Animals of North America

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• Watch Animal Alligator gar The alligator gar is one of the largest freshwater fish in North America. It has a broad snout lined with teeth, armor-like scales, and a swim bladder that works like a lung, so it can gulp air in warm, still water. It lives in the big rivers, swamps and bayous of the southern United States, Mexico and Central America.
• Watch Animal Alligator snapping turtle The alligator snapping turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in the United States. It lies still on the bottom of rivers and lakes with its mouth open, wiggling a worm-like lure on its tongue to trick fish into swimming close. Its numbers have fallen, and it is now endangered.
• Watch 3D Animal American alligator The American alligator is a large, armored reptile of the swamps, marshes and lakes of the southeastern United States. Alligator mothers guard their nests and carry their babies to the water, and the holes alligators dig help many other animals survive dry seasons.
• Watch 3D Animal American bison The American bison is the largest land animal in North America. Once tens of millions roamed the Great Plains, but by the 1890s fewer than a thousand were left. Careful protection, starting with a tiny herd in Yellowstone, brought bison back.
• Watch Animal American black bear The American black bear is the most common bear in North America. It lives mostly in forests, climbs trees with its short, curved claws, eats mainly plants, and spends the winter in a den. Not all black bears are black: some are brown, cinnamon, blue-gray or even white.
• Watch 3D Animal American bullfrog The American bullfrog is the largest true frog in North America. It lives in warm, still ponds and lakes, sits and waits for food to come close, and the males' deep 'jug-o-rum' call carries more than a kilometer. Its tadpoles can take years to turn into frogs.
• Watch Animal American crocodile The American crocodile is a large reptile of warm coasts and mangrove swamps, from the southern tip of Florida through Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and northern South America. It is shy, it basks in the sun to warm up, and mother crocodiles carry their babies to the water.
• Watch Animal American crow The American crow is an all-black bird found across much of North America, from fields and beaches to city centers. It eats almost anything, lives in close family groups, gathers in huge winter roosts, and a University of Washington study found that wild crows can recognize and remember a human face.
• Watch Animal American flamingo The American flamingo is a tall, bright pink wading bird of the Caribbean. It gets its color from pigments in the tiny water animals and algae it eats, and it feeds by filtering water through its bent bill with its head upside down. Flamingos live and nest in huge, noisy groups.
• Watch Animal American goldfinch The American goldfinch is a small finch that eats almost nothing but seeds. In summer the male is bright lemon yellow with a black cap and black wings, and in winter both males and females turn a soft olive brown. Goldfinches wait until late summer to build their nests.
• Watch Animal American lobster The American lobster is a big crustacean that lives on the rocky sea floor of the northwest Atlantic Ocean. It has two very different claws, one for crushing and one for tearing, and it must climb out of its hard shell again and again to grow.
• Watch 3D Animal American robin The American robin is a very familiar bird over most of North America, with a gray-brown back, a warm orange breast and a cheery song. It runs across lawns pulling up earthworms, eats lots of berries in winter, and builds a mud-lined nest for its sky-blue eggs.
• Watch Animal American toad The American toad is a common, warty toad of eastern North America, found in forests, prairies, farms and backyards. It has big poison glands behind its eyes, hunts insects and worms at night, and in spring the males sing a long, musical trill from shallow ponds, where females lay thousands of eggs in long strings.
• Watch Animal Arctic fox The Arctic fox lives on the frozen tundra around the North Pole. Its coat changes color with the seasons, white or blue-gray in winter and brown or gray in summer, and it has short ears, a short nose and furry feet to keep the cold out. It eats lemmings, birds and leftovers from polar bears.
• Watch Animal Arctic tern The Arctic tern is a small, graceful seabird with a black cap, a red bill and red legs. Every year it flies from its nesting grounds in the Arctic to the edge of the ice around Antarctica and back again. Scientists who tracked terns from Greenland and Iceland found that they flew an average of 70,900 kilometers in one year.
