Rip Van Winkle Gardens
Semitropical gardens and an 1870 mansion overlook Lake Peigneur, where a 1980 drilling accident transformed the salt-dome landscape.
Louisiana, United States: places and wildlife — page 3
Browse the published Explore collection for Louisiana, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Audubon Zoo
A century-old Uptown zoo combines global conservation exhibits with Louisiana swamp ecology beneath one of New Orleans’s major live-oak canopies.
Audubon Aquarium
Mississippi River, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean reef, rainforest, and conservation exhibits connect New Orleans to the waters surrounding it.
Global Wildlife Center
Guided safari wagons cross hundreds of acres where large herds move through managed pasture, offering close observation under strict feeding rules.
Barataria Preserve
Boardwalk and natural-surface trails reveal bottomland forest, cypress swamp, marsh, bayou, and the changing hydrology of the Mississippi delta.
Chicot State Park
Louisiana’s largest state park wraps hiking, paddling, fishing, camping, and the state arboretum around a cypress-edged lake.
Fontainebleau State Park
A Lake Pontchartrain beach, pier, marsh, live oaks, trails, and brick sugar-mill ruins layer recreation over plantation and industrial history.
Grand Isle State Park
Beach, dunes, bird migration, fishing, and exposed Gulf weather make Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island both inviting and visibly vulnerable.
Kisatchie National Forest
Louisiana’s only national forest protects longleaf pine, sandstone hills, prairies, bayous, military landscapes, campgrounds, and hundreds of trail miles.
Wild Azalea Trail
A long point-to-point route crosses rolling longleaf and hardwood forest, creek bottoms, camp areas, and spring azalea bloom in Kisatchie.
Tammany Trace
A paved former rail line links Covington, Abita Springs, Mandeville, Lacombe, and Slidell through pine woods, wetlands, trailheads, and town centers.
Longleaf Vista Interpretive Trail
A compact loop descends through sandstone outcrops, ravines, and fire-shaped longleaf habitat beneath one of Louisiana’s broadest upland views.
Atchafalaya Basin
A vast distributary floodplain carries Mississippi and Red River water through cypress swamp, lakes, bayous, bottomland forest, and working communities.
Mississippi River Delta
Distributaries, sediment, marsh, navigation channels, levees, and Gulf energy form one of the world’s most engineered and rapidly changing deltas.
Black Masking Indian Tradition
New Orleans Black Masking Indian tribes create monumental hand-sewn suits, songs, processions, and neighborhood identities through year-round collective work.
Courir de Mardi Gras
Costumed rural groups travel house to house under captains, sing and perform for ingredients, then return to build a community gumbo.
Cajun Music and Dance
Accordion, fiddle, French song, rhythm, and social dancing keep a continually evolving Acadiana tradition active across halls, festivals, kitchens, and radio.
Zydeco
Black Creole musicians fused French-language roots, blues, rhythm and blues, accordion, rubboard, and amplification into one of Louisiana’s most kinetic social traditions.
Brown Pelican
Louisiana’s state bird patrols bays in low files, then folds into spectacular headfirst dives for schooling fish near the surface.
Roseate Spoonbill
A pink wader sweeps its spoon-tipped bill through shallow Louisiana water by touch, turning every side-to-side arc into a search below the glare.
Louisiana Black Bear
Louisiana’s state mammal survived severe habitat loss and recovered as bottomland forests and movement corridors were restored across the Mississippi alluvial valley.
Louisiana Pearlshell
A federally threatened mussel survives only in narrow central-Louisiana headwaters, where clean flowing sand and a fish host must remain connected for its life cycle to close.
American Alligator
Louisiana’s largest native reptile engineers wetland habitat, survives seasonal cold through dens, and demands generous distance wherever fresh water meets land.
Louisiana Pinesnake
Louisiana’s rarest large snake is mostly an underground relationship: open longleaf pine feeds a grass layer, grass sustains Baird’s pocket gophers, and their burrows shelter the pinesnake.
Swamp Rabbit
Louisiana’s largest cottontail lives close to water, swims readily, and hides in dense floodplain cover where most observers see only tracks or a bounding tail.
Red Swamp Crawfish
Louisiana’s familiar crawfish is both a wetland burrower and a major farmed food species, thriving in seasonal shallow water and rice-crawfish systems.
Gulf Menhaden
A hand-sized silver fish links plankton to pelicans, dolphins, drum, and one of America’s largest fisheries, making a surface bait ball both feeding event and management question.
Alligator Gar
North America’s largest gar is an air-breathing floodplain fish whose armored body and broad snout conceal a life history paced by rare, well-timed inundation.
Louisiana Eyed Silkmoth
A rust-brown Gulf marsh moth hides its great hindwing eyespots at rest, while its stinging caterpillar feeds in the cordgrass that defines the species’ narrow world.
Giant Blue Iris
Louisiana’s state wildflower is best understood as a wild wetland iris, not a garden cultivar: tall, locally variable, and spectacular for a short spring window.
Bald Cypress
Louisiana’s state tree is a deciduous conifer built for floodplain life, capable of forming ancient forests where buttressed trunks rise from seasonal water.
Water Tupelo
A water-swollen trunk rises from Louisiana’s deepest forested wetlands into a crown of broad leaves and blue-black fruit—decidedly not the neighboring bald cypress.
Southern Live Oak
Southern Live Oak turns a well-drained Louisiana ridge into horizontal architecture, carrying evergreen leaves, acorns, ferns, lichens, and moss across limbs broader than many buildings.
Ringed Map Turtle
Bright yellow shell rings and a narrow Pearl River range make this small map turtle one of Mississippi’s most distinctive river specialists.
Southern Magnolia
Glossy evergreen leaves, fragrant white flowers, red-seeded cones, and deep cultural familiarity make this both Mississippi’s state tree and state flower.
Attwater's Prairie-Chicken
One of North America’s most endangered birds survives through intensive recovery on remnants of the once-vast Texas–Louisiana coastal prairie.
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.
Texas Bluebonnet
Texas’s most recognized spring flower is an annual lupine whose bloom depends on weather, seed banks, pollination, and disturbance—not a guaranteed roadside calendar.
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.
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.
Carolina Wren
A warm-brown wren with a white eyebrow lives close to cover across South Carolina and serves as the state bird.
Carolina Wolf Spider
North America’s largest wolf spider patrols open ground after dark and is South Carolina’s official state spider.
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
This large striped butterfly, South Carolina’s state butterfly, moves between tree canopies, flowers, puddles, and host plants.
Carolina Mantid
South Carolina’s state insect is a gray, green, or brown ambush predator of gardens, old fields, and woodland edges.
Diamondback terrapin
Pale spotted skin, a patterned shell, and a life between salt and fresh water distinguish Maryland’s official state reptile.
Baltimore oriole
Maryland’s orange-and-black state bird whistles from leafy edges and suspends a woven pouch nest near a branch tip.
Atlantic blue crab
Paddle-shaped rear legs, blue claws, and a life tied to brackish Chesapeake water distinguish Maryland’s state crustacean.
Black-eyed Susan
Rough-haired stems and golden rays around a raised brown center make Maryland’s state flower a familiar open-ground wildflower.