40 Fun Facts About Temperate Forests

Which Star Wars film shot its forest moon of Endor scenes among the giant redwoods of northern California?

Return of the Jedi used the redwoods as the home of the Ewoks. Backgrounds for the speeder chase were filmed by walking a camera through the trees at about 5 mph, then played back to look like 120 mph.

Which vampire saga is set in Forks, a rainy logging town surrounded by the temperate rainforest of Washington state?

Twilight turned Forks, where more than 100 inches of rainfall soak the woods each year, from a timber town into a destination for fans.

Which burrowing marsupial of the forests of south-eastern Australia is famous for leaving cube-shaped droppings?

Wombat droppings are stacked to mark territory, and the flat sides are thought to stop them rolling away. Research into how the cubes form won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.

Which mollusc of the redwood forests is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Cruz?

Banana slug became the mascot after a student vote, and Reader's Digest named it the best college mascot in 2004. The largest of these slugs can reach 25 centimetres long.

Which mammal of Himalayan temperate forests gave the Firefox web browser its name?

Red panda is the animal behind the name, since firefox is one of its nicknames, although the browser's logo shows a fox. It is not closely related to the giant panda, which is a bear.

Which flightless bird of New Zealand's forests is the only bird with nostrils at the tip of its beak?

Kiwi sniff out worms and insects underground with those nostrils, without seeing or touching them. A single egg can weigh up to a fifth of the female that lays it.

Which bird of south-eastern Australia's wet forests can imitate chainsaws, car alarms and camera shutters?

Lyrebird song mixes the bird's own notes with mimicry of other species and of machines. Recordings also include copies of crying babies, barking dogs and mobile-phone ring tones.

Which US state has a honey mushroom colony covering 3.5 square miles of forest, possibly Earth's largest organism?

Oregon's Malheur National Forest hides the colony, nicknamed the humongous fungus, which lives mostly underground. It may weigh as much as 35,000 tons.

Which Studio Ghibli film took its forest setting from the ancient mossy woods of Japan's Yakushima island?

Princess Mononoke borrowed the look of Yakushima, a World Heritage island whose most famous sugi tree is reckoned to be more than 2,000 years old.

Which fish, carried into the woods by bears, ends up fertilising the trees of Pacific temperate rainforests?

Salmon bring ocean nutrients inland when they swim upriver to spawn and die. Bears, otters and ospreys drag the carcasses ashore, where they rot and feed the forest.

Which California sequoia, named after a Civil War commander, is the largest living single-stem tree by volume?

General Sherman stands in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. It was confirmed as the biggest tree in the world in 1931, after being measured against a nearby rival.

Which wooded German region is known for cuckoo clocks and gives its name to a cherry and chocolate cake?

Black Forest gateau is made with chocolate cake, cream, sour cherries and kirsch, a cherry spirit from the same hills. The region is also the home of a well-known ham.

Giant sequoias depend on which natural force to dry open their cones and clear the ground for their seedlings?

Fire dries the cones so they shed their seeds, and it clears the litter and rival plants that would smother a seedling. A sequoia cone can otherwise stay green and closed for 20 years.

Which towering conifer of the Pacific Northwest, despite its common name, is not a true fir at all?

Douglas fir belongs to a separate genus from the true firs, and its cones hang down rather than standing upright. It yields more timber than any other tree in North America.

Which US national park protects the Hoh Rainforest, where about 140 inches of precipitation fall in a typical year?

Olympic National Park, in Washington state, holds rainforest valleys that may be the wettest area in the continental United States. Unlike tropical rainforests, they are dominated by conifers.

Which threatened bird became the symbol of the fight over logging old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest?

Spotted owl habitat was at the heart of the timber wars, and a court order halted logging in its national forests in 1991. The bird also loses food and territory to an invading relative, the barred owl.

Which flightless, nocturnal parrot of New Zealand's forests is the heaviest parrot in the world?

Kakapo is also the only parrot that cannot fly, and it weighs about 400 grams more than the largest flying parrot, the hyacinth macaw.

Which weather feature keeps California's redwoods supplied with moisture through the dry summer months?

Coastal fog condenses on the needles and drips to the ground, topping up the soil in the dry season. Redwoods can also take in the moisture directly through their bark.

The Appalachian Trail runs almost 2,200 miles through forested hills from Georgia to Mount Katahdin in which state?

Maine holds the northern end of the trail, which crosses 14 states and is hiked in part by more than three million people a year.

Which stocky, screeching animal became the world's largest carnivorous marsupial after the thylacine died out in 1936?

Tasmanian devil is a forest hunter and scavenger about the size of a small dog. Its fame abroad owes most to Taz, the whirling Looney Tunes character it inspired in 1954.

