Long-tailed Weasel
A fast, flexible hunter able to follow rodents into spaces far smaller than its apparent body length.
Ontario, Canada: places and wildlife
Browse the published Explore collection for Ontario, Canada. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
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.
Eastern Bluebird
A sky-blue thrush that hunts from fence posts and readily adopts nest boxes across Missouri’s open countryside.
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.
House Mouse
The mouse most closely tied to people is best identified by a nearly bare scaly tail and muted gray-brown body—and best managed by sealing the building, not chasing the animal.
Deer Mouse
Missouri’s open-country Peromyscus is a large-eyed seed cacher whose crisp brown-over-white coat is recognizable, but whose indoor traces demand sanitation rather than close inspection.
North American Bullfrog
Missouri’s largest frog broadcasts a deep jug-o-rum from permanent water, where one missing pair of back folds separates it from the smaller Green Frog.
North American River Otter
Missouri’s restored river predator travels as a low muscular ripple, leaving paired tracks, fish-scaled latrines, and bank slides that only become convincing when read together.
Western Meadowlark
Kansas’s flute-voiced grassland emblem is often identified by song before its yellow breast ever comes into view.
Barred Tiger Salamander
A boldly marked prairie amphibian that spends most of its life hidden beneath Kansas soil.
Channel Catfish
Kansas’s state fish navigates opaque water with eight barbels and taste receptors across its skin, but the fastest identification begins behind it—with a deeply forked tail.
Ring-necked Pheasant
At a Kansas field edge, the obvious copper male and the nearly erased brown female are two versions of the same introduced bird—both betrayed by an extraordinarily long pointed tail.
American Kestrel
North America’s smallest falcon hunts Kansas roadsides from wires, poles, and wind-held hovering flight.
Northern Flicker
A large spotted woodpecker hunts ants on Kansas lawns and prairie edges, then flashes a white rump and yellow—or sometimes reddish—flight feathers when disturbed.
Red-winged Blackbird
One Cheyenne Bottoms cattail can hold two identification lessons: a glossy male turning hidden red shoulders into a territorial flag, and a heavily streaked female moving low enough to be mistaken for a sparrow.
Killdeer
A shorebird without a shore runs across Kansas gravel, flashes two breast bands, and sometimes performs an apparently broken wing to move danger away from eggs hidden in plain sight.
American Badger
Kansas’s broadest weasel reads the prairie from below, opening prey burrows with long foreclaws and leaving fans of soil that may outlast the animal’s brief nocturnal appearance.
Sandhill Crane
About a million Sandhill Cranes use Nebraska’s central Platte as a spring refueling corridor, commuting between shallow river roosts and working fields in waves of rolling calls.
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.
American White Pelican
One of North America’s largest birds nests on remote Great Salt Lake islands and travels astonishing distances to feed in freshwater wetlands.
Lake Erie Watersnake
This nonvenomous, often nearly patternless watersnake lives on the limestone islands of western Lake Erie, where invasive round gobies transformed most of its diet and helped fuel a celebrated recovery.
Lakeside Daisy
A rare Great Lakes endemic can turn nearly barren alvar gold for a single synchronized week, surviving in thin soil over limestone where few flowering plants tolerate heat, wind, and drought.
Kirtland’s Warbler
A once-endangered warbler depends on large, carefully managed young jack-pine landscapes where males sing low among dense living branches.
Great Lakes Piping Plover
A palm-sized shorebird nests almost invisibly on Great Lakes beaches, where one footprint, loose dog, or sudden water rise can matter.
Dwarf Lake Iris
Michigan’s state wildflower forms low colonies on cool limestone-influenced shores, where a blue bloom can sit only inches above the ground.
Houghton’s Goldenrod
A globally rare goldenrod concentrates around the Straits and northern Great Lakes, where limestone shore and changing water levels maintain open habitat.
Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle
A federally endangered beetle smaller than a grain of rice survives in a few cold northern streams, mostly within Michigan.