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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Some of your posts are making me jealous! In the wide, wild world outside, I’ve encountered or sighted such beasts as:

A coatimundi and many, many crocodiles in Mazunte, Mexico. The local folks there take tourists for canoe rides through the mangrove swamps, and there are crocodiles everywhere you look. Nonaggressive crocodiles which don’t eat people, true, but when you’re in a little wooden rowboat and a crocodile that’s longer than said boat comes gliding up beside you all swift and silent, the little monkey-man deep in your consciousness starts screaming “Gonna eat me! Gonna eat me!” inside your head. Really loudly, too.

We stayed at a beach hotel in Zipolite once where little lizards ran around on the ceiling–and one morning there was a great big lizard clinging to the wall outside; I’ve no idea what it was but it sure wasn’t an iguana-it looked like a monitor, and it had really long claws, and the proprietor and his assistant seemed excited and upset by its presence. The same hotel had a tiny little deer of some kind that was the size of a beagle dog; it was very tame and liked for people to scratch its head.

Once when I was hitch hiking through Wyoming, there were pronghorn antelopes- what looked ike a huge herd of them to me-off to the side of the Interstate. Fascinating, the way they bounded and seemed to bounce almost.

We saw a roadrunner when we visited Death Valley.It was an odd and angular bird which you knew for a fierce predator at first sight.

On the outskirts of Santa Fe, I not only saw a horned lizard of the type miscalled a horned toad, I picked it up very gently and held it for a few moments. Such a strange looking and beautiful little thing! I can still remember the cold, rough feel of its skin and the pulsing of its breath. After a moment and a good long look, I let it go. I understand that horned toads are somewhat rare.

Lake Sam Houston in Texas is the home of many* alligator garfish*, great ugly ancient-looking critters which could frighten a person to death if encountered while (shudder!) swimming.

Living in San Francisco, I’ve seen members of the world-famous flock of wild parrots who also live there. They’re fabulous-every day they surprise people and bring wonder and delight with them. From reading up on psittacine companions, I am pretty certain that these hookbilled neighbors of ours are cherry headed conures.

Foxes aren’t rare, but both times I’ve seen one here in the city, I was amazed and pleased. Especially when one loped across Bush Street late one night, maybe half a block away.

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I’m not at all sure, but I may have seen a Rubber Boa when I was a kid. I was fishing with my dad and it was just getting dark. I remember the snake as looking quite rubbery and larger than the usual Garters.
In the intervening years I’ve pretty well looked under ever rock and log from Vancouver to Hope and never saw another one. We do have them, so I’m told, but apart from being rare, they’re also nocturnal.
I’ve also seen Alligator Lizards which are only in a few areas around here.

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Were they in the air–IN THE AAAAAAAAIR?

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Last summer my wife and I spent the weekend at Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland. One night something overhead caught my attention and I saw something resembling a gray hot dog float across the night sky. After watching the trees above for a while I caught it again and it was a flying squirrel.

A common animal in North America, at least in Canada and the Eastern half of the US, but they’re nocturnal so they are almost never seen. *I’d *never seen one before.

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Everyone has seen a pony, but I think a wild one is a pretty rare sight. I walked over a sand dune once and came upon a whole herd of them on Assateague, VA. I was about seven years old I think. I was well familiar with horses, but the way these wild ones looked at me, you could feel the difference at a visceral level. They clearly had no interest in allowing me to intrude upon their territory.

We don’t really stop to think much about how big and strong horses are, or how easily they could tromp upon us, especially in groups. But just the way they stood was clearly aggressive. I was never so happy to be considered unthreatening.

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I used to keep one of those compressed corn (gray) squirrel feeders on a tree outside my living room window. One night I looked out and saw a flying squirrel sitting on it and crept out with my camera hoping to get a photo before it ran away. I didn’t need to worry, though, because the squirrel ignored me even when I stuck the camera lens around a foot away from it. I could have reached out and touched it if I had been confident no spilling of blood would have been involved.

I don’t recall ever seeing anything particularly rare in the wild, but some things are concentrated more locally than others, so they are exotic to somebody. I can think of dolphins, alligators, herons, groundhogs, and beavers, for example. (The first two on visits to the coast, the remaining three a few miles or less from home.)