• Watch Animal Army ant Army ants hunt together in giant swarms and never build a permanent nest. This page is about the best-studied kind, Eciton burchellii, of Central and South American forests. Each night of its traveling phase the colony moves, and the workers link their legs to build a living camp around their queen and young.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic blue crab The Atlantic blue crab is a swimming crab with bright blue claws and back legs shaped like paddles. It lives along the Atlantic coast of the Americas, especially in bays where rivers meet the sea, like the Chesapeake Bay. A mother crab carries up to two million eggs in a spongy orange mass under her body.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic ghost crab The Atlantic ghost crab is a sand-colored crab of beaches along the Atlantic coast of the Americas. It is so pale that it almost disappears on the sand, like a ghost. It digs deep burrows, comes out mostly at night, and runs very fast on its long legs.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic horseshoe crab The Atlantic horseshoe crab is a living fossil: its relatives have looked much the same for hundreds of millions of years. Despite its name, it is more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to crabs. Each spring, thousands crawl onto beaches to lay eggs, feeding hungry shorebirds, and its blue blood helps keep medicines safe.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic puffin The Atlantic puffin is a small seabird of the North Atlantic, often called the clown of the sea because of its huge, colorful bill. It spends most of its life far out on the ocean and comes ashore only in summer to nest in burrows on islands and cliff tops. Underwater, its small wings work like flippers.
• Watch Animal Atlantic salmon The Atlantic salmon hatches in a river, swims out to the North Atlantic Ocean to feed and grow, then returns to the very river where it was born to lay its eggs. Along the way it changes color and shape several times.
• Watch 3D Animal Axolotl The axolotl is a salamander from the canals and lakes of Mexico City. Unlike most amphibians, it keeps its baby features, such as feathery gills and a fin, its whole life. It can regrow lost legs and even parts of its heart, but in the wild it is critically endangered.
• Watch 3D Animal Bald eagle The bald eagle is one of North America's biggest birds, with a white head and tail, a dark brown body and a huge yellow bill. It lives near lakes, rivers and coasts and eats mostly fish. Once rare because of hunting and pesticides, it has made an amazing comeback.
• Watch Animal Bar-tailed godwit The bar-tailed godwit is a long-billed shorebird that breeds on Arctic tundra and spends the rest of the year on mudflats far to the south. Godwits from Alaska fly non-stop across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand and Australia, and one young bird tracked in 2022 flew at least 13,560 kilometers without landing.
• Watch Animal Barn owl The barn owl is a pale, ghostly owl with a heart-shaped face that works like a dish to collect sound. It hunts mice and voles at night over fields and grassland, finding them by hearing alone if it has to. Barn owls live on every continent except Antarctica.
• Watch 3D Animal Barn swallow The barn swallow is a small, speedy bird with a glossy blue back, a reddish throat and a long, deeply forked tail. It catches insects in the air, builds cup-shaped mud nests on barns and bridges, and makes long migrations between the Northern Hemisphere, where it nests, and the Southern Hemisphere, where it spends the winter.
• Watch Animal Bee hummingbird The bee hummingbird of Cuba is the smallest living bird: about 5.5 to 6 centimeters long and weighing only about 2 grams. It hovers in front of small flowers to sip nectar, also eats tiny insects and spiders, and lays eggs the size of peas.
• Watch Animal Black-capped chickadee The black-capped chickadee is a small, curious songbird of North American woods and backyards. It hides thousands of seeds to eat later and remembers where they are, and its "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call tells other birds how dangerous a nearby predator is.
• Watch Animal Black-tailed prairie dog Black-tailed prairie dogs are sociable ground squirrels of North America's Great Plains. They dig huge underground towns, keep the grass short to watch for danger, and bark warnings to each other. Many other animals depend on their towns.
• Watch Animal Blue jay The blue jay is a large, crested songbird of eastern and central North America, blue above and white below with a black necklace. It is clever and loud, can copy the calls of hawks, and can bury thousands of acorns in a single fall. Its acorn burying is credited with helping oak trees spread.
• Watch 3D Animal Blue-and-yellow macaw The blue-and-yellow macaw is a large parrot of South America and Panama. It is bright blue on top and golden yellow underneath, with a green forehead and a white face lined with black. It lives near swamps and rivers, cracks nuts with its strong black beak and stays with one mate for life.
• Watch Animal Blue-footed booby The blue-footed booby is a seabird of the tropical eastern Pacific, from Mexico to Peru and the Galápagos Islands. Its bright blue feet star in its courtship dance: birds with bluer feet are more likely to find a mate. It catches fish by diving into the sea from high in the air.
