This one.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/255212710
I only ever saw this one in 20 years in Brazil. It flew into my house. After the photo I released it back outside.
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That is the most bizarre animal I have ever seen. It looks completely made up. As if Frankenstein wanted to delve into a bit of entomology. Insane!!!
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I guess it would have to be the moth Prays peregrina which was described as new to science from a specimen taken in my garden.
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My rarest sighting may be a Kirtland’s Warbler passing through on migration earlier this spring in Dayton, Ohio, a pretty rare sighting around there. Even got photos!
Second would probably be a South Polar Skua on my cruise two weeks ago. Seen from my cruise ship balcony 60 miles off the coast of northern California. No good photos, but got a video good enough for an ID!
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I agree. It is really a strange insect. When I took that picture (2006), it was the only picture of a living specimen at the time. It took me years to discover what it’s name was and originally, the name I found for it was Crocodile Lanternfly.
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Back in june 2019 in the Kuching Sarawak area, after a serious rainfall, me and my son went out at night to spot some wildlife. He is in a wheelchair but this won’t stop us to explore nature. Armed with his camera gear and flashlights we encountered this magnificent specie; Calliophis bivirgatus ssp. tetrataenius also known as the Malayan Blue coral snake. At ± 40 cm away it was gliding just in front of us. A rare encounter, on iNat there are 38 observations.
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That’s amazing! And welcome to the forum!
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Very cool, indeed! Welcome to the iNat forum.
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Nice. My wife and I just had a Kirtland’s as a yardbird this fall, also in Ohio. It was just hopping around on the front porch. According to eBird it might have been the 12th fall Kirtland’s sighting in Ohio EVER. Another one turned up at a nearby Wildlife Area the following week, too. So exciting and unexpected!
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I was pretty little, so I have no photos, but my local zoo (Houston) had a leucistic alligator named Blanco he has since moved to Crocodile Encounters
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I need to make sure to get over and see this species. I keep saying I’ll do it this year and then June is a whirlwind of breeding bird surveys and other obligations.
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I was going climbing to a spot that was rumored to have a newly discovered rare plant, Ivesia longibracteata, that grew nowhere else in the world. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for it (and to avoid disturbing any plants I encountered). I snapped a quick photo of a similar-looking plant several hundred feet up the climb, but then completely forgot about it for a few years.
When I finally posted it earlier this year, I learned that it had since been listed by the IUCN as critically endangered internationally, and that the wild population was estimated at only 500 mature individuals! Note: It’s the nondescript one in the center, not the one with the eye-catching flower. Surprisingly, it has 33 observations on iNaturalist.
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If it is well known and accessible, I would not say it is surprising at all. These places attract photographers as cadavers flies. Check how concentrated are the observations of Gentianella obtusifolia in Czechia https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=true&taxon_id=1448694&preferred_place_id=8264 . It is rare but not that super-rare and has several more smaller localities in the country, but this one really attracts photographers. And it also grows in Germany and Austria, but there are taxonomical and identification problems so they may be calling the same plant differently there. I do not know the difference between obtusifolia and aspera, for example.
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If it is well known and accessible, I would not say it is surprising at all. These places attract photographers as cadavers flies.
You should be glad there’s people interested in rare flowers in Czechia! It’s the only chance someone will protect them. Here in Austria nobody is interested in them, and there is no protection at all. Even with easily accessible spots of endemic orchids, I usually have the only observations.
When a rare flower is found in Austria, a year later there’s probably a road or house or cow pasture where it grew, before anyone can make inat observations. (For example the last remaining Orchis spitzelii spot is a cow pasture now, and the last remaining river wetlands with the only bigger stand of Anacamptis coriophora they are building a huge highway now.)
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You know you’re seriously into iNat when you:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/you-know-youre-seriously-into-inat-when/1992
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I have seen multiple nine banded armadillos in my area. They may not be rare, but they were quite unexpected. I also saw 2 Luna moths at a gas station in texas
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WOW that’s incredible! And in your own yard too! Congrats on such a lucky find!
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I’ve seen wildlife so rare, their population sizes are negative. So rare that they never existed and never will. So very rare that the entire IUCN showed up the instant I saw them. So rare that the periodic table of elements had to be updated after I posted my observation on iNat. So rare that they took observations of me.
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I’d also love to have that feature!
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I spent 30 minutes playing around with the compare tool only to scroll down the thread and find the tool, oops! Nothing super rare sadly (yet), but this artichoke fly is apparently my rarest at 249. As a plant person though, I’m more interested in Primula fassettii at 457 and Frankia’s type species Frankia alni only being at 527! Also a fair amount of California spring wildflowers with <1000 observations. Hoping for many rare plant expeditions in my future.
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