It has always amused me that the tourists to the US that I’ve spoken to are often very excited to see raccoons, and disappointed if they don’t see them before they leave.
Some others I’ve noticed on the east coast of the US are blue jays and cardinals. Boy, do people get excited about those if they’ve never seen them before! Very pretty birds of course, just very easy to get used to and see as uninteresting as well.
Definitely kangaroos. But they have bad luck as I live in Austria and not Australia.
Australian white ibises. They’re kinda like the Australian equivalent to a raccoon in the US; they eat rubbish and their roosts stink because they tend to congregate in a single tree and then shit everywhere. But they are quite unique looking birds: long beaks, black heads and white plumage. So the tourists find them quite interesting and the locals call them bin chickens.
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I was one of the fascinated tourists taking a million pictures of bin chickens. But, I was at least aware of it… because I remember at the time joking with my wife that the locals were laughing at us basically taking pictures of pigeons/seagulls.
Back when I worked at Disney, a subset of the Asian guests would get excited and take pictures of squirrels. Are there parts of Asia that don’t have many squirrels?
Japan doesn’t generally have squirrels like in the US. I took my wife to DC and we spent a solid 10+ minutes taking photos and videos of squirrels around the mall.
Squirrels are not native in most of Asia.
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Swans. It’s a wonder to me that such an arrogant bird ever became the national pride of Denmark. But tourists freak out about them, thanks to H.C. Andersen.
San Diego zoo has a racoon exhibit. I thought that was weird.
The Audubon zoo in New Orleans has a raccoon exhibit and it’s got a rusted out jalopy for them to play in. And a mouse exhibit where their natural habitat is a spice cabinet. Also, we probably have the only zoo with recipes on the wall next to some exhibits. They’re a relic of a bygone era and I asked the zoologists about it and they were like, “I mean, most of us are vegetarians but we just think it’s funny so we leave them up.” And there’s a fake loup-garou around a corner where you can scare your kids.
In grand New Orleans tradition, it’s also one of the few zoos that sells drinks and sometimes has live music. But it’s still probably one of the top 5 zoos in America for actual science and conservation. I haven’t seen one better besides San Diego and I frequent zoos. So, no one act like the giraffes or gorillas are upset. They get fed better than humans in most of the world and the climate is right up their alley.
Huh really? I have tons of trash pandas around me (central Ohio).
At my house, one figured out how to use my doggy door and kept raiding my kitchen trashcan at night.
I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.
When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You’ll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.
But if you’re headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you’ll spot the almighty and much maligned “bin chicken”, our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you’ll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that’s not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.
Seeing the flying foxes around Sydney surprised me.
The bin chickens, I simultaneously felt a little sorry for, and enjoyed watching.
The bin chickens are my kin, I’m in the small minority here who appreciate them.
And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They’re also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they’re just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It’s a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they’re not dangerous.
People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It’s understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you’re someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.
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What about crocodiles? Alligators are in most reasonably large retention ponds in Florida. Most places just relocate them once they reach a certain size. They’re pretty common. Knew a guy in high school who had a side hustle of removing them from people’s swimming pools. They’re pretty weird if you’re not from a place used to them.
Sorry about you not seeing the lightning bug.
Insects are dying out a bit.
Oh no, i got to see them. This was a decade ago, and I was told even then that there used to be many more. I was happy to see any at all though, I had only ever seen them in movies and they almost seemed mythical. They are pretty magical, it’s very sad to hear they’re almost gone.
Here in Australia, it’s drop bears and hoop snakes. People always want to see them… until it’s too late.
A drop bear got my auntie. All they found was her eskie… empty.
Typical. Those drop bears have no respect at all for a person’s eskie.
Thieves and murderers the lot of em. Just like my great great granddad before he was shipped here.
Some say that the drop bears are the true descendants of the first British convicts sent to Australia
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I’m from the US but lived in Japan for a while. They have squirrels, but they’re not very common. They went nuts when they would see a squirrel. At least where I was (Tohoku).
I’ve seen a vanload of tourists happily taking pictures of sheep on more than one occasion. New Zealand.
I mean, I grew up in the US by several sheep farms and I would take pics of the critters constantly because they’re cute.
When I first moved, I was happy to just see some robins.
I still get a giggle when I see them pretending to be the Amazon delivery crew.
Not a tourist, but a girlfriend that grew up in Long Beach, and moved to the East Coast, stopped me dead on the street one day, and asked, “what in the world is THAT‽‽‽” I looked where she was looking and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, said, “what is what?”
“The furry thing with the tail!”
“You mean the squirrel?”
“That’s what they look like in real life‽‽‽”
Black bears, mountains southeast USA
Alligators…not sure if that’s considered “common” or not. We don’t see them on a regular basis depending on your activities. If you fish/kayak on a lot, you’ll see them. If you don’t, you generally won’t unless there’s a drought. Then they’ll be in intersections or in your parking lot at work looking for water.
I’ve had kinda an inverse experience of this.
I was on a vacation to Mexico with my family and we decided to visit a local zoo. For the most part it was pretty similar to what we have back home with lions and gorillas but there was one exhibit that was drawing a large crowd so we decided to go see what it was. Once we are able to get a look inside there were just 4 or 5 white tailed deer grazing on some grass. We got a good laugh because back home these things are common to the point of nuisance. I don’t speak Spanish but I then started to notice several children pointing and mentioning “Bambi” to their parents and all the commotion made sense
Royalty 🇬🇧
