The Huck Blog
Data stories from the wild: what community wildlife sightings reveal about the animals around us, told with maps.
October 5, 2026The sandhill crane migration is underway: where to see one of Earth’s oldest birds, mappedRight now, across the middle of the continent, one of the oldest migrations on the planet is in motion. Four-foot birds with a bugle you hear before you see them are funneling south along ancient flyways. The map shows where they pile up.
September 23, 2026America has wild parrots now, mapped: the parakeet that beat winter and the parrot that’s safer in exileWild parrot flocks screech over American cities, and not just in the tropics. The map shows where they have settled, from a parakeet riding out Chicago winters to an endangered Mexican parrot that may now be safer living feral in the United States than at home.
September 15, 2026The elk rut is on right now. Here’s where to hear it, mapped.For a few weeks every fall, the biggest deer in North America lose their minds and fill the mountains with a sound like a train whistle crossed with a dinosaur. The map shows where the elk are: a huge western stronghold, and a handful of eastern valleys where the bugle was brought back from nothing.
September 15, 2026Crow vs raven: how to tell them apart, and the maps that show where each one rulesThey are both big, black, and brilliant, and people mix them up constantly. But a crow and a raven are different birds, and they mostly live in different halves of the country. Here is how to tell them apart, and the maps that give it away.
August 31, 2026California’s great white sharks, mapped: adult seal-hunters up north, baby sharks in the surf down southPlot every white shark sighting in California and the state splits in two. Off San Francisco, big adults patrol the seal colonies of the Red Triangle. Off Santa Barbara and San Diego, dozens of juveniles share the warm shallows with surfers who mostly never know they are there.
August 31, 2026How a Gila monster led to Ozempic: the desert lizard behind the GLP-1 drugsYou may have seen the claim that Ozempic comes from Gila monster venom. It is not quite true, and the real story is better: a slow, venomous desert lizard that eats a few times a year carried the peptide that launched the biggest class of drugs in modern medicine.
August 31, 2026Where Florida’s manatees gather, mapped, and why they’re running out of safe waterA thousand-pound vegetarian with no natural enemies should be easy to keep alive. The manatee is one of the hardest animals in Florida to save, and the map of where they gather is really a map of the few warm, food-rich places they have left.
August 31, 2026The beaver we nearly wiped out is now one of our cheapest defenses against drought and wildfireWe almost erased the beaver for its fur, and in doing so we deleted one of the most useful animals on the continent. It is back nearly everywhere there is fresh water, right as we have finally understood what it builds: firebreaks, water storage, and drought insurance, for free.
August 15, 2026The monarch migration is happening right now, and Washington is deciding whether it survivesEvery orange dot on this map is a monarch heading for a few mountaintops in central Mexico. The eastern population is down about 80 percent, the western more than 95, and a federal decision on protecting them is overdue. This is the migration that decision is about.
August 15, 2026America still gasses rattlesnakes out of the ground by the ton, and the map shows the costThe western diamondback is common enough that Texas towns pump gasoline into its dens and kill it by the thousands at annual festivals. Its close cousin, the timber rattlesnake, was hunted the same way for three centuries and is now so reduced that in much of the country it is a crime to touch one. Two rattlesnakes, two fates.
August 15, 2026The hellbender is a two-foot salamander that only lives in clean water. The map shows where Appalachia still has it.Anglers called it the snot otter and killed it on sight for generations, wrongly. North America’s largest salamander breathes through its skin and cannot survive a dirty stream, which makes it a living gauge of water quality. It has vanished from nearly half its known homes, and its federal protection is stuck in limbo.
August 15, 2026The eastern coyote is part wolf, and it lives in every town nowA century ago the coyote was a plains animal of the West. Then we cleared out the wolves, and it walked into the vacancy, interbreeding with the last of them along the way. The animal that reached the East Coast is bigger, part wolf, and almost certainly living closer to you than you think.
August 15, 2026The opossum is North America’s only marsupial, and almost everything you believe about it is wrongIt hisses and drools and looks like a giant rat, so we treat it like vermin. In fact it faints instead of fighting, shrugs off snake venom, almost never carries rabies, and is quietly expanding north into towns that never had one.
August 15, 2026The turkey vulture smells death from a mile off. The black vulture cheats off its nose, and it’s moving north.Two big dark birds ride the thermals over most of America, and from below they look nearly identical. One is a bloodhound with wings. The other is a thief that follows the bloodhound to dinner, and it is pushing north into cattle country that was too cold for it a generation ago.
August 15, 2026A single gopher tortoise burrow shelters 350 other species. Florida is paving over them.The gopher tortoise is the landlord of the Southeast, digging burrows up to 40 feet long that snakes, frogs, owls, and rabbits all shelter in. It is one of the few animals whose disappearance takes hundreds of others with it, and the government just declined to protect most of its range.
August 15, 2026The gray fox climbs trees like a cat. The red fox learned to live with us. Only one is winning.North America has two common foxes and they could not be more different. One is an ancient tree-climber of the brush and forest. The other is a recent, adaptable opportunist that followed us into the suburbs. Put them on a map and they carve the country in two, and the line between them is moving.
August 14, 2026Alligators and crocodiles coexist in exactly one place on EarthPlot every alligator sighting in Florida and you fill the whole peninsula. Plot the American crocodiles and nearly all of them crowd into the state’s southern tip - the only waters on the planet where the two animals live side by side.
August 14, 2026America has two kinds of wild horse country, and they could not be less alikeMap the wild horse sightings and the United States splits in two: a vast inland sea of mustangs across the Great Basin, and a handful of tiny island herds clinging to Atlantic beaches. Same animal, two completely different wild Americas.
August 14, 2026What Animals Live in Yosemite?Around 400 vertebrate species call Yosemite home, from the black bears everyone asks about to a marmot-and-pika high country and the southernmost great gray owls on the continent. Here is who you will actually meet, and where.
August 14, 2026What Animals Live in the Grand Canyon?Roughly 450 bird species, 90 mammals, and nearly 60 reptiles and amphibians live in and around the canyon. Here are the ones worth knowing: the giant, the lawn-mowing regulars, and a squirrel found nowhere else on Earth.
August 13, 2026The Salish Sea has two kinds of killer whale, and they ignore each otherEvery orca on this map is one species with one silhouette. But the whales around Seattle belong to two populations that do not interbreed, do not share calls, and will not eat the same food - and the balance between them has flipped within living memory.
August 12, 2026The Cape Cod shark map is really a seal mapPlot every white shark sighting around Cape Cod and you trace a line down the outer beaches. Plot the gray seals and you draw the same line - because one map is causing the other.Wildlife data stories, rare sightings, and Huck field notes - straight to your inbox.
