Ha ha!
Congratulations! 
At a nature preserve in florida, I got excited thinking i found a group of spoonbills, only to find that the park had placed a bunch of plastic flamingos on a raised “island” in the middle of the pond. My guess is to attract other birds. Couldn’t tell they were fake until i snapped a photo on my telephoto lens. Thankfully later I found REAL spoonbills
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I slowly and carefully approached this “bird”. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19009077
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No excuse for failing to get that bird in focus.
I spent a good 5 minutes looking at a plant thinking it was a second smaller kangaroo, until I put my glasses on and grabbed my phone to take a picture. By then the kangaroo was gone and all there was left was a plant in the distance…
Glad you approached it slowly and carefully. Dont want to startle it lol. Tbh, it looks like a pretty cute garden ornament!
Does “nothing” qualify as the strangest thing mistaken for wildlife?
In this photo I managed to see a spider with very strange legs that had caught a wild bee, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what kind of spider it was. Until I counted the bee’s legs – and suddenly the spider was gone. All that was left was a male Halictus scabiosae.
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Not really strange but… several years ago I walked the short trail behind the welcome center of Merritt Island NWR and shot a beautiful Canada Goose just sitting in the middle of a pond. Only after I posted the observation was it pointed out to me that it was a decoy they keep in the pond. @#$! these old eyes! lol.
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Can’t really blame you for that one!
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Stump-bird. Leaf-bird. Rock-bird. My notebooks are replete with these…
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Some decoys are pretty realistic, I’ve seen some turkey decoys that I first mistook for taxidermy. Too bad the goose ended up being a decoy-- that would have been a really cool pose to take a photo of.