Misplaced Wildlife

Celia: Doesn't anyone think it's odd that tropical birds were flying around in this climate? Haley: Have you ever read an encounter table? Nothing surprises me anymore. Belkar: I once fought 1d3 dire camels in a swamp. No joke. —The Order of the Stick, strip #564

What's wrong with this picture?

The bane of Naturalists, just as Anachronism Stew is the bane of Historians. This is a Trope that can manifest several different ways.

Generally, filmmakers use whichever animals they can get for a scene involving wild animals, especially in films set in Darkest Africa or The Amazon. Whether the animals are in the right environment, on the right continent or displaying appropriate behaviour is something they just hope we won't ask about.

Notorious in the case of elephants for scenes in Darkest Africa, since the only trained elephants available tend to be Indian, not African.

Glaringly obvious in the case of monkeys, as the cutest monkeys, the ones with the round faces and prehensile tails, are exclusive to the New World. Old World monkeys have long, wrinkly, often brightly colored faces and bare, often colourful, butts with non-prehensile (most of the macaque family and the colobus family) or vestigial tails (the drill and mandrill), so any film in Africa, India, Asia, or the Middle East featuring a cute little monkey hanging by its tail will annoy a naturalist like a Shakespearean costume at King Arthur's court annoys an English historian.

Also, scary things like snakes and spiders will consist of whatever the pet store had in stock. Never mind where these animals live. Never mind if they're even really dangerous either.

Can qualify as a full-fledged biology fail in cases where the animal wouldn't even be able to survive in the environment where it's depicted, never mind being in the wrong place. Fishes are perhaps the most common victims of this, as when freshwater species such as piranha or electric eels are shown living in the ocean, where salinity ought to kill them in minutes.

Misidentified wildlife is another feature of this Trope. This tends to happen to birds a lot. Some movies show a bird making generic ambient noise type calls, usually via stock footage. This ruins any sense of immersion for birdwatchers, who will immediately ask, "Hey, what's a White-throated Sparrow doing in feudal Japan?" Indeed one will eventually come away with the impression that there are no birdwatchers in Hollywood.

Occasionally, a movie or TV show will attempt to justify Misplaced Wildlife by identifying an animal onscreen, such as that White-throated Sparrow, as something completely different - even if it's a species that looks nothing like the creature onscreen.

Also, sometimes background sound effects contain sounds of animals not native to the setting of the film/TV show. Perhaps the most notorious example is the use of the distinctive "laugh" of the Australian kookaburra in jungle scenes set in Africa, or anywhere else other than Australia. This began with MGM's early-30s jungle movies like Tarzan, the Ape Man, and ever since, everybody has used this sound as jungle background.

Naturally, this Trope occurs much less often when the filming actually takes place within the area where the story is set. Also, this Trope generally applies only to normal animals. Funny Animals can be easily called as immigrants of some sort if found out of their element.

Note that this trope can also occur with plant life. In fact, it occurs often enough that Misplaced Vegetation is its own Sister Trope.

See also Noisy Nature, Diurnal Nocturnal Animal, Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying, Somewhere an Ornithologist Is Crying, and Polar Bears and Penguins.

Examples of Misplaced Wildlife include:

