Taiga, or northern coniferous forest, is a strip of coniferous forests surrounding the globe in the northern latitudes of the planet. This biome covers the northern parts of North America, Europe, Russia and Asia. Taiga is generally located south of the tundra and north of temperate deciduous forests and temperate grasslands. The taiga is the largest biome on Earth, totaling approximately 50 million acres (20 million ha), representing 17% of the Earth's land area.
The natural taiga zone is characterized by a cold, harsh climate, moderate levels of precipitation (snow and rain) and a short growing season. There are two types of taiga forests: open taiga - forested areas with widely scattered trees, and dense forests, the forest floor of which is usually in the shade. More information about the flora of the taiga can be found at the link “Plants of the taiga“.
The fauna of the taiga, like the fauna of the tundra due to the harsh winter, is characterized by relatively low diversity. Some taiga animals are able to cope with the cold winter, others hibernate, but many species migrate south to areas with a more favorable climate. Below is a list of the most typical animals for the taiga biome, including mammals, birds, insects, predators, rodents, herbivores and other fauna.
Diet
The diet of field mice is quite varied and varies depending on the “place of residence” .
The animal feeds very actively and can eat as much food in a day as it weighs.
- In the steppe . The vole usually feeds on grasses and plant roots, insect larvae, and cereals;
- In the meadow . The field mouse eats succulent stems and bulbs of plants, grass seeds, various berries, and small insects;
- In the forest . Field mice can often be found on forest edges; they eagerly eat tree bark, green leaves, buds, young shoots of bushes, mushrooms, nuts and berries;
- In the taiga . The field mouse, which lives in Siberian forests, is slightly different in color; its fur has a reddish tint. In the taiga, the vole has something to eat: lingonberries, cranberries, nuts, various small insects, cones, buds and tree leaves.
Birds of the Taiga
Great-footed owl
It has thick feathering on its paws, which is why it is nicknamed hairy-legged. The bird is the size of a pigeon, distinguished by a wide tail and elongated wings. The owl's talons are black, and its beak and irises are yellow. The plumage of the animal is brown with white splashes. The owl chooses the tall taiga as its home. The owl is found in mixed forests, but as an exception.
Hawk owl
The bird's head lacks the ears characteristic of many owls. The yellow beak is distinctly curved down and pointed. The plumage of the animal is brown. There are blotches on the back, shoulders and neck. Speckles alternating with brown camouflage the owl against the background of birch bark.
Birches in the taiga are often found in the valleys of rivers flowing from the mountains and along the periphery of meadows. This is where hawk owls nest. Sometimes birds of prey prefer burnt areas where they hunt during the day. Other owls are mostly nocturnal.
Great Gray Owl
Prefers dense coniferous forest. Due to deforestation, the bird has become rare and is included in the Red Books of many taiga regions. The great gray owl prefers mountain taiga to lowland forests with an abundance of swamps, burnt areas and dead wood.
Zhelna
In other words, a black woodpecker. He is large-headed, but with a thin neck. The bird's wings are rounded. The plumage of the bird is jet black. Males have a scarlet “cap” on their heads. The beak of the animal is gray and powerful, up to 6 centimeters long. The length of the bird is equal to half a meter.
Zhelna is the largest among the taiga woodpeckers; it can hollow out something like hollows in trunks. This is a salvation for many birds and not only. Trees in the taiga are rarely “equipped” with hollows. Meanwhile, birds need them for nesting and squirrels for storing nuts.
Zhelna is the largest of the woodpeckers
three-toed woodpecker
Typically, a woodpecker has 4 toes on each foot. Representatives of the three-toed species have one less. The bird itself is smaller than many woodpeckers. Three-toed individuals do not exceed 25 centimeters in length. Often, from the head to the tail of a woodpecker there is only 20 centimeters. The animal weighs about 80 grams.
The three-toed woodpecker is less common and is listed in the Red Book in many regions. The color of the bird is black with a few white streaks on the back and head. Instead of a red cap, there is a yellow-orange cap on the head.
