I petted and fed hay to the last male northern white rhino in Kenya some years ago.
He’s dead now and the remaining two females will likely die without giving birth and the species will go extinct :-(
It’s both cool and sad that you could interact and give witness to a species before its inevitable collapse.
Mainly sad.
I traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet, drove hours on dirt roads, hiked another hour through deafening wind, and then crawled on my stomach to the edge of a a 1300’ cliff, and hung off of it it just to take a picture of a puffin with my cell phone.
Coulda just flew to Oregon for that one lol. You can catch them up on haystack rock.
I bet it was still an awesome experience you had none the less.
Those are the angry looking puffins, not the cute ones.
Polar Bear on the Hudson Bay coast in northern Ontario.
I’m Indigenous and I’ve gone hunting and trapping with my relatives a few times in my life. On one of those trips we happened on a polar bear on the mud flats of the bay during the late autumn. We drove by in our freighter canoe (a very large oversized canoe with a 60 HP outboard motor) and the bear swam near us and then walked by a few hundred feet away. It wasn’t afraid but we were. We watched for a while and then fired rifle shot into the mud next to it to scare it away. From the moment it started to run to the point it disappeared as a speck on the horizon was about a minute or two. I went up later to look at the prints and the clay mud looked like a tractor had driven over it. I couldn’t believe how fast it could move on the mud. I quickly sank in my boots and could barely walk around.
One paw print was about the size of my head. I never left camp without someone nearby or a rifle in my hands.
I’m told that the time it takes a polar bear to discover, stalk, hunt, kill and partially devour you is on the order of 10 minutes.
Most people do not survive a polar bear passing them in the bush.
I guess nobody can tell how big they are from photos. There’s never someone standing next to them for comparison.
Seriously! They’re the biggest land carnivores bar none. If you’re 5’ - 5’6" a bigger polar bear will be able to look you levelly in the eye while on all fours* and on its hind legs, it’ll be more than half your height again.
*survivability of said staring contest is low
There was a stray firefly at my house one night. Like, singular. We’re not even near their habitat, so I don’t know what’s up with that.
A dik-dik. It’s a species of deer that is slightly larger than a house cat or maybe a medium size dog. It was super adorable but a bit uncanny feeling lol.
A wild beaver like a few miles from my house, and not a nutria, a real life flat-tailed beaver toothed fucking beaver. I was going to an artificial dam I use as a fishing spot and there he was. It was way bigger than I thought but I didn’t want to disturb it so I turned around and went home.
In captivity? An Okapi? A rhino? Idk man I’ve been to many zoos and exotic zoos where you drive through and idk about the rarest.
Giant Panda and Red Panda maybe.
Saw a fishercat in an industrial area not far from a large swath of floodplain and high voltage transmission lines. So there was a lot of territory for it nearby. Looks like a tall badger. Apparently pretty rare. Was walking around 18 wheeler trucks in motion like it owned the place, peeking around the dumpsters most likely looking for the young raccoons that hang around.
Either a black stork, a least weasel (actually pretty common, but difficult auf to see around here), Cerambyx cerdo (probably not as rare as most regulating bodies think), a Eurasian eagle owl (rare around Germany) or felis silvestris
In the wild: Florida scrub jay. key deer. carracarra. Indigo racer. I don’t know how to determine what is rarest. There are a lot I have seen.
Your dad
Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal–pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.
I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
Yeah check out my comment on the Santa Cruz salamander.
Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes
Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.
They are so fuckin huge dude.
They have one of the largest wingspans of any bird. Like their wingspan is ~9.5 feet.
I got a brief but good look at a wild Jaguarundi in south Texas nearly twenty years ago. I thought it was a bobcat at first, but it turned so I could see its tail and profile, and there was no mistaking it.
About a year ago my wife and I did a zoo date and when we got out of the car there was this bird walking around the parking lot. Not sure what kind of bird, flew off after like a minute but I thought it looked really cool.
