North America: Fascinating Fact Generator

Collared pikas (mouse-sized critters related to rabbits) must collect 50 times their own body weight in vegetation to survive the winter.
Mountain goats tough out the worst of winter on high mountain peaks over 12,000 feet about sea level, where Arctic winds can reach 100 mph.
In spring, mountain goats leap and spin to shake off their heavy winter coats, which help them withstand winter temperatures as low as -50°F.
A male bighorn sheep’s huge, curved horns can weigh up to 30 pounds. The horns alone account for 10 percent of the sheep’s body weight.
During rut, male bighorn sheep lunge headfirst at one another, colliding head-on with 800 pounds of force – enough to kill most animals.
Weighing only 1 oz (28 g), the calliope hummingbird’s migration along the Rockies is the longest per gram of any warm-blooded creature.
A wolverine’s sense of smell is so powerful it can detect a frozen animal carcass buried 20 feet beneath the snow.
The wolverine has a special tooth that can rotate 90° sideways, allowing it to tear off meat from prey that has been frozen solid.
The cougar’s hind legs are proportionally the longest of any cat. It can leap 18 feet up a cliff face and nearly 40 feet across.
The cougar has the largest distribution of any terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, ranging from Canada to the tip of Patagonia.
Each year in Labrador, Canada, 28,000 caribou wind their way through the mountains as part of a 3,700-mile annual migration.
In preparation for winter, grizzly bears can gain up to 400 pounds. At winter’s end, they will have lost nearly 40% of their body weight.
Smell is a grizzly bear's sharpest sense. Its nose is 2,300 times more sensitive than ours and it can smell carrion from 18 miles away.
Gray whales travel from the Bering Sea to Mexico and back each year, a 14,000-mile roundtrip that may be the longest mammal migration.
Looking to pack on some weight? Whale blubber, loved by orcas and grizzlies alike, contains more calories per pound than any other food.
With a summit elevation of 20,320 feet above sea level, Mount McKinley – part of the Denalis – is the highest mountain in North America.
The mustangs of the Great Basin Desert are descendants of horses that got loose during Coronado’s famous expedition 450 years ago.
Some of the vertical spires found in Monument Valley are the magma cores of ancient volcanoes that once peppered the landscape.
Death Valley holds the record for the highest air temperature ever recorded on Earth: 134°F, taken at Furnace Creek on July 10, 1913.
Death Valley’s Badwater Basin the lowest point on land in North America: 282 feet below sea level.
The Grand Canyon’s highest point, Point Imperial, is over a mile and a half above the canyon floor.
Long-tailed manakin males dance together in pairs to attract females, but only the older bird gets to mate.
Olive Ridley sea turtles return to land after 15 years at sea, on the very same night, by the thousands, to lay their eggs.
Of the half a million Olive Ridley sea turtles that hatch every year, only 5% make it past waiting predators to the safety of the sea.
In North America, some 3 billion birds stream north every spring, flying thousands of miles to find food, a mate and to raise a family.
Along North America’s Pacific Coast, hundreds of millions of salmon surge into rivers each year, swimming 750 miles inland to spawn.
200 million monarch butterflies flutter across North America each spring, from Mexico to as far north as the Canadian prairie.
Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, is home to the largest concentration of mammals on Earth: some 20 million free-tailed bats.
Labrador, Canada, is home to one of the greatest migrations on earth: 28,000 caribou that travel 3,700 miles each year in search of food.
American black bears evolved in the time of saber-toothed cats, when bedding down in treetops was the safest way to spend the night.
In the early 1800s, 30 million bison roamed the American heartland – more than the entire human population of North America at the time.
American bison were once hunted to near-extinction. Only 1,000 remained in 1890, down from 30 million bison less than a century earlier.
North America’s Great Plains are a sprawling ½ a billion acres of shelterless land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole.
Each year, over 400 tornadoes rip into North America’s prairies; in the last 50, tornadoes have touched down in virtually every state.
North America’s Great Plains are pounded by some of the most powerful storms on the planet, spawning tornadoes with winds up to 200 mph.
The largest-ever prairie dog settlement spanned 100 miles in one direction, 250 in the other and was home to 400 million prairie dogs.
Prairie dogs have calls to identify specific predators. They may also communicate how big the predator is and how fast it’s approaching.
500,000 years of erosion have shaped the Badlands into a region of razor-sharp ridges and buttes. Temperatures here can climb to 116°F.
Ferruginous hawks, which live in arid and semiarid grasslands, shade their hatchlings beneath their 5-foot wings when temperatures soar.