Which bristly forest animal of Europe and Asia is the ancestor of most breeds of farmyard pig?

Wild boar piglets wear pale bands along their flanks and back, a coat that changes as they age. People have hunted the adults as big game for thousands of years.

Monarch butterflies from eastern North America spend each winter clustered on highland forest trees in which country?

Mexico shelters the butterflies on volcanic peaks in the centre of the country, where they roost on oyamel trees until March. The journey south covers thousands of kilometres.

What is the English name for shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of unwinding by spending quiet time among trees?

Forest bathing has nothing to do with water. The term was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, a director at Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

The Colchic rainforests of Georgia grow in the land where Jason and the Argonauts sought which legendary prize?

Golden Fleece legends placed the prize in Colchis, in what is now western Georgia. The region's rainforests and wetlands became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.

Which Scottish-born naturalist and wilderness campaigner has a redwood grove near San Francisco named after him?

John Muir, known as the Father of the National Parks, was honoured at the insistence of William Kent, who bought the grove to save it from loggers and gave it to the nation.

What name, taken from a Titan of Greek myth, was given to the tallest known living tree, a California redwood?

Hyperion was found in 2006 by two naturalists in a remote corner of Redwood National Park. The same park holds other giants named Helios, Icarus and Daedalus.

Which New Zealand forest plant is the emblem worn by the national rugby team?

Silver fern fronds were laid pale side up by Māori hunters to mark a path home at night, because the undersides catch the moonlight. New Zealand players first wore the emblem on an 1888 tour.

Which rot-resistant tree did First Nations of the Pacific Northwest carve into totem poles and ocean-going canoes?

Cedar also gave the peoples of the region houses, masks, boxes and tools, which is why many First Nations call it the Tree of Life.

Every natural grove of giant sequoia grows on the western slopes of which California mountain range?

Sierra Nevada groves are the tree's only native home. Planted sequoias have nonetheless begun seeding themselves in southern California's San Jacinto Mountains, where conditions are similar.

Tāne Mahuta, a giant tree named after the Māori god of forests, belongs to which New Zealand species?

Kauri giant Tāne Mahuta stands in Waipoua Forest in Northland and is the largest kauri known to be standing today. Its name is often rendered in English as God of the Forest.

Which national forest, the largest in the United States, consists mostly of temperate rainforest?

Tongass covers 16.7 million acres of southeast Alaska, an expanse larger than ten US states. It is also described as Earth's largest remaining temperate rainforest.

Which shy animal of the temperate rainforests of South America is the smallest deer in the world?

Pudu stand only 32 to 44 centimetres tall and hide from predators in dense underbrush and bamboo thickets. Their name comes from the language of the Mapuche people.

What do foresters call a fallen, rotting trunk on which rows of tree seedlings take root and grow?

Nurse log decay supplies a seedling with water, nutrients and a bed of moss. It may also shield young trees from soil diseases that gather around adults of their own kind.

What is the science of dating wood and past climates by measuring the yearly growth rings of trees called?

Dendrochronology can fix the exact year in which each ring formed. A sister science uses the same rings to reconstruct climate and atmospheric conditions in earlier periods of history.

Southern beech forests in Chile, New Zealand and Australia are a legacy of which ancient southern supercontinent?

Gondwana once joined South America, Antarctica and Australia, and the beeches' scattered range follows its fragments. Scientists still debate how much seeds crossing the oceans added to the pattern.

Which rare conifer was unknown to science until an abseiler found it in a remote gorge north-west of Sydney in 1994?

Wollemi pine carries the name of its finder, David Noble, in its scientific name, Wollemia nobilis. He came across it in a temperate rainforest canyon about 150 km from the city.

The cancer drug Taxol was first isolated from the bark of which tree of the Pacific Northwest's forests?

Yew bark was in such demand that the tree was growing scarce, until chemists found ways to make the drug from farmed yews of other species.

The mountain ash of south-eastern Australia, the tallest flowering plant on Earth, belongs to which group of trees?

Eucalyptus regnans earned the name mountain ash because its timber resembles that of the unrelated ash of the northern hemisphere. The tallest living one, Centurion, stands 100 metres high.

Which small seabird of the North Pacific flies inland to nest on the branches of old-growth forest trees?

Marbled murrelet pairs lay a single egg on a mossy branch as far as 80 km inland, unlike relatives that nest in colonies on cliffs. Logging of those trees made the bird a flagship of forest protection.

Which small amphibian of Chile's southern temperate forests has a male that raises the tadpoles inside his vocal sac?

Darwin's frog fathers swallow the eggs once the embryos begin to move and carry the young until they have changed into froglets. Charles Darwin found the species on the voyage of HMS Beagle.