It sounds like an oxymoron, but it acknowledges the blended nature of this remote and slender threshold realm in which creatures of the subarctic have been overlapping with those of the subtropics since before the last Ice Age. There is strong evidence suggesting that this region was a refugium, one of several areas around the Pacific Rim that remained ice-free during the last glaciation, and this may help explain the presence of an ecosystem that exists nowhere else. Here, timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures
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