cuba. We were told that it is because they are hunted and eaten on the rest of the island but I don’t know if that is true. On base it would be worth your career to harm the wildlife. I saw a Cuban Boa once. They are pretty shy and hard to find. Cuban Rock Iguanas tend to plop themselves in the middle of the road and can cause some problems. Banana Rats are every where and happen to like doritos.
That may be so in some game parks, but seeing leopard cubs is still a rare event. Leopards are pretty shy, even when habituated. The one I saw was peering out at us from a tree ‘island’*. I got a photo, but it wasn’t easy.
*During the dry season in the Okavango Delta, the guides can drive where there is normally water. The clumps of trees standing in what is now grassland have the appearance of islands.
We used to see beluga whales all the time along the Seward Highway (which follows the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet) south of Anchorage. In fact, there is a turnout called Beluga Point along the highway, where they may be seen at certain times of the year. Then, if you turn 180 degrees and look up at the mountainside, you can often see Dall sheep; there are usually eagles soaring overhead, as well.
I don’t get out much – but I’ve seen jet black squirrels in Washington DC.
I’m not going to count rare species I’ve seen in zoos – it’s like they’re held hostage for the rubes to google at.