50 Times Wildlife Reminded Humans They’re Not Nearly As Tough As They Think

When you are walking at night and a group of humans start following you in the shadows. This is the most terrifying animal of all.

At the time I was working until 1am so I wouldn't get home until 2 or so. I opened the door to the house and felt what I thought was a breeze come by my leg. I don't really pay attention, walk over to my desk, put my keys down and turn the light on. Right when I do so, there are two possums in the act of mating in the middle of my kitchen. They screamed, I screamed and we began the three hour dance of getting them out of my house. I ended up trapping them in a dog cage and dumping them out in the middle of my back yard.


Edit: To avoid confusion they were opossums, not their Australian cousins!

I'm from Florida and I was volunteering at a local nature conservancy. One of our tasks was to remove fallen logs that were blocking up a creek after a big storm. The creek was about chest deep, 15 feet wide, and opaque brown (Many Florida freshwater ways are browns b/c of tannins leached into the river from trees).

As I'm moving logs I notice a ~12 ft. alligator on the embankment I hadn't noticed before. It then slid into the creek I was in. I was with a land manager who was moving logs with me, and a herpetologist (who was in the canoe). I asked them what to do and they responded,"Well, those logs aren't gonna move themselves, and that gator's probably just trying to get away from us."

Still, spending 30 minutes in a creek you can't see anything, knowing there's an alligator lurking near your feet, moving logs WHICH LOOK LIKE ALLIGATORS was one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done.

I was tree planting in northern B.C.

Was working on the same piece as another planter for about an hour, then heard a soft thumping sound. Looked up and saw an adult grizzly bear running towards the other planter, whose back was to the bear. I started running towards it, waving my arms and yelling. The bear stopped, turned towards me and stood on its hind legs. I stopped moving and was about 20-30 feet away from it. The bear stared at me for about 5 seconds (felt like an eternity), dropped back down, turned around and bolted back into the tree line. Saw two cubs with it that we weren’t anywhere close to, so we figured it was probably a mother teaching its cubs how to hunt. I had to sit down for a while after that because my legs were shaking so bad.

When I was 12 a young stallion decided he wanted to play with me and almost ended me. He kicked and bit me and tried to trample me. He was my pet and was only treating me the way he'd treat a peer. I even knew that while it was happening. I made a huge mistake by turning my back on him while he was playful. He bit me and pulled me down. Knocked me down a couple of more times with a forefoot when I tried to get up. Reared up over me to stamp me a couple of times too. Still have the scar on my leg and that was a LONG time ago. Literally peed myself during.

My dad basically saved my life by chasing him off. His response was - that was close! What did you learn?

Getting a group hug by a swarm of Portuguese man o' war. Painful creatures. While treading water about 100 meters from the shore.

EDIT: Do not use vinegar to treat bluebottle stings and do not attempt to rub or scrape the tendrils off. Use the hottest running water you can bear to wash them off. They have jelly like tendrils embedded with tiny stingers which remain in the skin if you physically remove them. Hot water cooks the tendrils kind of like eggwhite and they fall off. I recommend getting buckled drunk for pain relief.

I out ran a swarm of bees.
I was young and in Straya, and we lived on the front of a farm. I went exploring a lot , it was really cool.
I found a bees nest in a huge fallen tree.
I had watched a lot of cartoons, and wanted to know if the bees would come out in an arrow and get me if I whacked it with a stick.
So I did.
They did not.
I was disappointed and climbed around the fallen tree.
The bees do attack, just not immediately. And not in an arrow. In a cloud.
Suddenly they wee all around me. I sprinted home, about 2k, and if I slowed down the bees caught up.
I ran into our yard and shut he gate, thinking I was safe.
I wasn't, obviously and got stung a few times.
I deserved it though don't go beating up animal homes.

Getting charged by a black bear.


I was hunting elk and walking on an old 90 year old railroad grade in some dense forest, and I see some movement in a tree. I get to looking, and it is two bear cubs. Oh no.

I look around and though a somewhat clear spot for the trees I see Mom, and she is headed right for me at this point. I was hunting with a fairly large rifle, a .375 H&H magnum, so I decided to give her one warning shot, and if I had to shoot a second time it would be in self defense.

