Where I live or within a reasonable driving distance:
Birds
Whooping Crane
Attwater’s Prairie Chicken
Bufflehead
American and/or Least Bittern
Cerulean Warbler
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Green Jay rare visitors:
Fork-tailed Flycatcher
Northern Jacana
Gannet or Booby species
Jabiru
Golden Eagle
Other Animals
Rough Green Snake
Eastern Indigo Snake
Red Fox
Bobcat
Manatee
Southern Flying Squirrel
Eastern Chipmunk
any octopus species
Plants
Trout Lily
Nodding Nixie
one of the floating Bladderwort species
any new orchid species
Fungi
Violet Coral Fungus
Velvet Blue Crust
Ladder Lichen
Literally anything. I just scratched the black-capped chickadee off my list(sounds strange, I know, but it is incredibly difficult to get a fairly decent photo of one). As far as what lives in my area, I would really like to see a wolverine. Or an owl. Or get a picture of a lynx. I have seen those the exact two times I did not have my camera. Or a timber wolf. I have found shedded fur and paw print, but never the animal itself. I love reptiles, especially snakes, but you cannot find those in Alaska.
Oh yeah! Me too, although I’d settle for Dimetrodon (what’s that big back fin all about?).
Back here on modern Earth, I’d like to see a rattlesnake.
Or one of the rare Euxoa spp only known from two or three observations, like * Euxoa churchillensis
Anything else will do!
Top of the list is a mountain lion. They are sometimes seen in the area wandering through yards. My next door neighbor told me they’ve seen mountain lion prints on the property.
I would also like to see a great white shark. Our Santa Cruz whale watching excursion ended with a side trip to look for them around Capitola where the sharks were known to hang out, but no luck for sharks that day.
Since joining iNat a few years ago, I get pretty excited to notice any creature, even a gnat.
i would like to ID a Colombia lewisia someday but that probably will never happen because the taxon is…
1.extremely rare
and
2. not in the Puget trough region that i live in.
Me too and also a glacier bear which I think is the coolest subspecies of black bear, and a cinnamon bear would be fun too, plus any one with the white blaze on its chest, but those are supposedly common in the subspecies by me so hopefully I get to see one of those when I’m on a closer to home adventure.
If I can catch a insect that doesn’t pose, I use cold packs to chill it in a small cup or under a jar lid until it slows down. After I get some photos, they take a moment to warm up and then take off.
When I was young, and felt like I had all the time in the world, I probably wanted to explore every country at one time or another. Now that I am less-young, and constantly aware that I have but limited time, I have had to pare down the list considerably.
Gorillas (hence my last week’s post, “Gorillas in Fact and Fiction.”)
Birds-of-Paradise
Any ratites in the wild
Each of these requires making a specific trip to look for them; I’m not going to come upon them casually out-and-about. So, given that I spend more time casually out-and-about than making expeditions, I will also add that I always love completing a page in my wildflower guide – that is, I check off each lifer, write the date and location in the margin, and when every species on a given page has such a notation, the page is complete.
Ivory Gull, Ross’s Gull, Buff-breasted Sandpiper, Gyrfalcon
Any flying squirrel!
Neottia orchid species, and Cypripedium arietinum
Ophioglossum/Adder’s-Tongue Ferns
More milkweed species
Hummingbird moths
And farther afield:
Mountain lion (at a great distance, preferably!), gray wolf, wolverine
Calypso bulbosa and more Cypripedium species, C. fasciculatum, montanum, candidum
Too many birds to name!
For more global species:
I want to one day photograph and see the Aethia Auklet species that live up in the Aleutian Islands
Lemurs
Spoon Billed Sandpiper
Triprion (shovel headed) Tree Frog species
Hornbills
Podocnemis Species
Oropendolas
Turacos
Komodo Dragon
Ghariel
and way too many other species to count
For more local (PNW) species:
Evening Grosbeak - I have yet to see one
Coastal Giant Salamander
Northern Rubber Boa
Mt. Hood Pussypaws
Cool bog plants
Western Cauliflower Mushroom (I ate it once in the past foraged by someone else, it was so delicious I want to find one for myself!)
Minke Whale
Dalls Porpoise
Giant Pacific Squid!
I found some growing in a potted avocado (grown from seed) our friends left behind when they moved out of state. We bought their old house. The spores must have been in the dirt or compost they used. I delicately transplanted them to another pot because we had to destroy the avocado tree. It was infested with redbay ambrosia beetles. We had record cold temperatures last year. My mom who does most of the gardening here thought the ferns were dead. I held out hope they were just dormant or that some more would come up from spores. However rather than just putting some seeds in the pot as is, she dumped the dirt out. I didn’t notice the pot was missing until some time later. By then she had forgotten where she dumped the dirt.