We’ve all been there—staring intently at something in the wild, only to realize it wasn’t quite what we thought. Whether it was mistaking a rock for a bird or a stick for a snake, I’d love to hear your funniest cases of mistaken identity in nature. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever thought was an animal, but wasn’t? Bonus points if you even snapped a picture before realizing it!
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What’s the strangest thing you’ve mistaken for wildlife?
This is actually very common among herpers! These adventurous folks, who love catching and photographing snakes, often slam on the brakes for things like drive belts, twigs, and all manner of debris.
In areas where herping is popular, they even prank each other by painting bits of rope to look like snakes and leaving them in “snakey” spots, like sticking out of rocky crevices in road cuts.
It’s part of the playful nature of the herping community! 
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There was an amusing thread about this a while ago with some great pictures.
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I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried sneaking up on and continuously taking photos of bird poop due to thinking it was something else. (Mostly hoping that I’ve finally encountered a bird-dropping spider, but some caterpillar larva also seem to mimic bird droppings.)
There have also been times when I’ve cautiously approached what I thought was a snake in the underbrush only to find out it was some rubber or wire.
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I take pictures with the hope of identifying later. so this happens a lot with me.
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Would probably have been something I saw in a disco 
in the 70s. But I would rather leave that behind me now.
All I can say is, a stray scrap of paper on the ground looks remarkably like some kind of exotic pigeon at fifty paces.
As AdamWargon said, rope, cables, anything in the road when I’m looking for snakes. Every. Single. Time. This is the universal herpers experience.
I also look for roadkill a lot so clothes, cardboard, rugs, car parts, yep.
For other people, during the time I used to do snake removals, I would get calls, go there, only to find it was a piece of string, a cable, even a rubber toy snake!
It is common to go looking for a cobra, to find it’s actually a tiny house snake, but the best was finding a very rare legged snake, a lizard! Fear does very strange things to our imagination.
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Any kind of plant scraps or garbage stuck in a spider’s web looks like an insect from a distance.
You can find some odd things when dammed lakes are down. I found some cedar tree stumps out of the water at Melton Hill Lake (TN) that "stumped’ the AI. It posited that they were bears or dogs. My first guess would have been Komodo dragons, but sorry, not in TN.
Lots of things get mistaken for fungi: golf balls, fabric/stuffing, gloves (and vice versa, especially when it comes to Xylaria species), dog toys of all kinds, food on the ground, poop (mammalian and avian, especially when the birds have been eating colourful berries), glass/ceramic insulators on telephone poles, bones. . . also, some Helvella look a lot like fortune cookies on a stick, though I haven’t seen any fortune cookies in the wild yet.
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A patterned bungee cord lying in the road at night looks remarkably like a Kingsnake.
I once photo’d what I was sure was a Summer Tanager in a bush until I noticed it didn’t move. It was a red Christmas tree ornament.
Sometimes even the wildlife is fooled. How many times have I seen a yellow butterfly flying after a falling yellow leaf the size of a butterfly?
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Not technically wildlife, just wildlife evidence, but I once mistook a decaying egg carton for a fallen bees’ nest. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68348112
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Understandable.
ive seen part of an old tire that looks like a box turtle, but i have also done the opposite- thought i was looking at an airplane, but it was a hawk :/
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At one of my favorite sites, there are a whole lot of branches, stumps, and logs sticking out of a pond. At first glance, these elongated arboreal remains look like herons.
Welcome to the Forum!
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Or the moth is bird poop. 