I put one round into the dirt in front of her, and thankfully she decided that the cannon that just fired at her was something she didn’t want any part of, and she scrambled back and took off into the brush. I also noped the frick out of there and didn’t go that way the rest of the season. She can have that spot.

I moved to Colorado. About a month in one night I had gone to bed, and woke up on severe pain hours later. I felt nausea, throbbing pain around my abdomen,y muscles and back ached. I turned on the lights, and I had in my sleep rolled over a black widow spider and crushed it to death, which at some point had bit me. It's carcass lay in my bed. I freaked out, called 911, and put it in a mason jar so they thought I wasn't crazy. I was brought to the hospital where they treated me with pain management medications. The venom continued to spread. Every muscle ached and felt as though my body was being crushed. It soon began to get hard to breath and my blood pressure became irregular. The morphine has me drifting in and out of sleep. I prayed to God, who hours earlier I wasn't even sure I believed in. 12 hours I discharged. The venom ran its course for about 4 days, and he bite site intermittently itched for weeks. For the next year or two I had anxiety trying to go to sleep and reoccurring nightmares of the experience.

I did fieldwork back and forth between the US/UK and East and Southern Africa for ten years and in that time period, spent a good chunk of my life living at remote base camps so I have a few 'poop yourself' moments that I can list off the top off my head.

1. I was chased by an elephant (it was worse as she had a calf)

2. I know for a fact that I was stalked by at least two big cats twice (one being a leopard as it was the only large species around at the field site and the other was most likely a rogue male lion given that one was seen close by earlier and was known to hang out in the area).

3. (this one occurred in Alaska). It was my day off and I was reading in the main tent as everyone went into town and I turned around only to find a moose cow and calf about five meters away from me.

4. (this is the most recent event). We were having a party one night and I guess someone forgot to shut the kitchen door. I woke up in the morning hung over and decided to make coffee. The rubbish bag was underneath the sink and I heard something in it (I was directly over it) and I saw coils within striking distance from a Mozambique spitting cobra. That was a near s**t yourself moment

5. two spotted hyenas broke into our camp, took out a few dogs and then went over to a few tents (including mine) and pushed their muzzle through. The most surreal thing about that was, if you know anything about spotted hyenas, they actually make a noise every now and then (or every night) called a "whoop". Its insanely loud. One of them actually made that noise (it hurt my ears) but interestingly enough, it turns out that their is actually a growl that is always made directly after the whoop. So, really close up it sounds like "whoooop, grrrr" (and so on).

I have a few other stories but none of them were as terrifying as those or made me feel that my life was directly threatened.

Went to war with a huntsman spider and a mukade centipede simultaneously in my shower in Japan. Yes I was naked. Yes I won.

I was very drunk at a wedding on a large property in rural NSW. I like to wander and explore when I drink. I was alone and suddenly confronted with a wombat. Wombats are massive balls of muscle. Being the drunk idiot I was, I was all like “awww hello me wombat” and began to approach it. The wombat did not like this. It charged me. It was so fast. My heart stopped and I turned and ran as fast as I could. The little bugger nearly caught me. I sprinted back to the wedding in fear for my life.

I was cycling up a mountain in the Scottish Highlands (my gran lives there), and as I went round a corner, I came face to face with a huuuuge highland cow which was running down the mountain the opposite way. Instead of jumping off the path I thought the cow was be friendly and edge over to let me by: big mistake... it threw its head as I went by, almost impaling me and throwing me off the path and into a 20ft tumble down the mountain.

Was working in the Amazon and we had to sleep in trees during the rainy season because there was no dry ground. Woke up one night to the sound of my bug netting getting torn. The other rangers had insisted I sleep with my machete in the hammock and I had laughed at them but followed their advice. I have never been more grateful in my life. A Jaguar was pawing at us from the branch above and we held out our machetes to keep it away. We didn’t want to hurt it but we also didn’t want it dropping into our hammocks. It eventually stalked off after getting its paws pricked a few times.

Slept with that machete like a teddy bear the next 6 months.

I was solo hiking in the Porcupine Mountains in the upper peninsula of Michigan last autumn. Although I was by myself, there were plenty of other backpackers up there those couple of days.

