Wildlife

How to identify a spiny softshell turtle, where it lives, what it eats, and why picking one up is a bad idea.

A rattlesnake stands for the warned boundary and for transformation through shedding. What each sighting traditionally means, and which tradition says it.

North America’s largest native frog reaches 8 in and swallows anything it can fit in its mouth. How to tell it from a green frog, and what it does to a pond.

No frog species is naturally pink. Here are the albino morphs, red species and wild pigment oddities behind every real pink frog photo, with size, range and safety.

Ant bites look like small red welts in clusters, and fire ant stings cap with a white pustule after a day. Here is how to tell the species apart, what gets mistaken for them and when to worry.

Eight insects are routinely mistaken for stink bugs. Seven are harmless, one can carry Chagas disease. Use the shoulders, legs, and head to tell them apart.

A wolf in a dream points to instinct, but the situation decides the meaning. What a staring, attacking, black, white or howling wolf has meant across traditions.

Fishers chuckle, grunt, hiss and growl, and the famous scream almost always belongs to a fox or an owl. Here is each call, when you hear it, and what it gets confused with.

Bison leave the roundest big hoofprint in North America, 4.5 to 6 inches long and nearly as wide. Here is how to measure, age and separate them from cattle and elk.

Shrew poop is a thin, curved pellet 0.08 to 0.25 in long, full of shiny insect parts and dropped at fixed latrines. Mouse droppings differ in three ways.