Gogol
This species of duck has entered the taiga because its representatives love to nest in trees. Gogol “houses” are built at a height of 10 meters. Other ducks prefer to build nests on the ground.
For nesting, the animals of the Russian taiga look not just for tall trees, but for hollow ones. Since the coniferous massif on the cavities in the trunks is poor, people sometimes build artificial cackling houses. Resembling large birdhouses, they replace natural nests for ducks.
Pictured is a goldeneye's nest
Capercaillie
Belongs to the order of grouse. In it, the capercaillie represents the large birds of the taiga. Animals in the coniferous forest zone look for food at the roots of trees. Wood grouse fly with difficulty, weighing about 6 kilos. This is a mass of males.
Females are half as massive, but due to their structure they also fly poorly. The color of females is reddish-gray. Male wood grouse are colored green, brown, black, white, gray, and red. This coloring attracts females during the breeding season.
Wood grouse open their tail feathers like peacocks and raise their heads high, revealing a spectacular crop for viewing. Wood grouse eat plant foods. In summer, birds feast on berries, juicy shoots, and seeds. In winter, animals have to eat aspen buds and pine needles.
Kedrovka
Belongs to passerines. The bird's name is associated with a passion for pine nuts. The birds are of medium size, which makes feeding easier. The bird does not exceed 36 centimeters in length, weighing about 200 grams. The animal is densely feathered and has a variegated color.
On a dark background there is an abundance of light flashes. By eating nuts, the nutcracker softens their shells in the stomach. By falling to the ground with feces, the grains germinate easier and faster. It is thanks to nutcrackers that forests are restored.
In gratitude for the distribution of pine nuts, a monument was erected to the nutcracker
Shchur
It is also called the Finnish rooster, it is very bright and spectacular. A bird from the finch family, larger than its fellows. Weighing about 80 grams, the body length of the gar is 26 centimeters. The bee-eater feeds on harmful insects and seeds. In spring, birds switch to a diet of young shoots. In winter, the gar is ready to “gut” the cones of pine and cedar trees.
Is the vole an omnivore?
Basically, the diet of voles consists of plant foods, but they also do not disdain small insects and larvae, eating them in large quantities (especially in the spring and summer).
In winter cold, field mice often rush closer to warmth and attack residential buildings, warehouses, and settle in large numbers in stacks of bread.
Having chosen a house for the winter, the vole does not have to choose what to eat, so it eats everything that it can steal: cheese, sausage, lard.
Harm from field mice
The field mouse is very prolific . The vole's lifespan is short, only 1.5-2 years, and it can produce offspring at the age of 2 months.
The animals breed 3-4 times a year, each litter contains 4-8 mice . It is easy to calculate that in a short life span, field mice are capable of increasing their family to incredible sizes.
Hordes of voles raid fields, orchards, and vegetable gardens, and gnaw everything that gets in their way .
Voles' teeth have the ability to grow throughout their lives, so they need to be ground down, otherwise they can grow to impressive sizes.
Mice cause a lot of trouble for humans.
If field mice are infested in the house, it is necessary to get rid of the uninvited guests as soon as possible, since thanks to their strong teeth and the constant need to grind them down, voles can chew through anything , even a thick floorboard.
If field mice are infested in the garden, this is also not very good, since their favorite delicacy is bark, berry bushes, and young shoots of fruit trees .
And if they penetrated into the cellar, then there may not be a trace left .
But the main danger to humans from these seemingly cute and harmless animals is that field mice are carriers of various infectious diseases .
IMPORTANT ! The field mouse (not to be confused with the ordinary gray house mouse) is a carrier of such serious infectious diseases as tularemia and hemorrhagic fever, the development and complications of which can be fatal.
Population and species status
According to scientists, there are more than 60 species and subspecies of such rodents in the world. At the same time, it is quite difficult to distinguish species from species if you do not use the method of gene analysis.