Male jumping spiders flirt by dancing. If his dance steps aren’t totally mesmerizing, the female will kill him and slurp his insides out.
The pocket gopher has very bad eyesight and is nearly deaf, but can detect even the slightest vibration made by approaching predators.
A bobcat will sit and patiently focus on a pocket gopher’s burrow for over 2 hours, waiting for its prey to pop up so it can make a kill.
Cranes have been living on North America’s Great Plains for nearly 10 million years. They’re among the oldest living birds on the planet.
Nebraska’s sandhill crane is a living fossil. It has 1 of the longest fossil histories of any living bird, dating back 10 million years.
North America’s pronghorn can sustain a speed of 60 mph for miles without stopping. A cheetah can only sprint at that speed.
Winter is a fight against starvation for the 1-ton American bison, which must consume over 20 pounds of grass a day just to stay alive.
In North America’s Great Plains, the northern lights can be seen as far south as Tulsa, OK – further south than anywhere else on Earth.
A red fox homes in on the Earth’s magnetic field to fine-tune its pounce, allowing it to target mice stirring 3 feet beneath the snow.
Bald eagles will scare flocks of snow geese roosting on an icy lake, then prey on those that break their bones in the mass hysteria.
Millions of snow geese head north across the Great Plains each year. Over 200,000 of them can clog a single icy lake at winter’s end.
Prairie chickens inflate air sacs on the sides of their neck and snap their tails to impress females.
Alaskan grizzlies can give birth on slopes 9,000 feet high. Their newborns must avoid avalanches on their trek to the valley below.
An avalanche can pack 36,000 pounds of bone-crushing force as 1 million or more cubic feet of snow slides down the mountain at 90 mph.
In North America, 200 billion trees unfurl their leaves and 11,000 species of flower push out of the soil each spring.
Manitoba, Canada is home to the largest concentration of snakes on Earth: 30,000 garter snakes, which emerge from the soil each spring.
A white-tailed deer mom will feign injury, pretending to be easy prey in order to steer a hungry predator away from her vulnerable fawn.
North America’s smallest bird, the calliope hummingbird – which is as light as a penny – migrates up to 5,000 miles each year.
The male calliope hummingbird has purple throat feathers that resemble a tempting flower, which he unfurls to attract mates.
Each year, over 200 million salmon leave the Pacific Ocean and travel up to 750 miles upriver in the Pacific Northwest to spawn.
Years after they’ve hatched, salmon can find their exact birthplace based on smell alone.
A spawning salmon’s stomach organs will completely disintegrate to make room for millions of sperm and eggs.
Alaskan brown bears have enormous appetites. In spring and summer, they can devour up to 100 pounds of salmon a day.
Alaskan brown bears, which rival polar bears as the largest land predators on Earth, can crush a bowling ball between their jaws.
In North America, a Kodiak bear was filmed for the first time diving up to 20 feet to catch salmon. Only a few bears know how to do this.
The size of a tennis ball, the Yukon’s collared pika needs to collect 30 times its weight in flowers to make it through the winter.
The mouse-like collared pika collects the dead bodies of migrating birds and stores them in its “storm cellar” for food during winter.
Across the eastern half of North America, over 26 billion oak trees close up shop for the season each fall in an explosion of color.
A chipmunk’s cheeks can stretch up to 3 times the size of its head to store nuts. It races to store about 6,000 nuts by end of fall.
An acorn woodpecker will drill up to 3,000 holes in a dead oak tree to store nuts. It shifts nuts to smaller holes as they dry out.
Woodpeckers slam their beaks against wood with a force 1,000 times that of gravity. That’s 20 times more force than a human can survive.
Canada’s Chilkat River hosts the largest concentration of bald eagles on Earth – 30,000 congregate here each year to feast on salmon.
The Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania are home to largest wild elk herds east of the Mississippi River.
Weighing nearly 60 pounds, the North American beaver is the continent’s largest rodent, second in the world to South America’s capybara.
Each spring, spinner and blacktip sharks migrate 1,000 miles up the U.S. Atlantic Coast in one of the planet’s greatest mass migrations.
The giant hurricanes that pound North America each year can reach 600 miles across and deliver over 13 trillion gallons of rain.
In the last 100 years, hurricanes have hit nearly every inch of North American coastline from Texas to the tip of New England.
Two of the largest tectonic plates on Earth collide from California to Alaska, spawning violent earthquakes and steep mountain ranges.
In the hidden inlets of Big Sur, California, bobcats prey on seagulls that bathe in crystal clear mountain streams.
