What are Drunken Trees?

Drunken trees are a stand of trees displaced from their normal vertical alignment. This most commonly occurs in northern subarctic taiga forests of black spruce under which intermittent permafrost or ice wedges have melted, causing trees to tilt at various angles. Some trees survive their soil eroding and continue to grow. Others collapse or drown as the subterranean ice melts. As they are staggered across the landscape, people often refer to them as 'drunken trees.'

Drunken Trees are also called, tilted trees, or a drunken forest may also be caused by frost heaving, and subsequent palsa development, hummocks, earth flows, forested active rock glaciers, landslides, or earthquakes. In stands of spruce trees of equal age that germinated in the permafrost active layer after a fire. They tilting begin when the trees are 50 to 100 years old, suggesting that surface heaving from new permafrost aggradation can also create drunken forests.

The Golden Pheasant - Chrysolophus pictus

The golden pheasant or Chinese pheasant is a gamebird of the order Galliformes and the family Phasianidae. The genus name is from Ancient Greek khrusolophos, "with golden crest", and pictus is Latin for "painted" from pingere, "to paint". It is native to forests in mountainous areas of western China, but feral populations have been established in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.