50 Fun Facts About Taiga

Which amphibian of North America's boreal forest spends winter frozen solid, with no heartbeat?

Wood frog blood floods with glucose as ice forms, which works like antifreeze inside the cells. It is the only North American frog found north of the Arctic Circle.

Which 1908 blast, blamed on an exploding space rock, flattened 2,150 square km of Siberian taiga?

The Tunguska event is thought to have been a meteoroid 50 to 60 metres wide bursting in mid-air, which is why trees right at the centre were stripped of branches but left standing.

Which conifer, forming vast forests in eastern Siberia's taiga, sheds all its needles every autumn?

Larch is one of the few deciduous conifers, and one Siberian species grows farther north than any other tree in the world.

Which taiga-ringed lake, Earth's deepest, holds more water than all five Great Lakes combined?

Baikal is also the world's oldest lake, at 25 to 30 million years, and the only home of the nerpa, a seal found nowhere else.

Which taiga browser, the largest living deer, is called an elk in British English?

Moose are strong swimmers that have been known to dive more than 5.5 metres to reach plants growing on lake bottoms.

Which taiga animal, chief prey of the Canada lynx, rises and falls in a famous boom-and-bust cycle?

Snowshoe hare and lynx numbers, traced through decades of fur-trapping records, climb and crash together. Its big, densely furred hind feet stop it sinking into soft snow.

Which nickname describes boreal blazes that smoulder underground all winter and flare up in spring?

Zombie fires survive the cold by burning down into deep organic soil under the snow, and they are most likely after a hot summer with a big fire season.

Which rodent's record structure, 850 metres long, was found on satellite images of boreal Alberta?

Beaver dams and ponds turn forest into wetland that many other species depend on, making the animal a keystone species. The record dam lies in a park larger than Switzerland.

What lies beneath the taiga's so-called drunken forests, tilting spruce at odd angles as it thaws?

Permafrost grips the shallow roots until it melts and the ground slumps, a collapse scientists call thermokarst.

Which taiga carnivore, the largest land member of the weasel family, is nicknamed the skunk bear?

Wolverine paws carry crampon-like claws for scaling trees and snowy peaks, and the animal can kill full-grown deer that are stuck in deep snow.

The word taiga, for the great conifer forest of the north, entered English from which language?

Russian speakers long used tayga for any vast stretch of wild forest across northern Eurasia. The biggest areas of the biome lie in Russia and Canada.

Which treeless biome lies directly north of the taiga belt, beyond the limit where forest can grow?

Tundra is not where the worst cold is found: Canada's lowest temperature on record was measured farther south, inside the forest zone.

Which big cat stalks wild boar and deer in the Korean pine forests of the Sikhote-Alin mountains?

Amur tiger country is a mosaic where taiga merges with broadleaf woods. Also known as the Siberian tiger, the cat is often considered the largest tiger of all.

Which taiga bird can hear voles moving under 60 cm of snow and plunge through the crust to grab one?

Great grey owl hearing is sharp enough to hunt by sound alone, and measured by length the bird is the largest owl species in the world.

Which diving bird that breeds on boreal lakes appears on the Canadian one-dollar coin?

Loon gave the coin its nickname, the loonie. On the other side of the Atlantic the same bird is known as the great northern diver.

Which white-barked boreal tree supplied the waterproof bark for Indigenous canoes in North America?

Birch bark is full of oils that keep water out, and the paper birch is still known as the canoe birch. It is among the first trees to return after a wildfire.

Which name do North Americans use for the reindeer that roam their boreal forests and Arctic plains?

Caribou and reindeer are one species, and both dig craters in the snow with their hooves to reach their favourite winter food.

Which big taiga omnivore, native to Eurasia and North America, is called the grizzly in the latter?

Brown bear feeding grows heaviest from summer into autumn, when the animals lay down the fat that carries them through a winter of hibernation.

What covered most of today's taiga lands in Europe and North America until roughly 12,000 years ago?

Ice sheets gouged out countless hollows, and as they melted back the hollows filled with water to become the lakes and bogs that dot the forest today.

Which US state shares a frigid taiga interior, where yearly averages dip to about −10 °C, with the Yukon?

Alaska is not the only state with taiga, since the forest also dips into parts of the northern contiguous United States.

Which taiga finch pries seeds out of conifer cones with an odd beak and often nests in midwinter?

Crossbill mandibles cross over at the tips, so the bird can wedge the scales of a cone apart and lift out the seed with its tongue.

Which North American boreal tree keeps its cones sealed for years until wildfire heat opens them?

Jack pine cones open at about 50 °C or hotter, so a fire that kills the parent trees also sows the next generation on freshly cleared ground.

Which slow-growing organism carpets the taiga floor and is the favourite winter food of reindeer?

Lichen of the kind reindeer eat grows only 3 to 11 millimetres a year, so a patch that has been overgrazed or burned can take decades to come back.

What is the stoat, a small taiga hunter, called when wearing its pure white winter coat?

Ermine is the name for both the winter animal and its fur, which grows far denser and silkier than the sparse, rough summer coat.

Which taiga animal had fur so valuable that it largely spurred the conquest of Siberia?

Sable pelts have been prized since the early Middle Ages and are generally considered the most beautiful and richly tinted of any marten.

