Eastern North America

About Eastern North America

The deciduous forests of eastern North America turn over completely each year — leafing, shading, colouring and dropping — and the animals living in them run on that schedule. It is a landscape that was almost entirely cleared for agriculture in the nineteenth century and has since grown back over abandoned farmland, so most of it is young second-growth forest rather than anything ancient. That regrowth brought back deer, turkeys, black bears and beavers in numbers that in some places now exceed what the habitat can carry comfortably. The region is also a major corridor for migratory birds, with enormous numbers moving through in spring and autumn along the Atlantic flyway. Its salamander diversity, concentrated in the southern Appalachians, is the highest anywhere in the world.