Interestingly! Mice easily distinguish their relatives from representatives of another population, so they never mate with them. Until now, scientists have not figured out how they do this.
Until now, the genome of this rodent has not been solved, since the genetic material is located chaotically, and the bulk of the information is located in the sex chromosomes. The number of chromosomes can be at the level of 17-64, and in females and males their number may not be the same. Despite this fact, all mice of the same litter are genetic clones.
The mouse population has one unique property, which is associated with the “self-transplantation” of genes into the nucleus from cells (mitochondria) of other organs. Scientists have been struggling with this problem for many years to no avail, which is associated with gene transplantation in humans, while a similar process in mice has been working for thousands of years. Scientists explain this by saying that mice made a sharp evolutionary leap in the next few million years.
The size of the vole mouse population depends on the year and season, with the cycle of birth surges being on the order of 3 to 5 years. Under favorable natural conditions, there can be up to 2 thousand individuals per 1 hectare of territory, and in unfavorable years - only a hundred individuals.
Lemmings and muskrats, like mice, also belong to the rodent family.
Wood vole close up / Bank vole close up
Food at different times of the year
- The food of voles is varied and depends on the time of year.
- Winter. Field mice don't hibernate, and feed as actively in winter as in the warm season.
In the wild, food supplies in winter are very scarce, so voles rush to residential buildings, hay barns, granaries, and cellars in search of food.They eat grain, root crops, and straw with great pleasure, causing great damage to farms ;
- Spring Summer .
In the warm season, voles do not have any special problems with food; they eat succulent plant stems, roots, berries, and leaves. They live in large quantities in fields, destroying seeds and young shoots of grain, beets, carrots, causing significant damage to agriculture and farms ; - Autumn. This is also a favorable time of year for field mice. The harvest is underway, and there is something to profit from in the fields, since after harvesting a lot of grain remains on the field.
The hay has already been cut, and haystacks are one of the favorite places for voles to settle, it’s warm there and there’s a lot of tasty grass. The sunflowers are ripe, and field mice will never refuse its tasty seeds either.The harvest is ripe in the vegetable gardens and orchards - you can profit from ripe fruits and root vegetables;
Fishes of taiga reservoirs
Muksun
Salmon fish that lives for more than 20 years. Once born in taiga rivers, it returns to spawn. Muksun chooses clean, mountain reservoirs with a strong current. The latter provides the eggs with an abundance of oxygen necessary for the development of the fry.
Unlike most salmon, muksun does not die after spawning. Weakened fish remain at the sources of taiga rivers until spring, regaining strength in order to return to their feeding grounds.
Burbot
Loves deep and clean taiga reservoirs with no or weak currents. Of all the codfish, burbot is the only one that likes cool weather. The animal does not swim into bodies of water with a water temperature above 25 degrees. Moreover, burbot gets worse already at +15.
Due to deteriorating digestion, the fish prefers to starve, and sometimes even prefers to survive the “heat” by hibernating. With an average weight of 3-4 kilograms, burbots are found 10 times larger. Such giants reach a length of 120 centimeters.
vendace
Inhabits cold waters. Externally it resembles a herring. Fish can live in both salt and fresh waters. The river vendace rarely chooses the sea. However, fish are found in some taiga reservoirs.
Vendace has tasty white meat. This makes the fish a valuable commercial species, despite its small size. Rare individuals grow up to 35 centimeters. Most vendaces do not exceed 20 centimeters in length.
Grayling
Another inhabitant of clean and cold waters. That's why grayling chooses flowing lakes and rivers of the taiga. Animals are often talked about in terms of neatness and timidity. Grayling's wariness makes it difficult to catch.
Externally, grayling is flattened on the sides, elongated, covered with small scales with a greenish-blue tint. The length of the fish rarely exceeds 35 centimeters. Males of the species are larger than females, sometimes stretching up to half a meter.