Only 80 years ago, Los Angeles, California, wasn’t much more than a village. Today, the West Coast is home to over 30 million people.
The cliffs south of Los Angeles are home to one of the fastest animals on the planet – the peregrine falcon, which can dive at 240 mph.
In the waters off California, billions of bioluminescent phytoplankton light up the water, each glimmering for only a tenth of a second.
Moon jellyfish aren’t just mindless blobs; they have delicate senses, and some even have complex eyes that help them navigate.
At 10 feet wide with 60-foot tentacles, the lion’s mane jellyfish – found off the California coast – is the world’s largest jellyfish.
The Bay of Fundy on Canada’s east coast is home to the most extreme tides on Earth. Sea levels here can change by as much as 40 feet.
Bottlenose dolphins along North America’s Atlantic coast operate as a unit to drive fish to land, a behavior found nowhere else on Earth.
For the past 200,000 years, half a million ancient horseshoe crabs have been coming to the beaches of Delaware to breed.
Each year, hundreds of millions of seabirds pass through America’s eastern seaboard – one of the planet’s greatest migration corridors.
In summer, 18 trillion mayflies – over 3,000 times the population of people on the planet – take to the air along the Mississippi River.
Each year, trillions of mayflies hatch along the Mississippi River, collectively releasing 475,000 tons of protein into the food chain.
Every drop of water that falls on two-thirds of the United States, from New York to Yellowstone, flows into the Mississippi.
North America’s alligator gar is an ancient fish that can reach 12 feet in length. It gulps air and may even be able to survive on land.
Next to crocodiles, American alligators have the strongest bite in the animal kingdom. They can grow over 19 feet and weigh nearly a ton.
A Florida manatee’s lungs are two-thirds the length of its body, allowing it to feed underwater for up to 20 minutes at a time.
In the heat of summer, herds of wild mustangs will walk over 1,000 miles to find waterholes in North America’s Great Basin Desert.
Death Valley is the driest area in North America. The amount of rainfall it receives each year would barely fill a coffee cup.
The sparse animal life of Death Valley can only support a single 30-pound coyote for every 50 square miles.
The cactus is only found in the Americas. It can suck up to 200 gallons of water from a single rainfall and store it for months.
Cactus bees have the fastest development cycles of any bee in the world – 2 short weeks, driven by the brief cactus pollination period.
60,000 bolts of lightning strike the Arizona deserts each year. A single bolt can reach 50,000 degrees and generate a billion volts.
After releasing their rain, collapsing monsoon clouds in the Southwest can create deadly walls of dust 100 miles wide and 1 mile high.
There are thousands of spadefoot frogs buried beneath the desert sands of the American Southwest, waiting for the annual monsoons.
Over the past two decades, around half a dozen wild jaguars have returned to the Southwestern deserts of the United States.
The American Southwest’s pygmy rabbit is the world’s smallest rabbit. It’s about the size of a soda can and weighs a single pound.
The mighty Colorado River has been carving out the mile-deep, 277-mile-long Grand Canyon for some 6 million years.
The California condor's 9-foot wingspan is the largest on the continent. This ancient bird is so rare that only 22 remain in the wild.
O.D. McKee sold the very first Oatmeal Creme Pie in early 1935. The popular snack was used many years later to launch the Little Debbie brand.
The Little Debbie brand was born in 1960. Company founders, O.D. and Ruth McKee, named the product line after their granddaughter, Debbie.
The first Little Debbie snacks were sold in a carton of 12 and had a retail price of 49 cents. Twelve cakes would have cost 60 cents if sold separately.
The Little Debbie® bow tie has been in use continuously since 1963. A graphic artist decided a red bow tie would look great on the packaging and placed it just above the die-cut opening that was on all of our cartons at the time.
The top-selling varieties of Little Debbie snacks are Oatmeal Crème Pies, Swiss Cake Rolls, Nutty Bars Wafer Bars and Honey Buns.
If you lined up all the Little Debbie snacks that have been sold over the years, they would cover 9.9 million miles – enough to circle the earth almost 400 times!
You could fill the Globe at Epcot Center in Disney World 744 times with all of the snack cakes Little Debbie has sold since 1960.
Little Debbie snacks have orbited the earth on the space shuttle, traveling more than 17,500 miles an hour. Little Debbie snacks have been a standard pantry item on space shuttle missions for many years.
The first national Little Debbie commercial from the 1980s featured comedian and impersonator Rich Little rapping while posing as Jack Nicholson, George Burns and Crocodile Dundee (Paul Hogan).
Little Debbie currently has more than 1 million Facebook fans and close to 20,000 followers on Twitter!