American Mink
Dark, low-slung mustelid moving quickly along water edges while hunting on land and underwater
Ohio, United States: places and wildlife — page 2
Browse the published Explore collection for Ohio, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel
Slender ground squirrel striped with alternating pale lines and spots, often upright beside prairie burrows
Prairie Vole
Small blunt-faced vole hidden within woven runways beneath dense grass, seldom crossing open ground
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.
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.
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.
Flowering Dogwood
Dogwood’s famous white “petals” are actually bracts framing a compact bouquet of tiny true flowers.
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.
Black-capped Chickadee
Black cap, white cheeks, small bib, and a curious approach make this year-round northern songbird a foundational backyard identification.
Ruffed Grouse
Mottled bark-colored plumage, a dark tail band, and the male’s accelerating wing-drumming suit dense young forest better than open lawn.
Hermit Thrush
Spotted breast, plain face, and a reddish tail contrasting with a browner back identify the thrush behind one of Vermont’s clearest woodland songs.
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.
Northern Pike
Duckbill snout, rear-set fins, and pale bean-shaped spots identify the pike waiting almost motionless beside cover.
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.
Eastern Hemlock
Flat short needles with pale undersides, tiny hanging cones, and drooping twig tips identify Pennsylvania’s state tree.
Red Maple
Red buds, flowers, leaf stalks, and paired winged seeds recur across the year on Rhode Island’s adaptable state tree.
Eastern White Pine
Long flexible needles grouped in fives, slender cones, and layered horizontal branches identify the eastern white pine.
Northern Mockingbird
Arkansas’s state bird patrols open neighborhood territories, flashing white wings and stitching other birds’ sounds into long improvised songs.
Indiana Bat
A small social bat winters in a few cold caves, migrates to summer forest roosts, and carries the name of the state where science first described it.
Cleveland Museum of Art
Ancient objects, Asian art, European painting, textiles, photography, and contemporary work unfold around a luminous atrium linking the museum’s 1916 marble building to later wings.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Instruments, stage clothes, handwritten lyrics, recordings, film, and participatory galleries trace rock’s roots, reinventions, industries, and arguments across seven changing levels.
National Museum of the U.S. Air Force
More than 350 aircraft and missiles connect early military flight, global war, presidential travel, research, spaceflight, and the human systems behind aviation.
Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal
Natural history, city history, children’s exhibits, archives, film, and a Holocaust center share the restored 1933 Union Terminal beneath its vast half-dome and mosaics.
COSI
Hands-on laboratories, a planetarium, live demonstrations, dinosaur specimens, a miniature city, and rotating exhibitions turn scientific ideas into choices visitors can manipulate.
Toledo Museum of Art
European painting, ancient art, American modernism, decorative arts, and a transparent Glass Pavilion make material, light, and making unusually visible across one campus.
Pro Football Hall of Fame
Artifacts, film, statistics, bronze busts, and changing displays connect the NFL’s Canton origins to the players, coaches, tactics, media, and institutions that shaped professional football.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
A documented slave pen, first-person histories, art, resistance networks, and contemporary human-rights exhibits connect American slavery to the difficult work of defining freedom.
American Sign Museum
Neon, hand lettering, gold leaf, porcelain enamel, dimensional letters, and working fabrication shops reveal how commercial signs were designed, built, sold, repaired, and seen.
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Lucy, Balto, Dunkleosteus, dinosaurs, geology, astronomy, live native animals, and a radically redesigned campus connect planetary history to the habitats outside Cleveland.
Cincinnati Art Museum
More than 73,000 works span global art and design, while fifteen Cincinnati Wing galleries make the city’s painters, potters, furniture makers, and patrons unusually visible.
Taft Museum of Art
European paintings, Chinese porcelain, enamels, furniture, and Robert Duncanson’s landscape murals remain inside the 1820 house where the Tafts assembled and bequeathed them.
Akron Art Museum
Modern and contemporary art occupy an 1899 brick building pierced and wrapped by a steel-and-glass addition whose rooms make scale, light, and civic space part of every exhibition.
Butler Institute of American Art
American painting, works on paper, sculpture, folk art, and changing exhibitions fill a marble landmark whose collection moves between canonical names and the everyday life of industrial Ohio.