Ponderosa Pine
Ponderosa pine gives the Pine Ridge a western forest silhouette and reaches the eastern edge of its natural continental range in Nebraska.
Places and wildlife — page 7
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Limber Pine
A few native limber pines reach east from the Rockies into Kimball County, forming one of Nebraska’s most surprising tree populations.
Rocky Mountain Juniper
Rocky Mountain juniper threads blue-green columns through Nebraska’s western escarpments, where it can meet and hybridize with eastern redcedar.
Paper Birch
Paper birch survives in cool Niobrara canyons as a remnant of a colder climate, far south of its familiar northern forests.
Eastern Redcedar
Eastern redcedar can be both winter shelter and ecological warning: a useful native tree that transforms grassland when fire disappears.
Ozark Swallowtail
The Ozark swallowtail is a subtle regional specialist whose identity depends as much on place and behavior as on wing pattern.
Periodical Cicadas
Missouri’s periodical cicadas are not an annual attraction: the forest-wide chorus arrives only when a mapped 13- or 17-year brood emerges.
Common Eastern Firefly
The familiar summer flash is a coded courtship signal, with each species using its own timing, height, and shape in darkness.
Luna Moth
A luna moth’s luminous green adult life lasts roughly a week, devoted entirely to finding a mate rather than eating.
American Burying Beetle
North America’s largest carrion beetle converts one small vertebrate carcass into an underground brood chamber, then does something exceptional for an insect: both parents tend and feed the larvae.
Missouri Evening Primrose
Its lemon-yellow flowers open toward evening, transforming a harsh limestone glade just as sphinx moths begin to fly.
Big Bluestem
Missouri’s prairie giant builds a warm-season canopy above the flowers and a far larger architecture belowground, where dense roots helped create and still stabilize tallgrass soil.
Purple Coneflower
A familiar garden flower becomes more interesting in the wild, where its stiff cone feeds pollinators in summer and finches in winter.
Cardinal Flower
Few Missouri flowers match cardinal flower’s red, a color and tubular shape tuned especially well to hummingbird vision and bills.
Rose Verbena
From a distance Rose Verbena can masquerade as a patch of phlox; at knee level, its hairy trailing stems, rooted nodes, and opposite three-part toothed leaves give the glade plant away.
Flowering Dogwood
Dogwood’s famous white “petals” are actually bracts framing a compact bouquet of tiny true flowers.
Shortleaf Pine
Shortleaf pine once shaped vast Ozark landscapes, and restoration is rebuilding the open, fire-influenced woodland beneath its crowns.
Ozark Chinquapin
Once a canopy tree, Ozark chinquapin now often survives as repeated sprouts fighting the introduced chestnut-blight fungus.
Eastern Black Walnut
Black walnut combines valuable dark timber with a green-husked fruit whose hidden shell demands patience from squirrels and people alike.
New England Cottontail
New England’s only native cottontail depends on dense young forest, a habitat that disappears as shrubland matures or is fragmented.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Move from a Gothic Revival landmark into galleries where European masters, American modernism, decorative arts, and contemporary installations repeatedly change scale.
Puritan Tiger Beetle
One of America’s rarest tiger beetles survives along exposed banks of the Connecticut River and Chesapeake Bay—nowhere between them.
Yale University Art Gallery
Ancient sculpture, African art, American painting, modern abstraction, and photography meet inside buildings that make looking itself part of the lesson.
American Shad
This ocean-going herring returns to fresh water each spring, reconnecting the Connecticut River with the Atlantic in one powerful migration.
Yale Center for British Art
Daylight, travertine, concrete, and oak frame British paintings, sculpture, drawings, and rare books in Louis Kahn’s final museum building.
Block Island Meadow Vole
A distinct meadow-vole subspecies lives only on Block Island, where fields, shrub edges, predators, and island history shape its whole range.
Yale Peabody Museum
Fossils, minerals, anthropology, and habitat displays return in a renovated museum where historic specimens meet contemporary research and interpretation.
Mystic Seaport Museum
Historic vessels, shipyard skills, maritime collections, and a recreated seaport village make New England’s relationship with the sea physical and walkable.
Rhode Island Red
Developed around Little Compton, this deep-red dual-purpose chicken became a globally familiar farm breed and Rhode Island’s official state bird.
New Britain Museum of American Art
A focused national collection moves from early portraiture and Hudson River landscapes to illustration, modernism, and contemporary art at a manageable scale.
North Atlantic Right Whale
A broad back, rough head callosities, and V-shaped blow identify one of Earth’s rarest whales when it gathers seasonally off Massachusetts.
Bruce Museum
Minerals, fossils, regional ecology, and changing art exhibitions share a dramatically expanded Greenwich museum beside Bruce Park.
Northern Red-bellied Cooter
Massachusetts protects a far-northern, geographically isolated population of this large basking turtle through one of America’s longest headstart programs.
Atlantic Cod
A chin barbel, pale lateral line, and three dorsal fins identify the cold-water fish that shaped Massachusetts food, trade, and politics.
Connecticut Science Center
Ten floors of interactive exhibits turn forces, health, space, engineering, and the river environment into experiments rather than display cases.
Florence Griswold Museum
A boardinghouse, painted doors, riverside gardens, and galleries preserve the social world that made Old Lyme an American art colony.
Jesup’s Milkvetch
This federally endangered wildflower survives only on a few ice-scoured ledges beside the Connecticut River in Vermont and New Hampshire.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Changing exhibitions and outdoor works make this small Ridgefield museum a place to encounter contemporary art without a permanent-collection safety net.
Morgan Horse
Descending from a single Vermont stallion called Figure, the Morgan became a compact, versatile American breed known for strength and willing movement.
Mattatuck Museum
Regional industry, immigration, community life, and American art share a renovated downtown museum that keeps local history in conversation with wider visual culture.
White Mountain Fritillary
This small orange fritillary exists nowhere outside the Presidential Range alpine zone, where wind, cold, rock, and dwarf plants define survival.
Robbins’ Cinquefoil
Once pushed toward extinction by collecting and trampling, this miniature alpine plant now survives in carefully protected Mount Washington habitat.
Submarine Force Library & Museum
The USS Nautilus and a shore museum explain submarine design, hidden work, navigation, and the people who served beneath the sea.
Connecticut River Museum
Three floors above the Essex waterfront connect Indigenous presence, shipbuilding, trade, wildlife, and changing river conditions to the water outside.
Purple Finch
New Hampshire’s state bird is a stout forest finch whose males look washed in raspberry and whose movements follow shifting seed crops.
Atlantic Puffin
Atlantic puffins returned to historic Maine nesting islands through decades of seabird restoration, social attraction, and careful colony protection.
Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center
Immersive landscapes, archaeology, oral history, objects, and contemporary tribal voices tell a long Pequot story beyond a single colonial conflict.
Katahdin Arctic Butterfly
This cold-adapted butterfly survives on Katahdin’s alpine tableland, isolated from related arctics by forest and thousands of years of climate change.