40 Fun Facts About Temperate Deciduous Forest

Which monkey, the northernmost non-human primate on Earth, bathes in hot springs through snowy forest winters?

Japanese macaque troops live in the cool deciduous forests of central and northern Japan, where snow can lie for months. They have also been seen rolling snowballs for fun.

Around 6,000 trees, nine-tenths of them oak, were felled to build which flagship of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar?

HMS Victory needed 150 men to assemble her, and the rest of her timber was elm, pine and fir. She has sat in dry dock at Portsmouth since 1922 and remains a commissioned warship.

Which everyday painkiller grew out of salicin, a bitter compound found in the bark of willow trees?

Aspirin is a lab-made relative of salicin, and willow remedies appear on clay tablets from ancient Sumer. In the 1700s an English clergyman spent five years testing powdered bark on some fifty fever patients.

Which Christmas evergreen is really a parasite that taps water and nutrients from the branches of trees?

Mistletoe sinks a root-like organ called a haustorium into its host's bark. It still makes some food of its own by photosynthesis, so botanists call it a hemiparasite.

Which spirit must, by law, be stored in a brand-new container of charred oak?

Bourbon draws its colour and much of its flavour from caramelised sugars in the charred wood. Coopers favour the white oak of North America's eastern forests because its wood resists leaking.

In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, the immense sacred tree at the centre of the cosmos, is which kind of tree?

Ash is what both the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda call Yggdrasil, whose three roots stretch away to far-off wells and springs. The gods are said to assemble beneath it every day.

Which animal of eastern North American forests can pass months in a winter den without eating or drinking?

Black bear heart rates fall from 40 to 50 beats a minute to just 8 in the den. Cubs are usually born there in late January or early February.

Which sleepy woodland rodent, a guest at the Mad Hatter's tea party, can hibernate for six months or more?

Dormouse fat was believed by the Elizabethans to bring on sleep, because the animal fattens up before its long winter. It wakes now and then to nibble food stored nearby.

Which pale green insect of North American woods has no working mouth as an adult and lives about a week?

Luna moth adults have only vestigial mouthparts and no digestive system. All the eating is done by the caterpillars, which feed on the leaves of broadleaf trees.

Which fan-leaved tree from China, widely called a living fossil, had specimens survive the Hiroshima atomic bomb?

Ginkgo is the last survivor of an order of plants that first appeared over 290 million years ago. Its leaves turn bright yellow in autumn and sometimes all fall within a day.

In a so-called mast year, the oaks across a wide area flood the forest floor with a bumper crop of what?

Acorns fall by the thousand in a mast year, far more than seed-eating animals can finish, so some survive to sprout. Lean years in between keep those animals' numbers low.

Which colder biome of conifers lies directly to the north of the temperate deciduous forest belt?

Taiga, also called boreal forest, has its largest areas in Russia and Canada. Its soil is young and poor in nutrients, without the deep, enriched layer that builds up under broadleaf trees.

Besides eastern North America and Europe, which region holds a great belt of temperate deciduous forest?

East Asia completes the trio of big northern regions. Small pockets also grow in South America, where southern beeches of the genus Nothofagus take the place of oaks.

Dogwood and holly, small trees that spend their lives shaded by taller neighbours, belong to which forest layer?

Understory plants receive only a small share of the sunlight, so they are built to tolerate shade. The air around them is also more humid than it is up in the treetops.

Which dark, spongy material, left when fallen leaves fully rot, helps make deciduous forest soil so fertile?

Humus gets its deep brown colour from the organic carbon packed into it. That dark colour even helps to warm cold soil in spring.

Through which process can one large oak release about 40,000 gallons of water into the air in a single year?

Transpiration is water vapour escaping through tiny leaf pores called stomata. By the same route, an acre of corn gives off 3,000 to 4,000 gallons every day.

Which nocturnal digger of European woodlands lives in clans in sprawling tunnel systems known as setts?

Badger clans come out at dusk and go home at daybreak. In cold regions the whole clan sleeps in one chamber dug below the frost line, possibly to share body heat.

Which songbird of eastern North American forests can sing two notes at once, giving its song a flute-like sound?

Wood thrush males breed in deciduous and mixed forests, then leave for southern Mexico and beyond for the winter. Forest loss at both ends of the journey threatens the species.

Which US president earned the nickname Old Hickory, after a famously tough hardwood of America's eastern forests?

Andrew Jackson won the name by refusing to disband his troops and leading them on a hard march home to Nashville. The shock-resistant wood is still used for tool handles and drumsticks.

Which early-blooming plant of eastern North American wetland woods makes its own heat and melts through the snow?

Skunk cabbage can run 15 to 35 °C warmer than the air around it, thawing a ring in the ice. The warmth may also help carry its smell to the first insects of the year.