Played Straight Examples

Real Life

• Thanks to notorious Drug Lord Pablo Escobar, there is now a small population of hippos in Colombia.
• Birds occasionally fly to places they aren't normally seen in, such as Siberian birds in Alaska or American birds in Europe, due to being blown off course by strong winds during their migration. That said, this is such a rare occurrence, it tends to make the news.
  • And it doesn't just happen to birds either. A West Indian Manatee (more readily associated with Florida) spent his summer in Cape Cod in 2008.
  • The Wild Parrots of Brooklyn.
  • Pasadena, California has a large, non-indigenous population of naturalized parrots. According to the "Parrot Project of Los Angeles", the parrots are of at least five species. Some residents have come to enjoy the birds as part of their unique city's culture, while others consider them to be loud pests. Many theories surround the mystery of how the parrots landed in Pasadena and claimed the area as their own. A widely accepted story is that they were part of the stock that were set free for their survival from the large pet emporium at Simpson's Garden Town on East Colorado Boulevard, which burned down in 1959.
  • The same Monk Parakeets thrive in Florida, and also in isolated colonies in several other major American cities including Chicago. Technically these are "introduced" rather than misplaced—They were released as pets and have become feral versus winding up in the wrong place due to some natural phenomenon. This is unfortunately pretty common, as evidenced by the European Starling being ubiquitous across North America and the also European House Sparrow now being one of the most numerous birds on the continent, despite the latter's declining numbers in countries it is native to according to its article on That Other Wiki. Amazingly, both of these species have only been introduced to North America in the last 150 years or so. A story mentioning flocks of House Sparrows in New York City would have qualified for this trope as being wrong not that long ago.
  • The Ring-necked Pheasant, so beloved of American hunters and artists and also the state bird of South Dakota, was brought to North America in 1857. They are originally native to Russia and are also naturalized in much of Western Europe.
  • The common parakeet, or budgie, has been marching, proverbially, into the Netherlands driving out the native Sparrow (which as mention above is doing just fine in its non-native North American habitats).
  • The Rock Pigeon ended up this way due to human intervention. The species' adaptability combined with feral populations ending up on every continent except for Antarctica ended up giving what originally lived on European cliffs a very wide range, to the point where their non-native status outside their original range isn't brought up much due to how common and widespread they are, as well as the fact that these countries often have their own native species of doves and pigeons, in contrast to how the House Sparrow and European Starling stand out in North America since their families are mostly restricted to the Old World; although the Americas have species called sparrows, they're actually in the same family as Old World buntings. The fact that Rock Pigeons outside their native habitat are descended from domesticated specimens also results in varying colors among individuals.
• The story of how Singapore got its name—once upon a time, there was a fishing village called Temasek. Then a prince called Sang Nila Utama arrived, and upon reaching the shores of the island saw a creature that looked like a giant cat, with a red body, a black head and a white chest. He asked his assistant what the animal was and was told it was a lion. Hence the place was called the "Lion City" (i.e. Singapura) from that point on.
• Actual misplaced wildlife: there is a herd of South American Rheas living in northeastern Germany, of all places. Apparently, winters here aren't that much worse than in Argentina.
  • There are also a few colonies of escaped wallabies living wild in the UK.
  • The grey squirrel is native to North America but now so common in the UK that most people never see the native red ones, to the point that there is currently a campaign to introduce squirrel-hunting—and squirrel-eating—to the UK, specifically targeting the Grey Squirrel, so that the Reds have a chance to thrive again.
• Monkeys were released/escaped into the Everglades after the filming of the Tarzan movies there. While the movies were set in Africa, not Florida, they now depict accurately the fauna of the Everglades. When they were being filmed, they didn't...
  • Certain species of large constrictors often kept as pets have escaped or been illegally released when they got too big in such numbers that their populations in Florida may now be self-sustaining. So yes, now we do have potentially man-eating snakes.
  • The same is true for several species of parrots/parakeets in various areas.
• The rise of various "Beast of X" sightings and rumours circulating in rural northern England roughly coincides with a tightening of regulations on keeping large predators as pets. This is probably not a coincidence.
• There are many sightings of "black panthers" and maned lions in North America and Australia.
• It is widely believed that the countryside surrounding Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire supports a thriving wallaby population.
  • And aside of the wallabies there are Japanese sika deer all over the place, American gray squirrels driving native red squirrels into extinction and more Pere David's deer, Chinese water deer and Reeves's Muntjacks there than in their native China. British mammal fauna is completely FUBAR. Even rabbits weren't native to Britain until the Normans introduced them as game animals. Native British hares have mostly been displaced into isolated mountains and marshes by the fast-breeding continental coneys.