I ran across a bear print in the trail one morning. A few hours later I rounded a corner of the trail, and about 70 ft up ahead, I saw the hind quarters of an animal with dark brown fur about 2 feet high. I got a surge of adrenaline and everything started going in slow motion. I started to panic, and just as the poop was about to leave my bum, the animal lifted it's head and it ended up being a black Labrador retriever. Right as I catch my breath, the dog's owner came rounding the corner from the opposite direction and sees me clutching my chest.

I've been woken up by a bear sniffing my head once. Was cowboy camping (no tent) in Lyell Canyon in Yosemite once, when I hear something sniff right next to my head. My sleep addled brain thinks it's a ranger on a horse telling me to move my camp (had hiked about 20 miles that day. You have to be at least 4 miles into the canyon to camp, and I wasn't 100% sure I'd made it far enough since it was dark when I set up camp).


Anyways, I say "just one second", sit up, grope for my flashlight and turn it on to see a black bear a couple feet away.


I holler, he tears off, I get out and empty my bladder, and try to fall back asleep until I hear him coming around again. I make a bunch more noise, decide I'm not getting any more sleep, break camp and slowly night hike until the sun rises.

Told this before, but hey, the question has been asked before...

My scariest animal encounter while hiking: In California on a trail cut into a steep slope so nowhere to go except along the trail. Ahead of me in the middle of the trail was a chipmunk. Running wildly in circles. With patches of fur missing.

I decided to throw a rock in its direction to scare it off the trail. When the rock landed near it, the chipmunk ran straight at me. I just about crapped myself as it ran past down the trail.

This was an area with occurrences of bubonic plague and rabies.

When I was young, I went fishing with my dad and my best friend. We waded out through some deeper water to reach the shallow sandbar, where we fished for quite a while. The tide came in, and the water that had been just above my ankles was now above my waist.

Suddenly a large shark, about 7-8 feet, crashed through a school of mullet only a few feet away from me. Dad saw it, my best friend saw it, and for a second we all three just kind of froze with our mouths hanging open. Quietly, calmly, Dad told us to walk back to shore, splashing as little as possible. We did. But the tide had come in, and I wasn’t as tall as the other two guys. The deeper water between the sandbar and shore reached their chests, but I could hardly keep my head above water while my feet barely bounced along the bottom, and I struggled to hold my fishing rod up out of the water. I was completely helpless, while we knew that a hungry shark was swimming somewhere in the area. It felt like a scene out of a nightmare, trying to run from an invisible monster, but my feet could barely touch the ground and I was hardly moving.

I know— and even knew in that moment— that I had little chance of being eaten by a shark, especially one who is focused on fish. Still, if I ever WERE to be attacked, that was the moment, and I was utterly defenseless. A few years later, a man was ended just a few miles away when he jumped off his dock and into the path of a large bull shark that was chasing mullet.

I have a few good animal stories but the scariest was getting charged by an angry bull shark. I was down in Florida with my family, and my dad, brother (11) and sister (6) were all decently far out hanging out when we spotted the shark. Is was probably between 4-4.5 ft. My dad and I went shoulder to shoulder with my siblings behind us and started quickly but calmly heading in. This thing must’ve charged us nearly half a dozen times at or near full speed and only broke off when it got within 10-15 ft. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a shark hunt at full speed but they’re significantly faster than I could sprint on land. The feeling was were in its world, and if it wants one of us it’s probably going to take one.

So we finally get in and the shark heads down the beach. I look down and there’s another family with a small girl in a life jacket out in the water. So I run down and yell to them, but they aren’t listening. I figured I’m bigger than it and if it were going to attack me it would’ve, so I start swimming out to them. I popped up about 15 ft from the girl with the dad on her other side, and that shark was right in between us. Without thinking about it I jumped forward and slapped the water and I think spooked it. I jumped forward and grabbed the girl, which the dad, who hadn’t seen the shark, didn’t appreciate lol. I pointed it out and gave him back his daughter and we got back in. He was incredibly thankful once he understood the situation.

But ya, sharks have barely changed in hundreds of millions of years, and that day I truly appreciated exactly why. Like I said, if it had wanted to take me I don’t realistically think the four of us could’ve actually stopped it.

Driving down the highway and a spider drops out from the visor and hangs in mid air in front of me then just vanishes in my lap. I blacked out but the passengers in my Uber said I was screaming, "We're all gonna die" over and over.