Wild animal sighting you felt the luckiest to experience?

A little owl (Glaucidium passerinum) when I made cross-country skiing in a Southern France station.
This bird is very discreet, and among the rarest species of owl in all the country.
 
Glaucidium is normally called Pygmy Owl, Little Owl is Athene noctua, which is much easier to see. Congratulations on seeing Glaucidium!
 
I went to Custer State Park in South Dakota when I was around 8 years old and I had the opportunity to see wild bighorn sheep, bison, prairie dogs and donkeys. Seeing that massive bison herd walk across an open field was something I'll never forget. Also the two bighorn sheep about to butt heads then deciding to chase after our family's rental car - nearly giving my dad a heart attack - was a unique experience too.
 
PAKMan said:
I went to Custer State Park in South Dakota when I was around 8 years old and I had the opportunity to see wild bighorn sheep, bison, prairie dogs and donkeys. Seeing that massive bison herd walk across an open field was something I'll never forget. Also the two bighorn sheep about to butt heads then deciding to chase after our family's rental car - nearly giving my dad a heart attack - was a unique experience too.
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I don't know that you can call those bison 'wild'.
 
This morning I saw a piebald White tail deer running along the road. It was trying to get into a cluster of trees but a tall fence was stopping it. Eventually it darted across the road and ran into someone's backyard. The deer I saw looked very similar to this one:
a-piebald-deer-david-taylor.jpg
 
I was in Maui a few years back snorkeling and when I was making my way back in I saw a bunch of people on the beach pointing and yelling about something. I glanced back and there was a pretty big sea turtle swimming a few inches away from me, probably my coolest experience with a wild animal. I'd assume it was a Green Sea turtle, looked to big to be a Hawksbill or Loggerhead
 
Pink river dolphins in Rio Negro Brazil. They were habituated to being fed but to be floating in a warm river the color of dark tea and suddenly these dolphins came vertically up beside you bumping against you. Unlike bottlenose which swim toward you at the surface the pinks don't give warning that they are alongside. Plus their great long beaks as they take a fish you're holding. Magical magical magical.
 
While their population numbers in the rest of Europe are doing fine, here in the UK red squirrels are classed as endangered and very rare. I've seen wild ones a small handful of times, and I always get super excited when I do see them. It also always brightens my day when I see a wild deer, hedgehog, mole or frog. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it keeps me smiling for the rest of the day.
 
Highlights from Africa include African wild dog, brown hyena, aardvark, black mamba (really cool, close up encounter, on foot), boomslang, secretarybird, and a host of other species that were brand new to me (I saw five species of mongoose in Tanzania, three of which I'd never seen in zoos).

The rarest US species I've seen in the wild is probably bog turtle.
 
Kudu21 said:
For me, the two sightings that automatically come to mind are my last-minute, "Hail Mary" of sightings of a trio of sable antelope in Kruger National Park and of a lone Cape mountain zebra stallion in the Cape Point Nature Reserve. Both creatures were high up on my list of animals I wanted to strive to see during my time in South Africa, both animals coming with a certain degree of difficulty, but not edging on near impossible.

Now, I had seen sable antelope from the road several times while driving about the countryside, but none of these animals were truly wild, living on game ranches or small reserves, and most were outside of their natural range. The only time I was within their natural range was during my four days in Kruger National Park. I was based at the Pretoriuskop Camp, which has the head of a sable as its symbol, as they were once quite common in that area. Unfortunately, sable have become increasingly rare, and we were told that it was very unlikely that we'd actually see one. And that was the case for almost all of the four days I spent in the park. Then, finally, on my last day, on my last game drive before heading back to Johannesburg, not far from the camp entrance, three sable dashed out of the brush on a distant hillside, running down through the shallow ravine. They were gone as quickly as they appeared, so I'm left with only a couple of out of focus photos and my memories, but it made for an invigorating sighting!

Being endemic to such a small region of South Africa, the Cape mountain zebra is an animal that I desperately wanted to see, not knowing if I'd ever get the chance to see one again; however, with them being found in only a handful of locations, mostly in the more remote areas of the Cape provinces-- minus the population in the Cape Point Nature Reserve outside of Cape Town-- I knew my chances were slim, as for the majority of my time in the country, I was based in Pretoria with limited transportation options. My last week in the country, I ended up flying out for a last-minute four-day-weekend to Cape Town with two vet students from Spain that I worked alongside at the National Zoo in Pretoria. On our second full day in the city we took a guided bus tour of the Cape peninsula, which included a game drive through the Cape Point Nature Reserve to the Cape of Good Hope. The fynbos in winter is rather bare, but its starkness is truly beautiful. In our several hours in the park we saw some notable wildlife, including beach-combing chacma baboons and ostriches and herds of bontebok and eland but no sign of the zebra other than some old dung and tracks. At sunset, we were exiting the park and heading down the road back to Cape Town, when I looked over and saw a single Cape mountain zebra stallion grazing on the hillside amongst a small herd of bontebok! The bus pulled off the side of the road, and we were able to get out and admire the stallion for quite a while as he grazed in the fading sunlight. Our guides said that we were extremely lucky to have seen one, as they had not seen one in almost two months.
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To add a native sighting to this list, a couple of months ago my partner, my best friend, and I were driving through western Louisiana after taking a weekend trip together for a concert. As we were driving down I-10, through the rice and sugar fields and cattle pastures, we had a whooping crane fly up out of a field and over the highway right in front of us! It was such a privilege to have even such a small sighting of what is truly an iconic species for conservation in North America, one that I had worked adjacent to for so many years but did not expect to see so absolutely by chance in the wild.
 
This is nothing compared to everyone else, but I once came across a wild Eurasian otter on the Isle of Skye. It was about 5:30 in the morning and it was swimming on its back and diving in the water as I stood on the rocks. Again, it’s not much really but I’m so glad I made the decision to get up early that morning.
 
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