Your Best Misidentification

Inspired by this GQ thread and Colibri’s comments on filtering rare sighting report with what might actually have been seen, I was thinking of a time when I was on Santa Cruz Islands with some friends, and we’d been eager to see one of the island’s scrub jays, which are reported to be huge.

We walked through a eucalyptus grove in the late afternoon, and there against the dying sunlight we found one! It was huge, larger than any jay any of us had ever seen. We oohed and ahhed, but it wasn’t until the next day that we figured out that we had actually seen an osprey.

(For those who aren’t familiar with birds - this is a pretty absurd mistake. The birds are not similar in size, coloration, or even general silouette. Especially since the bird stayed perched perfectly still :o )

I was also recently mistaken by the California DMV for a driver with a different middle name and an extra letter on the end of his last name - who had been involved in a police chase in Oakland. :eek:
What stories of interesting misidentification have you got?

Ever badly misidentified something/someone? :confused:

Ever been misidentified by someone or something :dubious: ?

The other day I was going into the supermarket and a man asked me whether my mother was all right. I replied that yes, I thought so. (I didn’t recognize him, but figured that maybe he was one of the parents from our school that I’d only met once or twice.) He then went on to say that he’d been concerned when the ambulance pulled up to our house the night before.

I must have looked quite confused at this point. We don’t have a house, there was no ambulance, and my mother lives 90 miles away. He looked somewhat abashed and said that he must have mistaken me for someone else.

I was driving around in the country, at night, with a friend, trying to find someone’s house. We got ourselves completely turned around, but, being astronomers, we employed our specialized skills. Identifying Jupiter, which we knew to be in the southeast, we reoriented ourselves and drove on confidently.

Turns out it was Sirius. :smack:

Well, the coolest identification was my first bald eagle.

The wierdest mis-ID was a woman who had the build, skin, and hair (down past her butt of a uniquish wave and color) of my bestfriend from grade school. I put up a poster on her walking route with ‘her’ first and middle name, and my email addy. Never got an email (even crack pots).

A few months later I saw her at our community pool (where I lived meant she lived at one or two complexes - everything else at the time was light industrial, super rich who don’t deign to walk on city streets, or commercial) from the front; she was not the friend.

Usually if I’m with my father I’ll be mistaken for his wife (my mother). Generally if I’m out with my mom, we’re mistaken for sisters. If I go visit my family on my mother’s side, people whom I have never met will stop me and ask how my family is (and be correct in who my family members are).

I always sound like my dad on the phone, apparently. My favorite thing (which actually just happened as I was typing this post) is when people just assume they’re right, and say, “Hi, Lee, I was just calling to…” and I have to cut them off and say “No, this isn’t Lee. Let me get him.”

This may top the scrub jay story - in terms of embarassment. So there we were about halfway through British Columbia on our way to Alaska. We’d pretty much left civilization miles/days before, and were out at this somewhat small, obscure lake for the night. We’d been seeing bald eagles and black bears and stuff, and had a real sense of being out in the wild. So when we heard this “howl” echo across this lake, we were so excited that there might be WOLVES in the area. Talk about psyched ! The howls weren’t continual, but they continued for a while. But with the echos off the surrounding hills, we couldn’t get a decent fix on where the source was. So we decided the best plan was to take out our little inflatable raft out onto the lake, and by being more centered, we hoped we could get a reasonable “fix”. As we’re cruising on the lake, not only are the howls getting louder, but we’re gradually homing in on at least a “direction” to head for shore. And just as we’re approaching the shore ready to scour the bushes for the elusive canine (never mind that there might be grizzlies in the area ;-), we discover our “wolves” - the howls were coming from loons (lake birds) !

We had a pretty good laugh despite our disappointment. And we still get a kick out of retelling the story. I told the story to someone who has studied wolves (gives educational talks which include a live wolf as part of the show), and she made me feel better - she said many a scientist has been fooled by the loons in the same way we had. She may have just been trying to make me feel better, but I like to believe her.
A much more recent mis-identification that made me chuckle happened walking down a hall in the hotel of an indian casino. I am of japanese descent, and I happened to be wearing kind of a southwest “themed” shirt (a shirt from the Grand Canyon). Out of the blue this guy walking down the hall stops me and asks for directions to a manager’s office. I reply that I have no clue, and then he says “Oh, you don’t work here”. I guess I looked native american…enough.