Mallard
A widespread dabbling duck whose glossy drake is obvious—and whose variable females reward more careful identification.
Coahuila, Mexico: places and wildlife
Browse the published Explore collection for Coahuila, Mexico. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
White-tailed Deer
The adaptable deer behind dawn roadside silhouettes, garden browsing, spotted fawns, antler cycles, and flashing white alarm tails.
Fox Squirrel
A hefty tree squirrel of farms, parks, and open oak country, often warmer-colored and more deliberate than the eastern gray.
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.
Western Meadowlark
Kansas’s flute-voiced grassland emblem is often identified by song before its yellow breast ever comes into view.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Texas Horned Lizard
The familiar “horny toad” is a specialized ant-eating lizard whose camouflage, road use, and need for open ground make casual sightings increasingly memorable.
Devils River Minnow
A small borderland fish survives in clear spring-fed reaches where groundwater, desert rivers, barriers, and two countries meet.
Lacey Oak
A small Hill Country oak with blue-gray leaves grows from limestone and canyon soils, carrying a range that crosses Texas into northeastern Mexico.
Texas Madrone
Smooth red-orange bark peels from twisting evergreen trunks in West Texas mountain canyons, linking the Trans-Pecos to a wider Mexican highland flora.
Mountain Plover
Look first for sandy plover with a white forehead and thin black forecrown in breeding plumage, then confirm it in shortgrass prairie, prairie-dog colonies, and sparsely vegetated fields. Those two clues make Mountain Plover much easier to identify responsibly in Colorado.
Golden Eagle
Utah’s state bird of prey is a powerful open-country eagle most often discovered as a dark, steady shape circling over cliffs and basins.
Greater Roadrunner
New Mexico’s state bird is a large ground-dwelling cuckoo: a fast, territorial hunter that rudders with its tail, flashes white wing patches, warms dark skin in the morning sun, and sounds nothing like a cartoon beep.
Sandia Hairstreak
New Mexico’s state butterfly spends most of its life hidden on beargrass, emerging for a short spring flight as a remarkably camouflaged green hairstreak.
Soaptree Yucca
Tall flower stalks and elevated leaf crowns mark a desert yucca whose reproduction depends on specialized moths that deliberately pollinate its flowers.
Cactus Wren
Arizona’s brash desert wren advertises itself from cholla with bold white brows, spotted plumage, and a mechanical chugging song.
Two-tailed Swallowtail
Arizona’s enormous yellow state butterfly patrols canyon streams and gardens, flashing black tiger stripes and two tails on each hindwing.
Arizona Cypress
Blue-gray scale foliage, fibrous bark, and persistent round cones identify this fire-adapted conifer of Arizona’s rocky mountain canyons.
Desert Bighorn Sheep
Nevada’s state mammal turns steep desert rock into refuge, using gripping hooves while tracking sparse forage, shade, and water across isolated ranges.
Mountain Bluebird
Idaho’s state bird flashes an almost unbroken blue across open mountain and sage country, often hovering briefly before dropping onto ground prey.