North American Forest Habitat Coloring Pages
A habitat is the place where a living thing finds everything it needs: food, water, shelter and room to grow up. A forest is one of the biggest habitats on land. Close to a third of the land on Earth is covered in trees, and more than half of all land plants and animals live among them.
Not every forest looks the same. Rainforests near the equator are warm and wet all year. Temperate forests have four seasons and trees that drop their leaves in autumn. Up north the evergreen forests wait out long snowy winters. Each kind has its own residents, from monkeys to moose.
The trees do most of the building. Their branches make rooms for birds, their roots hold the soil in place and their fallen leaves become food for the ground. Every forest is built in layers and every layer has its own residents. They aren't all furry either. Birds, snakes, salamanders, bugs, ferns and mushrooms all have a home in it.
Jump to: Treetops | Trunks and Branches | Forest Floor | Logs and Leaves | Roots | Great Bear Rainforest
The Trees Themselves
Count the rings on a tree stump and you'll know how old the tree was, because it adds one new ring of wood every year. Wide rings come from years with lots of sun and rain, and skinny ones come from the tough years.
Up in the Treetops
The treetops are the sunniest part of a forest, and the leaves up there catch most of the light before it can reach the ground.
Blue Jays
A blue jay hides acorns all over the forest for the winter and forgets a few of them. The forgotten ones sprout into new oak trees, and scientists think blue jays helped oak forests spread north across North America after the last ice age.
Owls
An owl can't roll its eyes. They're shaped like tubes and fixed in place so the owl has to turn its whole head instead, up to about three quarters of the way around.
Ravens
A raven is the biggest songbird in the world, and it lives all across North America from forests to mountains. Ravens have been seen sliding down snowy slopes just for fun.
Along the Trunks and Branches
A tree trunk is a road that goes straight up. Claws, stiff tails and gripping scales all help forest animals travel along it.
American Martens
An American marten spends loads of its time up in the trees and uses its long bushy tail as a balancing pole when it races along a branch. It's a cousin of weasels and otters, and it lives in the evergreen forests of Canada and the northern US.
Rat Snakes
A rat snake is a brilliant climber. The edges of its belly scales catch on bark like the rungs of a ladder so it can shimmy straight up a trunk. It isn't venomous and farmers are glad to have one around because it eats rats and mice. Black rat snakes in the eastern US are among the longest snakes in North America.
Squirrels
A squirrel can scamper down a tree headfirst because its back ankles swivel all the way around. That turns its hind claws backward so they hook into the bark. Its big bushy tail is handy too, working like a blanket in the cold and a sunshade when it's hot. Gray squirrels and red squirrels live in forests across North America.
Woodpeckers
A woodpecker props itself up on its stiff tail feathers like a camping stool while it hammers. Its tongue is so long that it wraps around the back of its head.
Down on the Forest Floor
The forest floor is shady and cool because the leaves above soak up most of the sunlight. Plants that like shade do best here, and so do some of the biggest animals in the woods.
Bears
Rotting logs are a snack bar for bears. Ants and fat grubs hide in the soft wood, and a cub learns how to rip a log open by watching its mum. Black bears live in forests across Canada and much of the US.
Fawns
A fawn's mum leaves it alone in the leaves for hours on purpose so her scent won't lead hungry predators to it. Its spots look like patches of sunlight on the forest floor and a newborn fawn hardly has any scent of its own.
Ferns
Ferns were growing on Earth long before the dinosaurs. They never make flowers or seeds and spread with tiny spores instead, which grow in little dots on the underside of the leaves.
Foxes
A fox's tail is called a brush. On cold nights it curls up with the brush wrapped around its nose like a scarf.
Lynx
A lynx has enormous furry paws that spread out like snowshoes so it can pad across deep snow without sinking. Kittens look like they're wearing oversized slippers until their bodies catch up. In North America the Canada lynx follows snowshoe hares through the northern forests.
Wild Pigs
Wild pigs aren't from North America. Explorers from Spain brought farm pigs over in the 1500s, and Eurasian wild boar were brought in later for hunting. Some escaped and now roam the woods in many states. Their piglets are striped and sometimes called humbugs after the stripy sweets. The stripes help them hide in the patchy light of the forest and fade after a few months.
Under the Logs and Leaves
A fallen log is far from finished. As it slowly rots it turns into a home for bugs and salamanders and a nursery for mushrooms.
Mushrooms
What looks like a whole mushroom is really just the fruit of a fungus. The rest of it is a web of thin threads hiding in the soil or inside a rotting log, and that web breaks old leaves and wood down into food for the forest.
Spotted Salamanders
A spotted salamander spends most of its life underground and only comes up on rainy spring nights to find a pond. Those bright yellow spots warn predators that its skin tastes awful. It lives in the forests of eastern North America.
Walking Stick Insects
A walking stick can't run from trouble, so it hides by looking like a twig. It even sways back and forth like a twig in the breeze, and the biggest species in the world are over half a metre long! The northern walkingstick in the forests of eastern North America is only about as long as a crayon.
Under the Roots
The soil under a forest keeps tunnels and dens cooler in summer and warmer in winter, so plenty of residents live right under your feet.
Chipmunks
A chipmunk stuffs seeds into stretchy cheek pouches and carries them home to its tunnel pantry. Winter isn't one long sleep for a chipmunk. It naps for a few days at a time and wakes up to snack from its stash.
At the Forest's Edge
A forest edge is where the trees stop and a meadow, a field or a riverbank begins, and it's one of the busiest places in the woods. Sunshine pours in from the open side and the trees give cover on the other, so there's more to eat and more places to hide than deep in the shade.
Blackberries
Wild blackberries tangle along forest edges and clearings where sunlight reaches the ground, and bears and birds both turn up when the berries ripen in late summer.
Cottontails
An eastern cottontail can sit perfectly still inside a bramble thicket, and a hungry fox would have to push through the thorns to get at it. That's why cottontails love forest edges. When one does bolt, the fluffy white underside of its tail flashes like a cotton ball bouncing away.
Great Bear Rainforest
Some black bears in the Great Bear Rainforest on the coast of British Columbia are born with pale cream fur. They're called spirit bears and the pale coat comes from a rare gene that both parents have to carry.
Great Bear Rainforest coloring pages
And So Many More
A single patch of woodland can be home to thousands of kinds of insects alone, never mind the squirrels, moose, wolves and frogs.
Squirrels Moose Wolves Frogs Ants Snails