• Watch Animal Bobcat The bobcat is North America's most common wild cat, found from southern Canada across the United States to Mexico. It is bigger than a house cat, with a short tail, ear tufts and a spotted coat. It lives in forests, swamps, deserts and even some cities, and hunts mostly rabbits.
• Watch 3D Animal Brown bear The brown bear lives in more places than any other bear, from European forests to the mountains of Asia and the rivers of Alaska. It eats almost anything, from berries to salmon, and spends the long winter asleep in a cozy den. Grizzly bears and Kodiak bears are brown bears too.
• Watch Animal Brown pelican The brown pelican is a large coastal bird of the Americas with an enormous bill and a stretchy throat pouch. It catches fish by diving head-first into the sea from high in the air. Brown pelicans almost disappeared from North America because of pesticides such as DDT, but after DDT was banned they made a full comeback.
• Watch 3D Animal Brown rat Brown rats are large rodents that came from East Asia and spread around the world with people, mainly on ships. They are smart, strong swimmers with a superb sense of smell. Wild rats can carry germs that make people sick, so they are best left alone.
• Watch Animal Brown-throated sloth The brown-throated sloth is a three-toed sloth of the rainforests of Central and South America. It eats leaves, saves energy by moving very slowly, and its shaggy fur can turn green with tiny algae that grow in it.
• Watch 3D Animal Bull-headed dung beetle The bull-headed dung beetle is a shiny black beetle about 1 centimeter long. Large males have two long, curved horns on their heads, like a bull. These beetles dig tunnels under cow dung and pack dung into balls for their young, which cleans up pastures and helps the soil. They came from Europe and now also live in North America and Australia.
• Watch Animal Burrowing owl The burrowing owl is a small, sandy-brown owl with long legs and bright yellow eyes. Unlike most owls, it lives underground, in burrows dug by prairie dogs, ground squirrels or tortoises, or sometimes by the owls themselves. It lives in open grasslands and deserts from Canada to the tip of South America.
• Watch Animal California condor The California condor is the largest wild bird in North America, a giant vulture with wings about 2.8 meters wide. In the 1980s only 22 were left. Thanks to a huge rescue effort, the US Fish and Wildlife Service counted 607 condors at the end of 2025, 392 of them flying free.
• Watch Animal California sea lion The California sea lion is an 'eared seal' of the west coast of North America. It is clever, playful and very noisy, with a bark like a dog's. Unlike true seals, it has ear flaps and can turn its back flippers forward to walk on land. Its numbers have grown a lot since it was protected.
• Watch 3D Animal Canada goose The Canada goose is a big, black-necked goose with a white chinstrap, found near lakes, rivers, fields and parks across North America. Many migrate in noisy V-shaped flocks, but more and more stay all year on city lawns. People also brought Canada geese to Britain and other parts of Europe.
• Watch Animal Canada lynx The Canada lynx is a wild cat of the snowy northern forests of Canada and Alaska. Its huge, furry paws work like snowshoes, and it depends on one animal above all, the snowshoe hare. When hares are plentiful, lynx do well; when hares become scarce, lynx have a hard time too.
• Watch Animal Caribbean hermit crab The Caribbean hermit crab is a land hermit crab with a big purple claw and red legs. It lives near the coasts of Bermuda, Florida and the Caribbean, carries an empty snail shell for protection, and goes back to the sea only to release its eggs.
• Watch 3D Animal Cattle Cattle are large farm animals that people tamed from wild oxen long ago. They eat grass and digest it with a stomach that has four parts. Farmers around the world keep cattle for milk, meat and leather, and in some places oxen still pull plows and carts.
• Watch 3D Animal Chicken The chicken is a domesticated bird: people raise it on farms and in backyards all over the world for eggs and meat. Its wild ancestor is the red junglefowl of the forests of southern and Southeast Asia, and scientists think chickens were first domesticated about 3,500 years ago near rice fields in Southeast Asia.
• Watch Animal Chinook salmon The Chinook salmon, also called the king salmon, is the largest Pacific salmon. It hatches in a cold river, travels to the ocean to feed and grow for a few years, then swims back up its home river to lay eggs.
• Watch Animal Christmas tree worm The Christmas tree worm is a small sea worm that lives in a tube inside living coral on Caribbean reefs. Only its two colorful, spiral crowns show. They catch tiny floating food and help it breathe, and the worm pulls them in with a flash if anything comes too close.