European Forest Habitat Coloring Pages
People have been cutting down Europe's forests for thousands of years to build ships and houses and to make room for farms. Today many of the woods you'd walk through were planted by people and only a few patches of the old forest are left.
That changed who lives there. Some animals moved into the new woods and did fine. Others were hunted until they were gone from whole countries, and wolves, bears and bison all disappeared from big parts of Europe. Now some of them are slowly finding their way back.
Not every European forest looks the same either. Oak and beech trees fill the west and the middle, spruce and pine grow in the cold north and cork oaks grow in the sunny south. Each one has its own animals.
Jump to: Trees | All Across Europe | Ferns and Mushrooms | Ireland | Poland | Germany | Scandinavia | Spain and Portugal | Carpathians | Wolves
The Trees Themselves
Oak, ash and thorn are such old friends in Britain and Ireland that old stories say fairies show up wherever the three grow together. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about them that was later turned into a folk song.
In Forests All Across Europe
A few animals turn up in woods from one end of the continent to the other.
Hedgehogs
A hedgehog has around 5,000 spines and rolls into a tight ball when it's scared so they all point outwards. In autumn it tucks into a pile of leaves and sleeps through most of the winter.
Foxes
A fox can hear a mouse squeaking under deep leaves or snow. It leaps high into the air and dives nose first to land right on top of it.
Badgers
A badger's underground home is called a sett and some have been dug bigger by one family after another for hundreds of years. Badgers keep them tidy by dragging out the old bedding to air in the sun and carrying in fresh grass.
Wild Boar
Every pig on every farm comes from the wild boar. People in Europe began keeping them thousands of years ago. The stripes on a piglet help it hide in the patchy light of the forest and they fade after a few months.
Ferns and Mushrooms
Not everything on the forest floor has fur or feathers.
Ferns
A young fern leaf starts out curled up tight like a snail shell or the scroll on a violin. It unrolls slowly as it grows, and the curled-up stage is called a fiddlehead.
Mushrooms
Some mushrooms grow in a perfect circle called a fairy ring. Old European stories said fairies danced there at night. The real reason is that the fungus spreads outwards underground and pushes up mushrooms around the edge.
Ireland: Red Squirrels
Ireland was once covered in woodland. Today only about a tenth of it is forest and much of that was planted, so wildlife has had to squeeze into what's left.
Ireland's own squirrel is the red squirrel. Grey squirrels were brought over from North America in 1911 and they're bigger so they took over much of the woods. Help has come from the pine marten, a tree-climbing cousin of the weasel that was nearly gone from Ireland. A marten catches a heavy grey squirrel more easily than a light red one that can escape along the thinnest branches, and where the martens have come back the red squirrels are doing better too.
Squirrel coloring pages Pine marten coloring pages
Poland: Bison
Białowieża Forest on the border of Poland and Belarus is one of the last patches of the ancient forest that once covered the European plain. Some of its oak trees are hundreds of years old.
Europe has its own bison called the wisent, and by 1927 there were none left in the wild. A few dozen survived in zoos and parks, and their calves were brought back to Białowieża one herd at a time. Today thousands of them wander the forests again.
Germany: Eagles and Salamanders
Almost a third of Germany is forest. The Black Forest in the south got its name because the evergreen trees grow so thick that hardly any light reaches the ground.
Eagles
Germany's coat of arms shows a black eagle so you'll spot one on everything from flags to coins. The eagle that really nests in German forests is the white-tailed eagle, with wings that stretch about two metres across. Hunting and pollution nearly wiped it out a hundred years ago. Now hundreds of pairs raise chicks in tall old trees near lakes in the north and east.
Fire Salamanders
People used to believe a fire salamander could walk through flames. It hid inside logs, and when the logs were tossed on the fire it came scrambling out. The bright yellow spots warn animals that its skin tastes awful, and it comes out to wander the damp woods after a rainstorm.
Scandinavia: Moose
More than two thirds of Sweden is covered in forest, mostly spruce and pine.
In Europe this animal is called an elk. It's the biggest animal in the Scandinavian forest and a strong swimmer that crosses lakes and even dives under the water to eat plants on the bottom. A bull's huge antlers fall off every winter and a new pair grows back in spring.
Spain and Portugal: Lynx
In the oak woods of Spain and Portugal people peel cork off the trunks of cork oaks. The tree doesn't mind. It grows a new layer of bark and can be peeled again about nine years later.
The Iberian lynx lives only in Spain and Portugal and eats almost nothing but rabbits. When rabbits got sick in the last century the lynx lost its dinner and nearly disappeared too. There were fewer than 100 left in the early 2000s, and careful help from people has brought back well over a thousand.
The Carpathian Mountains: Bears
The Carpathian Mountains curve through Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Poland and hold some of the largest wild forests left in Europe.
A brown bear cub is born in winter inside a den while its mum sleeps, and it weighs about as much as a tin of beans. By spring it's ready to follow her out into the woods. Bears used to live all over Europe but they've vanished from many countries and the Carpathians are one of the places where they're still common.
When the Wolves Left
Wolves once lived in nearly every forest in Europe. People hunted them for centuries to protect their sheep and cattle and cut down the woods they hunted in, so wolves were gone from much of western Europe by about 1850.
Then wolves became protected and in some places farmland went back to woods. Wolves from Poland walked hundreds of kilometres west to find new homes, and around the year 2000 a pair raised pups in Germany for the first time in more than a hundred years. Today they're back in many countries.
More Woodland Residents
Owls, deer and woodpeckers live in European forests too.
Owls Deer Woodpeckers Frogs Ants Snails