Discover Nature this week with red, white, and blue in Missouri. This week, in honor of Independence Day, we celebrate red, white, and blue in nature.

Discover nature this week with Missouri's grasshoppers. Did you know there’s an unofficial song of summer? And it comes from one insect: the grasshopper. Their calls are the elevator music of summer.

Bird eggs sport an amazing variety of sizes, colors, and shapes. Their colors could fill an artist’s palette, from robin's egg blue to a buffy pink, from purple to green.

Discover Nature with Missouri's fish fathers. Father’s Day comes around during a popular time of year for family fishing. And two of our more popular fish make pretty good fish fathers.

You might steal a kiss under its green branches, but in nature, mistletoe is a parasitic plant that attaches to and steals nutrients from trees.

While on the road this holiday season, be on the lookout for these roadside dive-bombers: American kestrels.

Our most common native evergreen is the eastern red cedar, a cone-shaped juniper with a spicy yuletide aroma. It's prickly, scale-like leaves are quite different from those of spruce, fir, or pine. But it's symmetrical shape and fresh scent make cedar a yuletide choice.

Blue jays are relatively large songbirds (about the size of a robin) with blue upperparts and whitish underparts. A blue crest on the head can be raised or lowered depending on the bird’s mood.

As you drive country highways, it sometimes seems that hawks are everywhere -- perched on telephone poles and fence posts or circling overhead.

If you venture out near the woods after dark, you might hear the high-pitched cry of a flying squirrel.