European Starling
Glossy introduced bird with a pointed bill, triangular wings, and astonishingly coordinated winter flocks
Mississippi, United States: places and wildlife — page 2
Browse the published Explore collection for Mississippi, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Muskrat
Stocky aquatic rodent with a vertically flattened tail, compact lodge, and busy wetland feeding routes
American Mink
Dark, low-slung mustelid moving quickly along water edges while hunting on land and underwater
Nebraska Conehead
A loud summer katydid reveals itself by a buzz longer than a second, repeated about every two seconds, before its black-bottomed head cone comes into view.
Shortleaf Pine
Shortleaf pine once shaped vast Ozark landscapes, and restoration is rebuilding the open, fire-influenced woodland beneath its crowns.
American Black Bear
America’s most widespread bear is often easier to recognize by tracks, clawed logs, and overturned stones than by a direct sighting.
Common Bottlenose Dolphin
A curved dorsal fin, robust gray body, and short bottle-shaped beak mark a dolphin that finds prey through both vision and echolocation.
Osprey
Dark eye stripe, kinked long wings, and reversible outer toes identify the fish specialist nesting beside Oregon waters.
Largemouth Bass
A jaw extending behind the eye, deep body, and dark side stripe separate largemouth bass from their smaller-mouthed relatives.
Bluegill
A deep compressed body, dark ear flap, and blue-green cheek identify a widespread sunfish that rewards close looking.
Red Drum
Copper-bronze sides, blunt head, and one or more black spots near the tail identify a drum moving from marsh creek to open coast.
Monarch Butterfly
Orange wings with heavy black veins identify a migrant whose caterpillars can eat only milkweeds and whose journey outlasts any one summer adult.
Common Green Darner
Large size, bright green thorax, and a dark bull’s-eye on the forehead help identify a darner capable of continental movement.
Black Swallowtail
Paired rows of yellow spots and an orange-centered hindwing eye distinguish a butterfly whose striped caterpillar feeds on carrots’ wild relatives.
Say’s Firefly
A dark firefly with pale margins and an angular shield pattern, Say’s firefly turns summer dusk into species-specific communication.
Large-flowered Trillium
Three broad leaves, three white petals, and a flower held above a single whorl mark Ohio’s woodland wildflower.
Common Milkweed
Opposite broad leaves, milky sap, round pink flower clusters, and warty pods identify a plant central to monarch development.
Mountain Laurel
Glossy evergreen leaves and clustered pink-white cups patterned with ten pockets identify Connecticut’s state flower.
American Holly
Spiny evergreen leaves, pale bark, and red winter fruit identify a native holly once central to Delaware wreath making.
Northern Red Oak
Bristle-tipped leaf lobes, shallow-striped bark, and broad acorns distinguish New Jersey’s state tree from rounded-lobed white oaks.
Tulip Tree
Four-lobed leaves with a notched flat tip and green-orange tulip-like flowers identify one of eastern North America’s tallest hardwoods.
Red Maple
Red buds, flowers, leaf stalks, and paired winged seeds recur across the year on Rhode Island’s adaptable state tree.
Longleaf Pine
Needles up to well over a foot long, huge cones, and a tufted grass-stage seedling identify the pine behind one of America’s richest savannas.
Loblolly Pine
Arkansas’s state tree is a fast-growing southern pine whose long three-needle bundles, broad bark plates, and working-forest history shape the Coastal Plain.
Northern Mockingbird
Arkansas’s state bird patrols open neighborhood territories, flashing white wings and stitching other birds’ sounds into long improvised songs.
Brown Pelican
Louisiana’s state bird patrols bays in low files, then folds into spectacular headfirst dives for schooling fish near the surface.
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.
American Alligator
Louisiana’s largest native reptile engineers wetland habitat, survives seasonal cold through dens, and demands generous distance wherever fresh water meets land.
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.
Mississippi Museum of Art
A focused state collection, ambitious changing exhibitions, and an art garden connect Mississippi artists to broader American and global conversations.
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
Eight galleries center organizers, families, witnesses, violence, resistance, and the unfinished work of civil rights through testimony and primary evidence.
Museum of Mississippi History
A dugout canoe, documents, objects, sound, and immersive settings trace Mississippi from Indigenous homelands through the present without one uncomplicated storyline.
Mississippi Museum of Natural Science
Aquariums, fossils, native wildlife, scientific collections, and wooded trails make Mississippi ecology visible at both specimen and landscape scales.
GRAMMY Museum Mississippi
Instruments, stage wear, recorded voices, songwriting stations, and performance technology show how an unusually musical state shaped global popular culture.
B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center
B.B. King’s instruments, touring life, recordings, and homecoming anchor a broader account of cotton labor, migration, radio, business, and the blues.
Walter Anderson Museum of Art
Murals, watercolors, block prints, ceramics, and an extraordinary painted room reveal an artist who studied coastal nature through sustained immersion.
Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art
George Ohr’s astonishing clay, Frank Gehry’s pavilion campus, Coast art, and Biloxi history reward visitors who look past the famous eccentric persona.
Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience
The MAX connects music, writing, dance, visual art, theater, film, foodways, and craft through the Mississippians who carried them outward.
Delta Blues Museum
Historic guitars, recordings, stage material, and Muddy Waters’s cabin connect Delta musicians to labor, migration, technology, and world influence.
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art
American and European art, British silver, Japanese woodblock prints, and Native American baskets fill a carefully scaled 1923 museum in Laurel.