Pike
A regular in folklore and religious legends. The Finns, for example, have a legend about the creation of pike. God and the Devil once devoted their day to this matter. The latter came to show off to the former. God replied that he, too, created the pikes, marking each one with a cross. When the Devil and his opponent approached the river, only divine pikes swam up. Every fish actually has a cruciform bone in its head.
Pike in taiga reservoirs are recognized not so much by the cruciform bone of the skull, but by the size of the mouth and the torpedo-shaped shape of the body. Fish like to stay in the depressions of the bottom, choosing lakes and rivers with medium and low current strength.
Perch
The dorsal fin of the fish consists of 13-14 hard rays. Due to them, the animal is prickly. There are 2 rays on the anal fin, and 8 on each of the gills. These are not all the features of taiga animals . Perches stay in bodies of water with sluggish currents. Here the fish are predatory, eating the eggs of pike perch, trout, bream and carp.
Taiga perches are rarely more than 30 centimeters in length. However, in world practice, cases of catching 6-kilogram individuals have been recorded. One of them was mined at Chiddingston Castle. This is one of the lakes in Britain.
Taimen
Belongs to salmonids, rare. A few individuals are found throughout the taiga belt. The fish reach 2 meters in length. Taimen can weigh up to 100 kilograms. Artificial cultivation of taimen is relevant. This is how the population of the Red Book animal is maintained.
Sterlet
Found in the Siberian taiga. The fish is a sturgeon. Representatives of the family are relict; instead of bones, the animals have cartilage and no scales at all. The length of a sterlet can reach 130 centimeters. The weight of the fish is about 20 kilograms. Poachers catch Red Book species for tasty meat and valuable caviar.
The taiga covers 15 million square kilometers of area. On it you can find 33 thousand species of insects and 40 types of mammals. There are 260 species of birds in the taiga, and about 30 species of reptiles.
It’s interesting that the majority of the taiga is Russian, not only geographically. The biome was first identified as a separate type of forest by the domestic botanist Porfiry Krylov. This happened in 1898.
Do they stock up for the winter?
The burrows of field mice are quite simple; in rare cases, they may have several exits. The depth of the hole is small. Sometimes field mice make round grass nests on the surface and live in them.
In the voles' burrows, next to the nesting chamber, they build pantries , which allows them not to starve in the winter.
Field mice's pantries are usually filled with nuts, acorns, seeds and grains.
Reserves are usually not enough for the entire cold period, and the holes can often be destroyed by large forest animals, then voles rush to people in search of food.
How to draw a needle mouse with a pencil and pen step by step
Using a hard pencil, draw the outline of the mouse.
Step 2
Use a black ballpoint pen to darken the eyes, leaving room for highlights. We outline the ears and lower part of the mouse along the contour.
Step 3
Use a soft pencil to darken the pupils, as shown in the figure. After this, shade the mouse and shade it with a piece of paper. Next, we darken the ears and draw the fur on the forehead with short strokes in the direction from the nose to the top of the head.
Step 4We detail the fur, while darkening the pattern along the contour
Pay attention to the direction of the strokes. Draw a mustache with a well-sharpened pencil
Step 5
Using a black pen, draw a shadow under the mouse. Then shade the area around the black shadow with a soft pencil and blend it with a piece of paper.
What benefits do they bring?
After all the above-mentioned troubles from field mice, the question of their benefits may seem ridiculous.
Nevertheless, voles bring tangible benefits , being an important link in the food chain.
Without them, many animals: foxes, martens, owls, cats would be left without food. In addition, by destroying a significant part of the mouse army, these animals preserve many beneficial insects, plants, as well as a significant part of the crops in the fields and gardens.
In nature, there is nothing superfluous , and this is also the case with the field mouse. There is a lot of harm from it, but there is also tangible benefit.
And yet, despite their tiny size and harmless appearance, these are animals that are worth taking into account and it is better not to allow them close to your homes.
Pest control methods
Due to the danger to human life and health, as well as to all agriculture, the mouse is exterminated in every possible way. To limit the number of individuals there are the following methods:
- passive-preventive, in which mice are repelled from areas and objects of human activity;
- active, which uses methods for the complete destruction of pests.
