In the northern coniferous forest zone, or taiga, the relations of animals with European or Eurasian representatives are numerous, and this zone is also essentially circumpolar. The relations are less close than in the Arctic forms, but the moose, beaver, hare, red fox, otter, wolverine, and wolf are recognizably related to Eurasian animals. Even some fishes, like the whitefishes (Coregonidae), the yellow perch, and the pike, exhibit this kind of Old World–New World relation. A distinctively North American animal in this taiga assemblage is the Canadian porcupine.
The hardwood forest area of the eastern and the southeastern pinelands compose the most important of the faunal regions within the United States. A great variety of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles of this region have related forms in East Asia, and this pattern of representation is likewise found in the flora. This area is rich in catfishes, minnows, and suckers. The curious ganoid fishes, the bowfin and the gar, are ancient types. The spoonbill cat, a remarkable type of sturgeon in the lower Mississippi, is represented elsewhere in the world only in the Yangtze in China. The Appalachian region is headquarters for the salamanders of the world, with no less than seven of the eight families of this large group of amphibians represented; no other continent has more than three of the eight families together. The eel-like sirens and amphiumas (congo snakes) are confined to the southeastern states. The lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae exhibit a remarkable variety of genera and a number of species centring in the Appalachians. There is a great variety of frogs, and these include tree frogs whose main development is South American and Australian. The emydid freshwater turtles of the southeast parallel those of East Asia to a remarkable degree, though the genus Clemmys is the only one represented in both regions. Much the same is true of the water snakes, pit vipers, rat snakes, and green snakes, though still others are peculiarly American. The familiar alligator is a form with an Asiatic relative, the only other living true alligator being a species in central China.
In its mammals and birds the southeastern fauna is less sharply distinguished from the life to the north and west and is less directly related to that of East Asia. The forest is the home of the white-tailed deer, the black bear, the gray fox, the raccoon, and the common opossum. The wild turkey and the extinct hosts of the passenger pigeon were characteristic. There is a remarkable variety of woodpeckers. The birdlife in general tends to differ from that of Eurasia in the presence of birds, like the tanagers, American orioles, and hummingbirds, that belong to South American families. Small mammals abound with types of the worldwide rodent family Cricetidae, and with distinctive moles and shrews.
American bisonAmerican bison, or plains buffalo (Bison bison).Alan G. Nelson/Root Resources
American badgerAmerican badger (Taxidea taxus).Alvin E. Staffan—The National Audubon Society Collection/Photo ResearchersMost distinctive of the grassland animals proper is the American bison, whose nearly extinct European relative, the wisent, is a forest dweller. The most distinctive of the American hoofed animals is the pronghorn, or prongbuck, which represents a family intermediate between the deer and the true antelopes in that it sheds its horns like a deer but retains the bony horn cores. The pronghorn is perhaps primarily a desert mammal, but it formerly ranged widely into the shortgrass plains. Everywhere in open country in the West there are conspicuous and distinctive rodents. The burrowing pocket gopher is peculiarly American, rarely seen making its presence known by pushed-out mounds of earth. The ground squirrels of the genus Citellus are related to those of Central Asia, and resemble them in habit; in North America the gregarious prairie dog is a closely related form. The American badger, not especially related to the badger of Europe, has its headquarters in the grasslands. The prairie chicken is a bird distinctive of the plains region, which is invaded everywhere by birds from both the east and the west.
The Southwestern deserts are a paradise for reptiles. Distinctive lizards such as the poisonous Gila monster abound, and the rattlesnakes, of which only a few species are found elsewhere in the United States, are common there. Desert reptile species often range to the Pacific Coast and northward into the Great Basin. Noteworthy mammals are the graceful bipedal kangaroo rat (almost exclusively nocturnal), the ring-tailed cat, a relative of the raccoon, and the piglike peccary.
Kangaroo rat (Dipodomys).Anthony Mercieca—Root Resources/EB Inc.
The Rocky Mountains and other western ranges afford distinctive habitats for rock- and cliff-dwelling hoofed animals and rodents. The small pikas, related to the rabbit, inhabit talus areas at high elevations as they do in the mountain ranges of East Asia. Marmots live in the Rockies as in the Alps. Every western range formerly had its own race of mountain sheep. At the north the Rocky Mountain goat lives at high altitudes—it is more properly a goat antelope, related to the takin of the mountains of western China. The dipper, remarkable for its habit of feeding in swift-flowing streams, though otherwise a bird without special aquatic adaptations, is a Rocky Mountain form with relatives in Asia and Europe.
In the Pacific region the extremely distinctive primitive tailed frog Ascaphus, which inhabits icy mountain brooks, represents a family by itself, perhaps more nearly related to the frogs of New Zealand than to more familiar types. The Cascades and Sierras form centres for salamanders of the families Ambystomoidae and Plethodontidae second only to the Appalachians, and there are also distinctive newts. The burrowing lizards, of the well-defined family Anniellidae, are found only in a limited area in coastal California. The only family of birds distinctive of North America, that of the wren-tits, Chamaeidae, is found in the chaparral of California. The mountain beaver, or sewellel (which is not at all beaverlike), is likewise a type peculiar to North America, confined to the Cascades and Sierras, and there are distinct kinds of moles in the Pacific area.
The mammals of the two coasts are strikingly different, though true seals (the harbour seal and the harp seal) are found on both. The sea lions, with longer necks and with projecting ears, are found only in the Pacific—the California sea lion, the more northern Steller’s sea lion, and the fur seal. On the East Coast the larger rivers of Florida are inhabited by the Florida manatee, or sea cow, a close relative of the more widespread and more distinctively marine West Indian species. Karl Patterson Schmidt The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Settlement patterns
Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation—except locally, as in parts of New Mexico. A benign habitat permitted a huge contiguous tract of settled land to materialize across nearly all the eastern half of the United States and within substantial patches of the West. The vastness of the land, the scarcity of labour, and the abundance of migratory opportunities in a land replete with raw physical resources contributed to exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavours have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.