Northern Cardinal
A backyard trumpet in a red suit—easy to recognize, rewarding to really notice through every season across towns and woodland edges.
Places and wildlife
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Raccoon
Masked, tactile, and astonishingly adaptable—your cleverest nocturnal neighbor, with nimble paws built for investigating almost everything.
Katy Trail State Park
A nearly flat ribbon of crushed limestone tracing railroad history and the Missouri River past bluffs, farms, wineries, and welcoming river towns.
Ha Ha Tonka State Park
A roofless stone mansion above caves, sinkholes, a giant spring, and Lake of the Ozarks—all packed into one wildly varied park.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
An encyclopedic collection with world-class Asian art—and giant shuttlecocks on the lawn in Kansas City’s monumental cultural heart.
Eared Dove
Peru’s abundant open-country dove links a small black cheek mark with spotted wings, reddish legs, and flocks that can expand from a few town birds to moving clouds over crops.
Rufous-collared Sparrow
The everyday sparrow of Andean villages announces morning with a simple phrase that changes subtly from place to place.
Black Vulture
A highly social scavenger whose broad circles and white wing patches are familiar above both cities and wild rivers.
Neotropic Cormorant
A versatile diving bird found from Pacific harbors to Amazon rivers, often drying its wings on the nearest exposed perch.
Roadside Hawk
The small, vocal hawk of tropical roadsides often watches from a wire or bare branch before dropping onto prey.
Great Kiskadee
A loud, adaptable tropical flycatcher whose name echoes its ringing kis-ka-dee call.
Blue-gray Tanager
The calm blue-gray tanager of Amazonian gardens often appears in pairs wherever fruit and open canopy meet.
Molina’s Hog-nosed Skunk
A powerful little digger that uses an elongated nose and foreclaws to root insects from South American soil.
Long-tailed Weasel
A fast, flexible hunter able to follow rodents into spaces far smaller than its apparent body length.
South American Coati
A social forest forager whose upright ringed tail often appears above vegetation before the animal itself.
Brown-throated Sloth
A rounded clump in the Peruvian canopy resolves into long limbs, three hooked claws on every foot, a brown throat, and rain-shedding fur whose grooves host algae.
Bolivian Squirrel Monkey
A fast-moving little monkey that travels in large troops through the southwestern Amazon canopy.
Common Vampire Bat
The best-known blood-feeding mammal is also a highly social bat that shares food with unsuccessful roost-mates.
Brown Rat
A Brown Rat problem is a route-finding problem: identify the stocky ground-level rat, map fresh sign to food and entry, clean contamination wet, then close the building before measuring whether control worked.
Black Rat
The agile roof-climbing rat of ports and warm cities differs sharply from its heavier, burrowing relative.
Cane Toad
A broad-headed Neotropical toad carries large toxin glands behind its eyes—an effective defense that makes a curious dog, not a quiet observer, the urgent concern.
Green Iguana
A powerful tree-dwelling herbivore that can escape predators by diving from branches directly into water.
Yellow-footed Tortoise
The Amazonian motelo walks humid forest floors on yellow-scaled limbs, tracking fallen fruit and fungi through habitat where an open-country tortoise would look out of place.
Common House Gecko
A human-transported tropical gecko that patrols walls beneath lights and announces itself with surprisingly audible chirps.
Eastern Bluebird
A sky-blue thrush that hunts from fence posts and readily adopts nest boxes across Missouri’s open countryside.
Northern Bobwhite
A round, secretive quail more often found by its clear bob-WHITE whistle than by a clean view.
American Robin
The familiar lawn bird whose upright pauses, orange breast, and liquid dawn song reward a much closer look.
Blue Jay
A crested blue corvid that caches acorns, imitates hawks, and maintains a surprisingly complex neighborhood social life.
Mourning Dove
A small-headed dove writes its identity in motion: pointed tail, white tail corners, black wing spots, explosive takeoff, and a high mechanical whistle quite separate from its mournful voice.
Wild Turkey
Missouri’s restored woodland giant scratches for mast by day, flies to a high tree roost at dusk, and turns spring clearings into a careful performance of gobble, strut, fan, and low drumming.
Canada Goose
The black-necked goose behind migrating V formations, urban grazers, family processions, and loud seasonal skies.
Mallard
A widespread dabbling duck whose glossy drake is obvious—and whose variable females reward more careful identification.
Great Blue Heron
A long-legged ambush hunter that can look prehistoric at close range and surprisingly compact when folded in flight.
Red-tailed Hawk
A broad-winged raptor commonly seen on poles, thermals, and highway trees, yet extraordinarily variable in plumage.
Bald Eagle
A fish-eating sea eagle whose recovery turned a once-imperiled national emblem back into a familiar sight over major waters.
Turkey Vulture
A long-tailed scavenger rides warm air on raised wings, teetering with few flaps while its pale flight feathers flash across the entire trailing edge.
Red-bellied Woodpecker
A zebra-backed woodpecker named for a faint belly wash, not the far more obvious red on its head.
Pileated Woodpecker
A huge crested woodpecker whose ringing laugh and rectangular excavations announce mature forest even when the bird stays hidden.
White-tailed Deer
The adaptable deer behind dawn roadside silhouettes, garden browsing, spotted fawns, antler cycles, and flashing white alarm tails.
Coyote
A slender, intelligent canid equally capable of living in prairie, desert, farm country, forest edge, and major cities.
Eastern Gray Squirrel
A familiar tree squirrel whose spatial memory, deceptive digging, and forgotten caches help regenerate hardwood forests.
Fox Squirrel
A hefty tree squirrel of farms, parks, and open oak country, often warmer-colored and more deliberate than the eastern gray.
Eastern Cottontail
A compact rabbit that freezes into invisibility, then bounds for dense cover with its cotton-white tail flashing.
Virginia Opossum
A nocturnal generalist with a pouch, fifty teeth, a grasping tail, and a famous involuntary shutdown response.
Striped Skunk
A mostly nocturnal digger that advertises powerful chemical defense with bold black-and-white fur and patient warnings.
Groundhog
Missouri’s largest squirrel lives mostly underground, marking a field edge with fresh soil, feeding paths, a whistle, and brief upright surveys before winter removes it from view.
American Beaver
A broad-tailed rodent that fells trees, stores branches, builds dams, and creates habitat used by entire freshwater communities.
Bobcat
Missouri’s statewide wild cat often appears first as a nearly straight track line through mud, then as long hind legs, cheek ruffs, and a short tail slipping between brush and clearing.