American Goldfinch
Small bouncing finch with black wings, a musical flight call, and dramatic seasonal plumage
United States: places and wildlife — page 6
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
House Sparrow
Chunky introduced sparrow closely tied to buildings, livestock areas, sidewalks, and busy human settlement
European Starling
Glossy introduced bird with a pointed bill, triangular wings, and astonishingly coordinated winter flocks
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
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
Bullsnake
Large blotched snake that hisses loudly, imitates a rattlesnake convincingly, but remains nonvenomous
Plains Garter Snake
Striped garter snake with a bold orange-yellow back stripe, especially at home near prairie wetlands
Prairie Mole Cricket
North America’s largest cricket sings from a carefully shaped prairie burrow rather than from a grass stem.
Regal Fritillary
A Regal Fritillary turns a Kansas prairie remnant into a complete life-cycle map: orange forewings above, black spotted hindwings behind, nectar flowers for adults, and violets waiting below for spring larvae.
Plains Lubber Grasshopper
The Plains Lubber is the heavy, short-winged answer to the idea that every grasshopper should fly: an outsized prairie walker patterned in green, brown, pink, black, and pale dots.
Great Plains Giant Tiger Beetle
A flightless tiger beetle patrols Kansas after dark like a small black hunting machine built almost entirely from legs and jaws.
Southern Plains Bumble Bee
This long-faced native bumble bee connects deep prairie flowers to an underground social colony that lasts only one growing season.
Common Sunflower
Kansas’s familiar sunflower is a branching wild annual, not simply a smaller version of the single-headed crop plant.
Little Bluestem
Little bluestem turns an ordinary-looking summer bunchgrass into one of the prairie’s most luminous copper winter plants.
Purple Poppy Mallow
Wine-colored flowers seem scattered directly across the ground because this prairie mallow grows outward instead of upward.
Compass Plant
A compass plant can spend decades building a taproot before raising its rough flower stalk above nearly every neighboring prairie plant.
Leadplant
Leadplant is a prairie shrub disguised as a wildflower: silver-haired leaflets and purple one-petaled blooms sit above woody stems and roots that reach deep into dry Kansas ground.
Eastern Cottonwood
Cottonwoods trace water across the plains, their restless leaves revealing river corridors from miles away.
Bur Oak
Thick bark and an enormous root system let bur oak stand where prairie fire, drought, and winter test less durable trees.
Common Hackberry
A familiar Kansas creek-and-street tree becomes unmistakable at arm’s length: corky bark ridges, sandpapery three-veined leaves with crooked bases, and dark winter fruit crowded with birds.
Western Soapberry
Clusters of amber soapberries glow like marbles after the leaves fall, making this modest plains tree easiest to recognize in winter.
Peachleaf Willow
Peachleaf willow follows prairie watercourses, growing taller and straighter than the shrubby willows many people expect.
Salt Creek Tiger Beetle
One of North America’s rarest insects survives beside Lincoln where an ancient inland sea still salts a few muddy stream edges.
Platte River Caddisfly
A caddisfly found in only a handful of Nebraska channels completes part of its aquatic life while its wetland is seasonally dry.
Ottoe Skipper
The Ottoe skipper turns a thumbnail-sized butterfly into a demanding test of whether a prairie still functions as habitat rather than scenery.
Sandy Tiger Beetle
Against pale Sandhills sand, the sandy tiger beetle reverses the usual camouflage equation: white becomes the color of concealment.
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.
Blowout Penstemon
Blowout penstemon survives where moving sand defeats most plants, sending vanilla-scented flowers from the exposed face of a dune.
Sand Milkweed
Sand milkweed hugs loose prairie sand with thick woolly leaves, looking almost sculpted by the drought and wind around it.
Silky Prairie Clover
Silky prairie clover softens the Sandhills at ankle height, pairing pale hairs with pink flower spikes and roots built for shifting soil.
Soapweed Yucca
Soapweed gives western Nebraska an evergreen silhouette and stages one of the prairie’s most intimate partnerships with a tiny moth.
Giant Goldenrod
Nebraska’s floral emblem is a late-summer colony, not one giant flower: arching branches carry hundreds of tiny golden heads above a smooth bluish stem alive with visiting insects.
Ponderosa Pine
Ponderosa pine gives the Pine Ridge a western forest silhouette and reaches the eastern edge of its natural continental range in Nebraska.
Limber Pine
A few native limber pines reach east from the Rockies into Kimball County, forming one of Nebraska’s most surprising tree populations.
Rocky Mountain Juniper
Rocky Mountain juniper threads blue-green columns through Nebraska’s western escarpments, where it can meet and hybridize with eastern redcedar.
Paper Birch
Paper birch survives in cool Niobrara canyons as a remnant of a colder climate, far south of its familiar northern forests.
Eastern Redcedar
Eastern redcedar can be both winter shelter and ecological warning: a useful native tree that transforms grassland when fire disappears.
Ozark Swallowtail
The Ozark swallowtail is a subtle regional specialist whose identity depends as much on place and behavior as on wing pattern.
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.