The smell of a number of plants repels field mice; such protection is classified as a passive type of protection.
Repellent method
Plantings of odorous plants that mice cannot tolerate are effective in repelling them. These include:
- calendula;
- garlic;
- onion;
- sagebrush;
- mint;
- tansy and other herbs and plants with an intense odor.
Essential oils of plants are also used. You need to moisten cotton pads in liquid and place them in places where mice are expected to appear. You can use ammonia or kerosene. Rodents also try to avoid tree ash.
If you do not want to harm field mice, you can use a sonic repeller
Vibrating or ultrasonic devices are considered a more humane method of repelling, because of which rodents feel uncomfortable and run away. Such devices can be found in specialized gardening stores, or you can also make them yourself.
To make the device, you need to bury a stake in the ground, onto which a plastic bottle is placed. In windy weather it will spin and rattle, scaring away rodents. By analogy with a bottle, you can use tin cans or even bells.
It is unlikely that a colony of pests will remain in an area that is under the supervision of a hunter cat.
Physical destruction
In such a “war” any means are good. In a situation where the harvest is in danger, even the most extreme measures are justified. In folk methods of getting rid of mice, there are several options for battle:
- Plaster thrombus. You need to mix flour and gypsum (or lime) in equal parts and add a little salt. A mouse that eats this mixture will develop a blood clot in its stomach and die.
- I. In pesticide stores you can buy special anti-rodent preparations. They are presented in the form of granules or tablets. You must strictly wear gloves when laying out the poison, otherwise cautious mice will not even approach the bait. Some poisons take time to act and poisoned individuals infect others during this period. If there is a cat on the property that can eat a dead mouse, it is better not to use this method, otherwise the pet may also die.
- Mechanical destroyers. The method using mousetraps is only effective when there are only a few mice living in the area.
- Traps. People invent different types of devices for catching mice. For example, glue is applied to the base and bait is placed in the center. The mouse, having approached the food, becomes glued and cannot escape. You can also buy a trap in a store.
Traps and baits should be laid out with gloves, the smell of a person repels mice
Sometimes mice cause such harm to a household that a real war is waged against them. It is better to use chocolate, meat or bread dipped in unrefined sunflower oil as bait rather than cheese.
Consequences of complete extermination
During the years of demographic decline of mice, populations of owls, foxes and other animals and birds that feed on mice suffer. Some species of voles are considered rare and are protected by law. These are the mice:
- Muyskaya;
- Central Kashmir;
- Balukhistan;
- Taiwanese;
- Evoronian;
- Japanese;
- Mexican.
Prevention measures
To reduce the likelihood of voles becoming infested, various methods are used. Some of them:
- get a pet cat or dog;
- do not drive away natural mouse enemies from the site;
- clear the area of rubbish in which rodents can live (old furniture, boards, fabrics, etc.);
- loosen the ground, destroying mouse passages;
- Get rid of any garden debris that might harbor mice.
For effective control, it is better to use several methods, which also include prevention.
Any living creature living on the planet occupies a certain place in the ecological sphere. By eating plant seeds, mice control the growth of grass, which prevents trees from emerging. This way the forest is preserved. Rodents are also an important link in the predator food chain.
Photo
Meet the vole in our photo gallery:
Also read on our website about the subspecies of the vole: root vole, gray vole, bank vole.
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Features of reproduction
The Polish mouse becomes mature after 3 months. A young female gives birth to 1 to 3 offspring, and grows up to 12 in one year. Vaginism lasts for about 25 days.
The children are described as blind, naked, and absolutely hopeless. A photo of the field mice after the populace is presented below. The female gives birth to young offspring for up to 1 month, then the young continue to breed. They farm their own living things and extract hedgehogs.
Reproduction of the mouse After 9-10 days after the canopy, the mouse is again ready for watering. Each river produces new offspring up to 4 times. The favorable period for this begins with the grass and continues until the harvest.