Which wild animal of Asian and European forests is the only canid known to hibernate?

Raccoon dog metabolism falls by a quarter during the winter sleep. Unusually for a member of the dog family, the animal can also climb trees.

In Felix Salten's novel, Bambi is which European woodland species, swapped by Disney for an American cousin?

Roe deer are native to Europe, so Disney's artists redrew Bambi as a white-tailed deer, an animal that audiences across the United States would recognise.

Which nocturnal mammals of North American forests were found in 2019 to glow pink under ultraviolet light?

Flying squirrels gave up the secret by chance, and ordinary tree squirrels showed no glow at all. They only glide, yet trips of up to 90 metres between trees have been recorded.

Which vine, once sold to American farmers to stop soil erosion, now smothers trees across the US South?

Kudzu was only a garden plant until the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. It climbs so quickly and so densely that it kills trees by blocking most of their sunlight.

Which medicinal root of eastern North American forests has been traded to China for more than 300 years?

Ginseng joined fur as the oldest trade between North America and China after a French Jesuit found the plant near Montreal in 1716. Most wild exports now come from southern Appalachian states.

Which red, white-spotted toadstool of fairy tales grows in partnership with the roots of birch trees?

Fly agaric cannot be farmed, because it lives only in partnership with tree roots. It turns up in Disney's Fantasia and in the Super Mario video games.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited national park in the US, lies partly in which state?

Tennessee shares the park, whose slopes hold one of the largest blocks of old-growth temperate deciduous forest in North America. A state line runs through its centre.

Which king proclaimed the New Forest of southern England a royal hunting ground in about 1079?

William the Conqueror kept it for his own hunting, and harsh forest laws protected the king's game. Two of his sons later died there, among them King William Rufus in 1100.

Which reptile of eastern North American woods has a hinged shell that it can shut completely?

Box turtle shells close along a flexible hinge on the underside, sealing the soft body in bone. Some individuals have stayed on the same patch of ground for more than 32 years.

Vernal pools, the short-lived spring ponds of deciduous woods, are safe frog nurseries because they usually lack what?

Fish cannot last in a pond that vanishes for part of the year, so tadpoles and young salamanders grow up without them. In New England, wood frogs are a telltale sign of such a pool.

Which pigments, the same ones that colour blueberries and raspberries, turn some autumn leaves red and purple?

Anthocyanins are made fresh at the end of summer, and the brighter the light, the more a leaf produces. The yellows are different: they sit in the leaf all year, masked by green.

What do botanists call the way some oaks and beeches keep their withered leaves on the branch all winter?

Marcescence is typical of oak, beech and hornbeam. A pin oak only finishes the layer of cells that cuts each dead leaf loose once the next growing season begins.

Which eerie glow, made by fungi in rotting wood, lit the compass needle of one of the earliest submarines?

Foxfire, also called fairy fire, lit the barometer on board as well. When cold weather put the glow out, Benjamin Franklin was consulted about other ways to light the instruments.

Which nut tree of eastern American forests releases juglone, a chemical that stunts or kills plants growing nearby?

Walnut leaves, roots, husks and bark all carry the toxin, and tomato plants growing near one were seen to wilt in a 1921 study. Writers had noticed the effect as early as the 1st century.

Which wild ox, the ancestor of domestic cattle, died out when the last one perished in a Polish forest in 1627?

Aurochs horns were prized as drinking horns in the Middle Ages, and the horn of the very last bull was among them. Many of the horn sheaths survive to this day.

Which country shares the Hyrcanian forests, a lush broadleaf belt beside the Caspian Sea, with Azerbaijan?

Iran holds a long strip of the forest between the Caspian shore and the Alborz mountains, a World Heritage Site since 2019. The Caspian tiger was once its top predator.

Which North American forest bird stands on a log and drums by beating its wings rapidly against the air?

Ruffed grouse males drum to proclaim a territory, starting slowly and speeding up, a habit behind the nickname thunder-chicken. The species is the state game bird of Pennsylvania.

Which insect, the largest of its order in Europe, spends up to seven years as a grub feeding on rotting wood?

Stag beetle adults live for only a few weeks after those years as blind, C-shaped larvae. Conservationists bury upright logs, known as stumperies, to give the grubs food.

Which green and yellow bird ranged across the eastern United States until the last one died in a zoo in 1918?

Carolina parakeet flocks were the only native parrots across that range. The last known bird, a male named Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, and the species was declared extinct in 1939.

Woodland wildflowers that bloom, seed and die back before the tree canopy fills in are known as spring what?

Ephemerals such as trilliums race to use the sunlight that reaches the forest floor before the leaves overhead open. They spend the rest of the year as underground parts.