File:The continent we live on (1961) (20496523050).jpg

Title: The continent we live on
Identifier: continentweliveo00sandrich (find matches)
Year: 1961 (1960s)
Authors: Sanderson, Ivan Terence, 1911-1973
Subjects: Physical geography; Natural history
Publisher: New York : Random House
Contributing Library: New College of California
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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The ubiquitous Canada Goose migrates north in spring and south in (all but nom lives all year m almost every province. British in the last century and was applied by them first to the desert scrub there, then to dry woodlands, then to wet wood- lands, and finally to the Tropical Tall Deciduous Forest. It seems first to have been Rudyard Kipling and then such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs who popularized the word in English, and in doing so transferred it to the Equatorial Rain Forests. Nowa- days people call any tall, dense, and tangled mass of vegetation a jungle. It would seem better to confine the word to tropical growth, and to apply the term "rain forest"—in the absence of any valid local name—to these magnificent forests that rim the northwest coast of North America. And they need a name, for they are quite different from any other forests found elsewhere. Also, it is indeed the warm rain and mist that drift in from the Pacific that have created them. It may seem odd that the coast of this far northern province, from 60 degrees to 48 degrees north, should be blanketed with a sort of treble-layered forest, denser and more lush and dripping than almost anything found in the equatorial zones; but this is the fact because tropical forests are "hollow" and clear below. One cannot describe adequately this forest, especially when the skies are clear and brilliant sunlight filters down to its lower levels. As in tropical jungles, the light is actually bright green. as photographers learn either immediately or to their cost later. The floor of this forest is often hard to find, being many feet below the apparent surface, and in virgin areas you have to be extremely careful or you may break through the mat of mosses, ferns, dead brandies, and general tangle and drop down into a tridimensional latticework of fallen and rotting tree trunks below. A companion of mine once so vanished instantly, right before my eyes, and I had to fetch a rope to get him out. for he was wedged between two great logs about ten feet down in a sort of cave with overhanging sides formed by a crisscross of age-old rotting logs. This rain forest that clothes the coastal strip is built in three tiers, the uppermost being composed of the head foliage of giant conifers, the middle of smaller conifers and some broad-leafed trees, and the bottom one of bushes and ferns. The middle and bottom strata are bound together and festooned with mosses and lichens. THE LARGEST LIVING THING The principal coniferous trees are the Douglas Fir. the Sitka Spruce, the Western Red Cedar, and the Western Hemlock.

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