People Are Pretty Stumped Over What Looks Like A Flying Cat

“As soon as I downloaded the photo, I couldn’t help seeing the cat head."

When Bob White was younger, he used to love doing The New York Times Crossword puzzle with his dad. One clue that often seemed to come up was “Hawaiian goose,” for which the answer is "nene." White wondered if he would ever actually get to see a nene out in the wild, and recently, he finally got his chance. 

White was at the Haleakala National Park headquarters in Maui, Hawaii, when he suddenly spotted a nene flying overhead. This was finally his chance. He went to grab his camera, but by that point the bird was already past him. He tried to take a picture anyway — but ended up catching the bird from kind of a weird angle. 

Afterwards, White looked at the photo — and couldn’t help but smile at what he had accidentally captured.

bird
Bob White

“As soon as I downloaded the photo, I couldn’t help seeing the cat head, but knowing what it actually was, I knew that I had evidence of having seen it,” White told The Dodo.

From that angle, the nene looked more like some sort of strange flying cat. It’s definitely not a creature most people have seen soaring across the skies before, and as soon as White posted it, people went pretty wild for it.

“I’m amazed that the photo got over 5,000 likes in Crap Wildlife Photography, but it really does look like a cat’s head on one of Daenerys Targaryen’s pets,” White said. “I don’t know if the ‘ears’ are its feet or outer rectrices [tail feathers].”

After waiting so long to see a nene, White was hoping to get a cool photo to commemorate the occasion — and the weird cat-bird photo actually worked out just fine.