Ozark Swallowtail
The Ozark swallowtail is a subtle regional specialist whose identity depends as much on place and behavior as on wing pattern.
Missouri, United States: places and wildlife — page 4
Browse the published Explore collection for Missouri, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Periodical Cicadas
Missouri’s periodical cicadas are not an annual attraction: the forest-wide chorus arrives only when a mapped 13- or 17-year brood emerges.
Common Eastern Firefly
The familiar summer flash is a coded courtship signal, with each species using its own timing, height, and shape in darkness.
Luna Moth
A luna moth’s luminous green adult life lasts roughly a week, devoted entirely to finding a mate rather than eating.
American Burying Beetle
North America’s largest carrion beetle converts one small vertebrate carcass into an underground brood chamber, then does something exceptional for an insect: both parents tend and feed the larvae.
Missouri Evening Primrose
Its lemon-yellow flowers open toward evening, transforming a harsh limestone glade just as sphinx moths begin to fly.
Big Bluestem
Missouri’s prairie giant builds a warm-season canopy above the flowers and a far larger architecture belowground, where dense roots helped create and still stabilize tallgrass soil.
Purple Coneflower
A familiar garden flower becomes more interesting in the wild, where its stiff cone feeds pollinators in summer and finches in winter.
Cardinal Flower
Few Missouri flowers match cardinal flower’s red, a color and tubular shape tuned especially well to hummingbird vision and bills.
Rose Verbena
From a distance Rose Verbena can masquerade as a patch of phlox; at knee level, its hairy trailing stems, rooted nodes, and opposite three-part toothed leaves give the glade plant away.
Flowering Dogwood
Dogwood’s famous white “petals” are actually bracts framing a compact bouquet of tiny true flowers.
Shortleaf Pine
Shortleaf pine once shaped vast Ozark landscapes, and restoration is rebuilding the open, fire-influenced woodland beneath its crowns.
Ozark Chinquapin
Once a canopy tree, Ozark chinquapin now often survives as repeated sprouts fighting the introduced chestnut-blight fungus.
Eastern Black Walnut
Black walnut combines valuable dark timber with a green-husked fruit whose hidden shell demands patience from squirrels and people alike.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Western Prairie Fringed Orchid
White flowers become visible near dusk, when their fragrance and long nectar spurs recruit large night-flying moths.
Green Ash
Green ash once seemed almost indestructible across northern towns and river bottoms; emerald ash borer has changed that assumption permanently.
White-lined Sphinx
This powerful moth can look like a hummingbird at dusk, hovering precisely while its long tongue reaches deep tubular flowers.
Iowa Skipper
Despite its name, the Iowa skipper is a prairie-range insect rather than an Iowa-only species, and intact grassland determines where it persists.
Prairie Blazing Star
Tall violet spikes begin blooming at the top, turning a prairie’s normal bottom-up expectations literally upside down.
Rattlesnake Master
Pale globes and swordlike leaves make this carrot-family plant look as if it belongs to a completely different botanical neighborhood.
Shagbark Hickory
Long bark strips lift away from an old trunk, creating both the tree’s name and summer roost crevices for bats.
Swamp White Oak
Wind flips each leaf from deep green to silvery white, making this flood-tolerant oak shimmer above Midwestern bottomlands.
Indian Blanket
Oklahoma’s state wildflower brings red-and-yellow color to dry roadsides for months, but its common name should not be treated as a generic Indigenous design license.
Post Oak
Post oak forms the stubborn skeletal framework of the Cross Timbers, where slow growth records drought, fire, and poor soil.
Blackjack Oak
Thick leathery leaves and a scrappy crown let blackjack oak occupy soils where richer forest trees grow poorly.
Pallid Sturgeon
An ancient-looking fish is actually a living specialist of big, warm, sediment-rich rivers whose natural flow has been heavily altered.
Bobolink
A bubbling metallic song tumbles over spring grass from a bird that will later migrate all the way to southern South America.
Northern Mockingbird
Arkansas’s state bird patrols open neighborhood territories, flashing white wings and stitching other birds’ sounds into long improvised songs.
Diana Fritillary
Arkansas’s state butterfly appears to be two species until sex explains the palette: orange-banded males and larger blue-spotted females share one violet-dependent forest life cycle.
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.
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.
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.
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.