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.
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.
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 :-(
I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
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(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
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.
See my other comment about California condors. I actually got to be part of their rehabilitation efforts and thanks to the university I worked with we got them from about 27 total known individuals left to over 170 last data I can find.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_long-toed_salamander
So rare I don't even know if they still exist.
I did some field biology work back in the mid 2000s and this is the only reason I know this.
There is also the California Condor and a species of kangaroo rat in the Mojave. The former is less rare now due to an immense amount of work we did to save the species to the point where they actually got removed from the endangered list at one point.
Look at this little guy though
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As for the Condors:
The condor population (wild and captive) has steadily increased, reaching over 460 in 2017 (with 170 wild condors in California). For the most current update check out the Condor Population Status Summary (PDF)
Back when I was doing field work they were down to only 27 and all had been moved to captivity.
The situation with the salamander is much more dire
Its limited range and fragile specialized habitat place severe restrictions to the viability of this species. There is no definitive population estimate for the Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, but the numbers are deemed to be quite small. Further disturbance of its limited habitat could lead to this species' extinction.
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.
Uhh, in the wild? I've seen some pretty uncommon wetland birds a number of times. Some pretty weird bugs too, although it's hard to say what they were.
I've seen big moose really up close, and that was epic, and would have been terrifying if there wasn't usually a car-stopping amount of wood between us. They're not rare, though, just shy.
Well that need the disclaimers of "outside a zoo" and "of which i was aware of", but probably Hummingbird hawk-moth, it might not be very rare, but i was like "wtf a hummingbird in Poland?" and i managed to get close enough to see it's in fact a moth.
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.
I saw a numbat at the zoo. Very rare, almost extinct, pretty skittish so even if you do go to their exhibit they're often hiding from everyone
