Forest animals for kids: 12 species to research

Forests cover about a third of the world's land, and the animals of the temperate and northern forests are the ones many children know from stories: deer, bears, wolves, foxes, owls and rabbits. Each has a niche. Deer browse at the forest edge and their antlers regrow every year, among the fastest-growing bone known. Grey wolves hunt them in family packs, and bears eat almost anything — berries, roots, salmon, insects — before sleeping through winter on stored fat. Owls fly almost silently thanks to fringed wing feathers and can hunt mice by hearing alone; bats do the same with echolocation and eat thousands of insects a night. Raccoons and red foxes have followed people into towns, and hedgehogs roll into a ball of around 5,000 spines when threatened. In the mountain forests of the Himalaya, the red panda climbs bamboo stems at night. Moose, the largest deer, wade the lakes of the boreal forest that rings the Arctic.