New England Air Museum
Civil, military, and Connecticut-built aircraft reveal aviation through full machines, restored interiors, engines, and the labor behind flight.
Places and wildlife — page 8
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry
Changing exhibitions reveal puppets as engineered performers shaped by material, movement, voice, politics, and the hands that animate them.
Furbish’s Lousewort
Rediscovered after decades of presumed extinction, this rare wildflower lives only on naturally eroding banks of the upper Saint John River.
The Mark Twain House & Museum
Guided rooms, decorative surfaces, family stories, and the nearby museum trace the Hartford years when Samuel Clemens produced much of his defining work.
Willow Ptarmigan
Feathered feet, seasonal white plumage, and a taste for willow let this Arctic grouse remain active through Alaska’s long winter.
Alaska Blackfish
This small Arctic fish survives warm, stagnant summer ponds and oxygen-poor winter water by gulping air into a specialized esophagus.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
Stowe’s final Hartford home uses objects, documents, and facilitated discussion to examine writing, abolition, family, race, and the limits of reform.
Glacier Bay Water Shrew
Known from a small part of Southeast Alaska, this rare semi-aquatic shrew swims cold streams on fringed feet and hunts underwater prey.
The Glass House
Philip Johnson’s transparent house is only one structure in a 49-acre composition of architecture, art, paths, views, and deliberate contrasts.
Hill-Stead Museum
Theodate Pope Riddle’s Colonial Revival home preserves paintings, furnishings, archives, gardens, and landscape as an unusually intact personal composition.
Nēnē
Evolved from Canada goose ancestors, nēnē traded strongly webbed feet for better walking across Hawaiian lava and upland grasslands.
ʻIʻiwi
A long curved bill and brilliant scarlet body identify this endemic honeycreeper, now pushed upslope as mosquitoes carry avian malaria.
Weir Farm National Historical Park
Studios, stone walls, orchard, pond, and farm buildings preserve the Connecticut place where J. Alden Weir and later artists worked outdoors and in company.
Gillette Castle State Park
William Gillette’s hand-designed fieldstone home joins carved mechanisms, eccentric rooms, former railway paths, and broad Connecticut River views.
Hawaiian Monk Seal
Hawaiian monk seals forage across deep reefs but spend roughly a third of their time ashore, where undisturbed rest is essential.
ʻŌpeʻapeʻa
This solitary, tree-roosting bat is Hawaiʻi’s only living native terrestrial mammal and an insect hunter most often detected after sunset.
Old New-Gate Prison & Copper Mine
Underground mine tunnels, ruined prison walls, and archaeology reveal a site where extraction, punishment, labor, and preservation repeatedly changed meaning.
Fort Trumbull State Park
A nineteenth-century coastal fort, riverwalk, visitor center, and harbor outlook explain New London’s strategic position beside the Thames River.
Kamehameha Butterfly
This orange-and-brown butterfly occurs only in Hawaiʻi, where its caterpillars depend primarily on native māmaki and related nettle-family plants.
California Condor
With a wingspan near ten feet, North America’s largest land bird now flies again above California after every surviving wild condor entered captivity.
Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park
Earthworks, a tall monument, museum rooms, and a commanding river view mark the violent 1781 attack on Groton Heights.
Henry Whitfield State Museum
A massive seventeenth-century stone house and modern visitor center examine colonial settlement, architecture, mythmaking, and the Indigenous land beneath the familiar landmark.
Island Scrub-Jay
The Island Scrub-Jay occurs naturally only on Santa Cruz Island, giving it the smallest geographic range of any North American bird species.
Prudence Crandall Museum
The former Canterbury Female Boarding School interprets Black education, organized white opposition, law, violence, and Prudence Crandall’s students as actors in their own history.
Tule Elk
Once reduced to a single tiny herd, tule elk now occupy protected pockets across California grasslands, marsh edges, and oak country.
Delta Smelt
This slender, nearly translucent fish lives only in the upper San Francisco Estuary, where its seasonal movements track fresh water, tides, and salinity.
Roseland Cottage
Pointed gables, patterned interiors, a boxwood parterre, and the nation’s oldest surviving indoor bowling alley preserve elite nineteenth-century summer life.
Giant Sequoia
Giant sequoias grow naturally only in scattered Sierra Nevada groves, building extraordinary volume through thick fire-resistant bark and immense longevity.
Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum
An enormous 1860s country house combines Second Empire architecture, technological innovation, elaborate interiors, and the unstable fortunes of two families.
Coast Redwood
Coast redwoods occupy a narrow Pacific fog belt, where immense height, canopy moisture, and vigorous resprouting build forests found nowhere else.
Nathan Hale Homestead
The Hale family house and farmland place Nathan Hale within household labor, Revolutionary politics, siblings, military choices, and the later construction of patriotic memory.
Hammonasset Beach State Park
Beach, boardwalk, campground, marsh, and the Meigs Point Nature Center make Connecticut’s largest shoreline park far more than a swimming stop.
Sleeping Giant State Park
Basalt ridges form a reclining profile above Hamden, with routes ranging from a broad tower path to steep, rocky blue-blazed trails.
Silver Sands State Park
A coastal boardwalk crosses restored dunes and marsh while Charles Island sits offshore, reachable only under narrow and hazardous tidal conditions.
Rocky Neck State Park
A sheltered Sound beach opens into tidal marsh, wooded trails, a historic fieldstone pavilion, camping, and views across the Four Mile River.
Devil’s Hopyard State Park
A stepped waterfall, mysterious potholes, hemlock woods, camping, and rocky trails make a compact park with both geological and folkloric layers.
Wadsworth Falls State Park
Broad Wadsworth Falls, narrower Little Falls, forest roads, streams, and a seasonal swimming area create several distinct park experiences.
Talcott Mountain State Park
A short but steady climb reaches a 1914 hilltop tower, traprock ledges, and broad Farmington Valley views along the Metacomet Ridge.
Dinosaur State Park
More than 750 visible dinosaur tracks remain under a geodesic dome beside trails and an arboretum planted with ancient lineages.
Harkness Memorial State Park
Eolia mansion, pergolas, lawns, gardens, saltwater views, and working shoreline ecology share a former Gilded Age estate.
Kent Falls State Park
A short climb follows a mountain stream through repeated drops while a historic covered bridge and picnic meadow frame the park entrance.
Bluff Point State Park
An 800-acre coastal reserve joins woods, bluff, beach, tidal marsh, mudflat, and eelgrass along a long multi-use loop.
Farmington Canal Heritage Trail
A mostly paved north–south route follows transportation layers from New Haven toward Massachusetts through cities, wetlands, stone cuts, and surviving lock history.
Air Line State Park Trail
A crushed-stone rail trail crosses eastern Connecticut on dramatic fills, cuts, wetlands, and bridges once engineered for a fast New York–Boston route.
Appalachian Trail — Connecticut
Connecticut’s Appalachian Trail follows Housatonic flats, steep ridges, waterfalls, and the state’s high northwest corner through a deceptively demanding section.
New England National Scenic Trail — Connecticut
The blue-blazed Mattabesett and Metacomet routes connect rocky ridges, reservoirs, forests, and towns as Connecticut’s share of a national scenic trail.
Steep Rock Preserve
Trails loop beside the Shepaug River through hemlock forest, old carriage roads, a former railroad tunnel, and the dramatic Steep Rock overlook.
Elizabeth Park Rose Garden
Thousands of roses, curved pergolas, greenhouses, lawns, and specialty gardens form a free public landscape on the Hartford–West Hartford line.