Some of my scariest wildlife encounters in the field

In honor of Halloween, I wrote an article discussing some of the spookiest and scariest moments I've had as a wildlife photographer.  This charge by a big bull elephant back in July is barely worth mentioning compared to some of the other encounters.

You can read the article here.

Have any of you had some memorable, scary/tense wildlife moments (which you can look back on with a chuckle later)?

Max

This could develop into an interesting thread. Here's mine:

Max and the Salt Chuck Mine Hike

 

Wow, Jim.  Pulse-pounding.

I've been fortunate that none of my backwoods bear encounters have resulted in charges yet.  I'm usually tromping around looking for owls, but to date have made enough noise to give them a fair bit of warning.  Still, I can remember one bear standing there eyeing me at close range for a good thirty seconds, as though deciding whether I was worth the effort.   That was a bit unsettling.

Max

Love the pic, my wild photo adventures are more local, so the Deer, occasional skunk, or snakes, have not been captures on "film" yet.

Mine are local, too, but since I'm in Florida mine include alligators.  Floridians generally are not afraid, just wary, of alligators on land, but we normally do not make a practice of swimming in any body of fresh water in Florida. 

We have a pond behind our house, and sometimes it has an alligator in it and sometimes it doesn't.  On this occasion I knew there was an alligator there, and this was VERY foolish of me.  This goes from the pond to a spillway in which the water overflows as necessary.  I was not only sitting at the edge with my back to the pond, I was sitting partway down.  So when I heard a noise behind me I don't need to tell you what I said (at least to myself).  I didn't say anything out loud.

I turned around, and this is what I saw, just at this POV.  There wasn't really anything I could do but stare him down, because anything else would have involved running in the water, and that is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do.  So I stared at him and he stared at me for at least a minute or two, and then he slowly, very slowly, backed down into the pond.  I was afraid to move, but I knew I needed to get back up on land, so that's what I did.  I was very lucky.

On our trip to Belize I rented a bicycle and took a ride down a dirt road near the resort.  I ran into a young black jaguar crossing the road.  I was in shock and after a few seconds I took off at a record speed for bikes.  He just lumbered into the brush along the road.  I imagine the scene would be comical to an onlooker but it is an event I will never forget.  Upon returning to the resort they proclaimed that there were no black jaguars (wrong!).  The next day we went to the Belize Zoo where there were two captive ones.

Wow, Patricia.  That's pretty special.  There have been fleeting sightings in Latin America over the years, but usually they're only seen in camera trap footage.  A British photographer camped out at Tiputini Research Station in Ecuador for a month and managed to get a face-to-face encounter (with photos), but it's exceedingly rare.

Max

Can't really think of any scary moments while in the field shooting, but can certainly think of a startling moment.  Paddling my kayak one day on Boiling Creek  (a swampy little stream in NW Florida) I was just floating downstream, making zero noise and I came to a bed of river grass that was about 3 feet tall (about head height with me in the kayak).  Turns out, there was a small gator (5-6') sunning in the grass and I startled it, and it, in turn startled the crap of me when it exploded and tried to escape the situation by coming out of the grass and over the back of my kayak before hitting the water and disappearing.  I didn't have time to be scared but the incident evoked that crazy laughter that sometimes comes when you know you just dodged a bullet.

Then there was the time when I was a teenager (many years ago!!) when I stepped on a timber rattler while feeding the dogs on our farm.  Young reflexes being what they are, I reflexively jumped about twenty feet away one millisecond after it's tail struck up a warning!  I was very lucky that day that I didn't get bit.

Aren't rattlesnakes fun? Two incidents come to mind for me when I, as Bill, was a younger lad and crazy about fishin'. One in Modoc County California in high grass along the South Fork of the Pitt River. You kind of do a "modified stationary panic" in the immortal words of Patrick F. McManus when you hear that warning bell go off. The other time I was backpacking in the Trinity Alps, again, Northern California. My buddies and I got to a nice campsite about ten miles from the trail head where there were three logs placed in a C shape. They took one of the logs and I ended up straddling the end of the opposite log. Out from between my legs a little insignificant 18" Pacific rattler came rattling away, complaining about me disturbing it's nap. After checking for soilage, I proceeded to take my aggressions out on the poor little snake. I would never do that these days, mostly because I would probably be dying of a heart attack now a days instead of jumping up and down on adrenaline.