Just for fun!
Everyone answer the following questions:
- Most exciting animal you saw in the wild?
- Most exciting animal you saw in zoos?
- Animal you most want to see in the game?
- Animal you want to see in a zoo?animal you want to see in the wild?
- Where could you go to see the animals from the previous question?
Questions 4&5 require a realistic answer.
The idea: in a year or so we could revive this thread, and see which people got their wishes ingame and in real life, and also see if it topped their previous best animals encounters.
These are hard! Sorry for giving multiple answers for most of these, but it's difficult to single out any one encounter or species as my favourite.
1. Could go for lots of different options here. In terms of pure awe, probably
saltwater crocodiles; they're not hard to come by once you're within their range (which means you have to be wary around all waterbodies), but when you get up close to a big male you realise what impressive animals they really are. In terms of weirdness,
platypus; I managed to spot 6 of them in a period of half an hour in north Queensland.
Other options could be glimpse of a
chuditch/western quoll in the Flinders Ranges last year, chancing upon a
western pygmy possum at Innes National Park a few years back, or a
king brown snake up near my grandparent's place recently. In regards to sheer rarity, the
pygmy bluetongue skinks I've been working with as of late (they were thought extinct until the 90s and even today very few people are lucky enough to see them in the wild) or the vagrant
Subantarctic fur seal I stumbled upon on Kangaroo Island in 2021 would probably take the cake. A lot of the animals I see in the wild regularly though, like
koalas,
kangaroos,
emus,
echidnas and so forth are pretty exciting if I think about them from an outside perspective though.
2. Probably
numbats,
mala and
thorny devils at the Alice Springs Desert Park (and Alice Springs Reptile Park for the latter), just in regards to being animals that are very unique and distinctive but extremely rare in zoos. Outside of that, hard to say!
3. Pretty obvious answer,
Tasmanian devil.
4. Probably the animals I want to see most in zoos are unique and interesting species not kept in Australia, like
North Sulawesi babirusa,
fossa,
kowari,
North Island brown kiwi, and so forth. In the wild, my biggest goals at the moment are
carpet python,
perentie and
spotted-tailed quoll.
5. Obviously for the zoo species I'll have to visit international zoos - I can picture myself visiting New Zealand within the foreseeable future so the kiwi shouldn't be hard to come by, but the other species I'd have to see further afield, such as in Singapore or Europe. Carpet pythons are pretty rare in my wider area but I'm just hoping to chance upon one at some point, especially with some targeted searching up around Mt Remarkable. With the other two species, I'm already planning trips into their native range for later this year - first slowly travelling up the coast of New South Wales this winter looking for mammals (with the quoll as the biggest target), and then visiting central Australia in spring to do some herping (with perentie as a likely prospect). These plans aren't set yet but hopefully they work out!