• Some introduced species have become so widespread, their presence can be felt all over the world. One of the most ubiquitous, the rat, has spread so relentlessly that biologists haven't got a clue what sort of habitat their wild ancestors originally came from.
  • The most widespread and familiar rat is the Norway rat (also called the Brown Rat). While, like any inhabitable place, there are rats in Norway today, it's definitely not their original, indigenous location. They were called Norway rats by an English biologist in the 18th century, when the brown rat didn't even exist in Norway.
• You wouldn't expect to see gray whales on the coast of Israel, would you?
• Dromedary camels are native to the North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where they are now completely domesticated. The only wild population is in Australia, where they were introduced.
• Many domestic species are like this: wild horses in the United States are descendants of animals brought over from Europe by Spanish explorers or that escaped from captivity. Likewise, feral populations of cats, dogs, goats, sheep, and pigs are now common in many places that they're not native to. Pigs in particular have proved so able to colonize new territory that they've become a serious ecological problem in places like California, Hawaii, Florida, and Australia.
  • However, horses evolved in North America, and only got to Eurasia relatively recently. They died out in North America about 10,000 years ago, before being reintroduced. Mustang defenders have argued that wild horses should be allowed in National Parks in the American Southwest because the archeological record shows they lived there before humans did.
• Non-native dolphins, sharks and seals sometimes turn up off the Atlantic coast of Britain.
• Pigs are native to Europe and Asia. Polynesians introduced them across the South Pacific. Spanish explorers introduced them to North America, South America, and everywhere else they went. Today, feral pigs are found from the US to Argentina, in Australia, and in a whole slew of other places they're not supposed to be. Unfortunately, due to their fast growth rate, high reproductive rate, ability to eat almost anything, and the general lack of predators capable of dealing with them, they've become a huge problem in most of the places they've been introduced to.
• On June 2011, a young emperor penguin ended up on the coast of New Zealand.
• Every now and again, a walrus will be seen in or around Northern Scotland, even though that's still quite a ways away from the walrus' natural habitat, the Arctic Circle.
• The South American nutria (looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver) has invaded many parts of the USA and Europe after being introduced there by fur ranchers.
• The common starling was not native to North America until 1890, when Eugene Schieffelin and the American Acclimatization Society released 60-100 in Central Park as part of a plan to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare to America. They are now over two-hundred million strong and a major pest bird.
• Fish also get misplaced—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not—in various rivers and streams around the world. In North America, numerous species of Asian carp have infested lakes and rivers across the United States, and on occasion so have northern snakeheads. Alligator Gar, native to the Southeast United States have been found in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkmenistan and Singapore. The South American arapaima has been introduced to lakes and rivers in Thailand and Malaysia. There are varying reasons for this, from fish owned by private collectors escaping or being released into the wild, introduced to remove pest species or as part of conservation efforts.
• The cane toad, native to South and Central America, was released into numerous islands in Oceania, the Caribbean, Hawaii and Australia where they were intended to reduce or eliminate cane beetles that were eating cane sugar, a valuable crop. The toads succeeded in their mission, but rather than stop at the beetles, they went on to eat anything else they could fit in their mouths. In addition to that, they have a deadly venom that frequently kills predator species. The lack of predators and an abundance of food sources have caused cane toad populations to explode and become a serious pest species that have destabilized every ecosystem they were introduced to.
• And just sometimes this works out all right. The fallow deer used to live in most of Europe until an ice age drove it all the way back to Turkey and beyond. Then the Romans came along and they apparently liked the deer so much they introduced the animals to, well, most of Europe.
• The old "Parisian Sewer Rat" carnival sideshow gig. If it's not a silly-looking rubber/plastic monster rat, it's typically a capybara, which are native to marshlands in South America.

Aversions and Parodies

Real Life

• Time to spoil the ending of every single "brain teaser" set in Australia, ever. There are no bears or wolves or whatever other misplaced animal the story featured heavily in Australia (well, there are dingoes...). The guy telling the story is a blowhard.
• Thanks to the oil-spill disaster, word is now out that oil companies (not just BP) drilling in the Gulf of Mexico merely duplicated their recovery plans for spillages occurring in Alaska. This includes guidelines about how to assist walruses and polar bears endangered by a spill.
• Scott of the Antarctic took guns and ammunition to fight off polar bears. They observed that some penguins were covered in scars and deduced the existence of predators. Luckily for explorers, the predators in question are killer whales. And Leopard Seals. Given, Leopard Seals are man-eaters, cunning hunters, and bloody swift. The armaments were a good idea anyway.

---