For rare but not in the wild, but I was at Hollywild last week and saw their zebra-donkey cross. (Along with various other hooved ungulates that faced my offerings of food with supreme boredom.)

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Pronghorns are cool. They’re also the 2nd fastest mammal on the planet.

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Yeah, I saw tons of them just driving on the Interstate in Wyoming. They were all over the place! And very cool.

But nit pick: They are not antelopes, even though they are often called that. They are their own thing, and not closely related to other ungulates.

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Holy crap! Was it aggressive? How did you realize it was there? Story please!

I had to look this up, as I was sure I’d learned differently. They are, in fact, Antilocapra Americana*.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Family: Antilocapridae
Subfamily: Antilocaprinae
Tribe: Antilocaprini
Genus: Antilocapra
Species: A. americana
*Grubb, P. (2005). “Order Artiodactyla”. In Wilson, D.E.; Reeder, D.M. Mammal Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 671–2. ISBN 978-0-8018-8221-0. OCLC 62265494.

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We had one in our Front yard!

I like** ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness** also saw a California Condor in the wild.

I als saw (and fed) a San Joaquin kit fox in a grocery store parking lot in Baersfield.

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Although they superficially resemble deer, pronghorns are most closely related to giraffes and okapi. The hunter slang is “speed goat,” which isn’t completely inaccurate, they’re more goat than deer. Some other weird things about them is that they have some aversion to jumping. Mule deer prance around like jackrabbits and hop fences, antelope really prefer to go under, sometimes at speed. They also have true horns, not antlers, but like antlers they shed the sheath annually.

I saw a porcupine last year. I’m used to animals bolting, so I’m not used to such a lethargic creature. Easily could’ve caught it. Eventually it headed for a small tree.

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I’ve lived in many places and seen many things:
A bobcat in a mountain pass on the Navajo Reservation
On Saipan, at Suicide Cliff overlooking the ocean, we saw a couple of blue-footed boobies and a sea turtle (we were too high up to determine species). Snorkeling and riding in a submarine, we saw amazing blue sea stars, many mantas, all kinds of tropical fish, black-tipped sharks (scary when seen snorkeling), octopus. I came face-to-face with a moray eel the last time I went snorkeling.
On the southern high plains, antelope.
In the Pacific Northwest, bald eagles are plentiful, but in the Four Corners it was rather surprising.
A black bear in northern NM
A fox in Baltimore
We went through the Everglades and saw many beautiful birds.

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One time when I was in my bathroom and looked out the bathroom window I thought I saw a kwyjibo.
Then I realized I was looking at the*** bathroom mirror***.

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The Esquilaxes run thick through the hills by me.

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Ostrich (not yet mentioned?) — reminds me of a dinosaur.

I too was going to say the slow loris, they’re very cool, but it was in a zoo. It certainly wasn’t crawling up my arm!

Pangolin — never heard of that before. They look prehistoric, sort of like an ankylosaur.

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And then there’s the Ostrich’s cousin, Cassowary. Talk about a bizarre but beautiful creature (also scary-looking). Picture an ostrich-sized bird with claws like a dinosaur or a demon.Very easy to imagine one gutting a man with a single kick of that claw.

Unlike with most sexually dimorphic birds, it’s the female Cassowaries who show the most color – bright blue faces and brighter red wattles that hang down low like heavy necklaces. And the adult ones sport keratin helmets atop their big bird heads.

Whenever we go to the SF Zoo, we always stop early on at the Cassowary enclosure and look well and long upon the lovely lady.

We were doing just that a year or two ago when a Zoo Docent came along, leading some young scholars. She was telling them about the Cassowary’s hard horn hat, and she said that evolutionary scientists had no idea how that growth benefited its wearers. Well, it was obvious to me from the first time I ever saw one, so I schooled her and her class on the spot.

“They’re jungle birds. They wander around in deep forests. Those forests are made up of tall trees. Tall trees mean things falling – fruits, leaves, and ***big-ass tree limbs! ***The keratin crown of a Cassowary is a hard-hat, like construction workers wear – without it they’d get their brains bashed out!”

She hmm’ed dubiously instead of thanking me for my brilliant insight, and led her students quickly elsewhere.

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Why you little… .