Which word of Cree origin names the waterlogged, mossy bogland spread across Canada's boreal north?

Muskeg is so soft that winter roads are made across it by clearing off the insulating snow and letting the ground freeze hard.

Which partly decayed plant matter, built up in boreal bogs, holds some 415 gigatonnes of carbon?

Peat piles up because bog plants grow faster than they rot, yet a layer a couple of metres deep still takes thousands of years to form.

Which amber-coloured bog berry of the boreal north appears on Finland's two-euro coin?

Cloudberry fruit ripens from pale red to amber in early autumn, and Finns eat it with a warm local cheese, cream and sugar.

Which wildflower, the floral emblem of Yukon, has young flowers that are made into jelly there?

Fireweed takes its common name from the way it springs up in abundance on burnt ground after forest fires.

Which boreal rodent heaps up the scales of eaten cones in middens that can reach 12 metres across?

Red squirrel harvests of spruce cones in August and September go into a central cache, which feeds the animal through the winter.

Which bird, North America's tallest, was down to 21 in the wild by 1941 and nests in Canada's taiga?

Whooping crane survivors fly each year between the Texas coast and a boreal national park in northern Canada, the last natural nesting ground the species had left.

Which animal, North America's heaviest on land, prompted the founding of a vast boreal park in 1922?

Wood bison are the largest animals in the taiga, yet pure-bred herds were once believed extinct after plains bison were mixed in with them in the 1920s.

Which bird of Eurasia's conifer forests, renowned for its courtship display, is the largest grouse?

Capercaillie cocks can reach a metre long and nearly 7 kg, and the species once lived in every taiga forest from Europe across northern Asia.

Which boreal bird sticks food stores to trees with gluey saliva and lays eggs while snow lies deep?

Gray jay pairs, also called Canada jays, nest as early as February and live through winter on hidden food. Their nickname, whisky jack, comes from Wisakedjak, a figure of Cree legend.

Which force of nature did the Greek god Boreas, namesake of the boreal forest, personify?

North wind was his domain, and he was the harshest of the four wind gods, the bringer of cold winter air. The aurora borealis carries his name too.

Which climate type, with winters lasting five to seven months, covers most of the world's taiga?

Subarctic climates swing hard between the seasons: a typical taiga winter day is around −20 °C, while an average summer day reaches about 18 °C.

What name is given to the taiga's northern edge, beyond which it is too cold for forest to grow?

Tree line also describes a limit on high mountains, set there by altitude instead of latitude, where long-lasting snow cover can keep forest out.

In which country do the Dukha, or Tsaatan, herd reindeer in taiga near Lake Khövsgöl?

Mongolia's Dukha are a small Turkic community of semi-nomadic herders, divided into East Taiga and West Taiga groups.

Which Siberian village, set in taiga, is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth?

Oymyakon's average low can stay below −50 °C through December, January and February, and its coldest month on record, January 1931, averaged −54.1 °C.

In a taiga food web, which role do spruce, moss and other plants play by making food from sunlight?

Producers sit at the lowest level of every food chain, turning light into the fuel that plant-eaters, and in turn their hunters, all depend on.

Which term describes the wolf's place at the top of the taiga food web, with few natural enemies?

Apex predator is the label for a hunter at the top of a food chain. The wolf specialises in picking off the vulnerable members of herds of large prey.

Which group of organisms does most of the rotting of fallen needles and logs on the taiga floor?

Fungi are nature's principal decomposers, but taiga cold slows decay so much that soil nutrients stay scarce, which favours evergreen trees.

Which word names the hidden space between snow and ground where voles and shrews pass the winter?

Subnivean spaces stay close to 0 °C however cold the air above, once the snow is about 15 cm deep, and they hide small mammals from many hunters.

Which acidic soil of conifer forests has a name meaning under-ash, after its bleached grey layer?

Podzol forms where acids from fallen needles wash minerals downward, and peasants who first ploughed it turned up what looked like a layer of ash.

Which Old Believer family lived cut off in the Siberian taiga until geologists found them in 1978?

The Lykov home stood 250 km from any settlement, and the family chose to stay put even after the geologists made contact.

Which Akira Kurosawa film, about a Nanai trapper guiding a surveyor through the taiga, won an Oscar?

Dersu Uzala was shot in the Soviet Union, where the crew filming in the forest were beset by summer heat, mosquitoes and ticks. It won Best Foreign Language Film.

In which country does Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce about 9,500 years old, still grow today?

Sweden's Old Tjikko stands just 5 metres tall, and its trunk is only a few centuries old: the plant is a clone that keeps sprouting new trunks from ancient roots.

Which river, the largest flowing into the Arctic from North America, drains Canada's boreal forest?

The Mackenzie and its tributaries stretch 4,241 km, making up the longest river system in Canada, with open taiga along the lower valley.

Which small hoofed animal of Siberia's taiga has males that grow long tusks instead of antlers?

Musk deer males grow the fang-like teeth for display. Despite the fierce look the animals are plant-eaters, most common in the taiga of southern Siberia.

Which Japanese island has a northern part that falls within the taiga biome, with heavy snowfall?

Hokkaido was mainly inhabited by the Ainu people before large-scale Japanese settlement, and the native conifer of its north is the Sakhalin fir.