Black Vulture
A highly social scavenger whose broad circles and white wing patches are familiar above both cities and wild rivers.
Mexico: places and wildlife
Browse the published Explore collection for Mexico. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
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.
Long-tailed Weasel
A fast, flexible hunter able to follow rodents into spaces far smaller than its apparent body length.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Western Meadowlark
Kansas’s flute-voiced grassland emblem is often identified by song before its yellow breast ever comes into view.
Ornate Box Turtle
Kansas’s state reptile crosses prairie with a yellow-starred shell and a durable mental map—one reason moving it to “better habitat” can do lasting harm.
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.
Black-tailed Prairie Dog
A talkative burrowing rodent whose clipped lawns and tunnel systems reorganize an entire patch of prairie.
American Kestrel
North America’s smallest falcon hunts Kansas roadsides from wires, poles, and wind-held hovering flight.
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher
A pale summer flycatcher turns Kansas utility lines into launchpads for pink-flashed aerial loops.
Dickcissel
This grassland bunting broadcasts its own name from Kansas weeds, fences, and bluestem each summer.
Burrowing Owl
A small, long-legged owl stands in daylight beside a prairie-dog mound, using another mammal’s excavation as nest, refuge, and lookout.
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.
Black-tailed Jackrabbit
A Western Kansas hare becomes a pair of black-tipped ears, a still body in a shallow form, and finally a flashing black upper tail carried through long open-country bounds.
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.