common wildlife species

Look, a crow! Or is it a raven? Wait, it looks like a koel!

(it's a magpie)

You can't go wrong with pokemon because most doesn't share similar silhouette, like even if 4 legged feline, there's very distinct shape between Persian, Umbreon, and Nermal. That's very important for pattern recognition.

Common wildlife species also weren't designed by art and marketing people to be visually distinct and easy to recognise.

There isn't a song that names all the wildlife creatures either...

I also don't have a convenient, and actually useful AI device that knows everything about every animal that I keep on me at all times. Something close to it, but it's wrong 70% of the time.

There's also only 1025 pokemon. There are so, so, so many more animals IRL to memorize.

Yeah, what an idiotic comparison. The one thing is a game franchise, specifically designed to get you hooked on it and "collect them all" which obviously means you need to know what you are collecting. Plus the name yelling thing.

The other thing is... life. How many average 8-year olds are travelling the world to see all animals? They certainly don't have unrestricted access to the internet (hopefully) to lookup animals. There's no reward for knowing that.

Just a shitty comparialson.

That was in 2002. That percentage must be much lower now, since the number of Pokemon has increased due to a phenomenon called Pokémon inflation.

There were like 20 different kinds of small birds where I grew up. Adult me can't tell you the species of any of them.

Unless of course, one were to live a part of the world where the Tokay gecko can commonly be found.

As for the 50% common wildlife species, most of those kids would probably also resorted to their Pokemon knowledge to figure those out: "That one looks like Pidgey, hmm that must be a Pigeon then?"

We do have the Cuckoo

Whip-poor-wills yell their name at you.

I love it when wild animals yell at me.

Whether it's that guy at the bus stop who blocks the traffic or the one with the bible and the speaker that renders his words into nonsense noise...

They're all a part of our ecosystem!

I was just watching a dude not know what a horseshoe crab was, but describe a similar Pokémon’s evolution step by step, as this scrolled onto my screen. .

Killdeer