ARTICLE RAUL´S CLASS

8/7/2019 ARTICLE RAULS CLASS

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Tracking the Elusive Lynx

In the Garnet Mountains of Montana, the lynx is the king of winter. Grizzlies, which rule the

wilderness all summer, are asleep. Mountain lions, which sometimes crush lynx skulls out of spite,

have followed the deer and elk down into the foothills. But the lynxwith its ultralight frame and

tremendous webbed feetcan tread on top of the six-foot snowpack and pursue its singular passion:

snowshoe hares, prey that constitutes 96 percent of its winter diet.

Which is why a frozen white bunny is lashed to the back of one of our snowmobiles, alongside a deer

leg sporting a dainty black hoof. The bright yellow Bombardier Ski-Doos look shocking against the

hushed backdrop of snow, shadows and evergreens. Lynx (Lynx canadensis) live on the slopes of

these mountains, a part of the Rockies, and the machines are our ticket up. We slide and grind on a

winding trail through a forest shaggy with lichen; a bald eagle wheels above, and the piney air is so

pure and cold it hurts my nose. Lean into the mountain, advises John Squires, the leader of the

U.S. Forest Services lynx study at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula. I gladly oblige,

as this means leaning away from the sheer cliff on our other side.

The chances that well trap and collar a lynx today are slim. The ghost cats are incredibly scarce in

the continental United States, the southern extent of their range. Luckily for Squires and his field

technicians, the cats are also helplessly curious. The studys secret weapon is a trick borrowed from

old-time trappers, who hung mirrors from tree branches to attract lynx. The scientists use shiny

blank CDs instead, dabbed with beaver scent and suspended with fishing line near chicken-wire

traps. The discs are like lynx disco balls, glittering and irresistible, drawing the cats in for a closer

look. Scientists also hang grouse wings, which the lynx swat with their mammoth paws, shredding

them like flimsy pet store toys.

If a lynx is enticed into a trap, the door falls and the animal is left to gnaw the bunny bait, chew the

snow packed in the corners and contemplate its folly until the scientists arrive. The lynx is then

injected with a sedative from a needle attached to a pole, wrapped in a sleeping bag with plenty of

Hot Hands (packets of chemicals that heat up when exposed to the air), pricked for a bloodsample

that will yield DNA, weighed and measured and, most important, collared with a GPS device and

VHF radio transmitter that will record its location every half-hour. We let the lynx tell us where

they go, Squires says. Theyve trapped 140 animals over the years84 males and 56 females, which


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are shrewder and harder to capture yet more essential to the project, because they lead the scientists

to springtime dens.

As we career up Elevation Mountain, Squires nods at signs in the snow: grouse tracks, footprints of

hares. He stops when he comes to a long cat track.

Mountain lion, he says after a moment. Its only the second time hes seen the lynxs great enemy

this high up in late winter. But the weather has been warm and the snow is only half its usual depth,

allowing the lions to infiltrate. Thats a bad deal for the lynx, he says.

The lynx themselves are nowhere to be found. Trap after trap is empty, the bait nibbled by weasels

too light to trip the mechanism. Deer fur from old bait is scattered like gray confetti on the ground.

Finally, in the last trap in the series, something stirswe can see it from the trail. Megan Kosterman

and Scott Eggeman, technicians on the project, trudge off to investigate, and Kosterman flashes a

triumphant thumbs up. But then she returns with bad news. Its just M-120, she says, disgusted.

M-120beefy, audacious and apparently smart enough to spot a free lunchis perhaps the worlds

least elusive lynx: the scientists catch him several times a year.

Because this glutton was probably the only lynx Id ever get to see, however, I waded into the woods.

The creature hunched in a far corner of the cage was more yeti than cat, with a thick beard and ears

tufted into savage points. His gray face, frosted with white fur, was the very countenance of winter.

He paced on gangly legs, making throaty noises like a goats nickering, broth-yellow eyes full of

loathing.

As we approached, he began hurling himself against the mesh door. Yup, he knows the drill,

Squires said, yanking it open. The lynx flashed past, his fuzzy rear vanishing into the trees, though

he did pause to throw one gloating look over his shoulder.

The lynx team hopped back up on the snowmobiles for another tailbone-busting ride: they were off

to a new trapline on the next mountain range over, and there was no time to waste. Squires ends the

field research every year in mid- to late March, around when grizzlies usually wake up, hungry for

an elk calf or other protein feast. Before long the huckleberries would be out, Cassins finches and


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from fires, insect invasions and logging. In 2000, lynx were listed as threatened under the

Endangered Species Act.

Squires began his project in anticipation of the listing, which freed up federal funding for lynx

research. At the time, scientists knew almost nothing about the U.S. populations. Montana was

thought to be home to about 3,000 animals, but it has become clear that the number is closer to

300. The stronghold is not a stronghold, Squires says. They are much rarer than we thought.

Hundreds more are scattered across Wyoming, Washington, Minnesota and Maine. Wildlife

biologists have reintroduced lynx in Colorado, but another reintroduction effort in New Yorks

Adirondack Mountains fizzled; the animals just could not seem to get a foothold. Bobcats and

mountain lionsculinary opportunists not overly dependent on a single prey speciesare much

more common in the lower 48.

In the vast northern boreal forests, lynx are relatively numerous; the population is densest in

Alberta, British Columbia and the Yukon, and there are plenty in Alaska. Those lynx are among the

most fecund cats in the world, able to double their numbers in a year if conditions are good. Adult

females, which have an average life expectancy of 6 to 10 years (the upper limit is 16), can produce

two to five kittens per spring. Many yearlings are able to bear offspring, and kitten survival rates are

high.

The northern lynx population rises and falls according to the snowshoe hares boom-and-bust cycle.

The hare population grows dramatically when there is plenty of vegetation, then crashes as the food

thins out and predators (goshawks, bears, fox, coyotes and other animals besides lynx) become

superabundant. The cycle repeats every ten years or so. The other predators can move on to

different prey, but of course the lynx, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in 1911, lives on

Rabbits, follows the Rabbits, thinks Rabbits, tastes like Rabbits, increases with them, and on their

failure dies of starvation in the unrabbited woods. Science has borne him out. One study in a

remote area of Canada showed that during the peak of the hare cycle, there were 30 lynx per every

40 square miles; at the low point, just three lynx survived.

The southern lynx and hare populations, though small, dont fluctuate as much as those in the

north. Because the forests are naturally patchier, the timber harvest is heavier and other predators

are more common, hares tend to die off before reaching boom levels. In Montana, the cats are

always just eking out a living, with much lower fertility rates. They prowl for hares across huge


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home ranges of 60 square miles or more (roughly double the typical range size in Canada when the

living is easy) and occasionally wander far beyond their own territories, possibly in search of food or

mates. Squires kept tabs on one magnificent male that traveled more than 450 miles in the summer

of 2001, from the Wyoming Range, south of Jackson, over to West Yellowstone, Montana, and then

back again. Try to appreciate all the challenges that animal confronted in that huge walkabout.

Highways, rivers, huge areas, Squires says. The male starved to death that winter.

Of the animals that died while Squires was tracking them, about a third perished from human-

related causes, such as poaching or vehicle collisions; another third were killed by other animals

(mostly mountain lions); and the rest starved.

The lynxs future depends in part on the climate. A recent analysis of 100 years of data showed that

Montana now has fewer frigid days and three times as many scorching ones, and the cold weather

ends weeks earlier, while the hot weather begins sooner. The trend is likely the result of human-

induced climate change, and the mountains are expected to continue heating up as more

greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. This climate shift could devastate lynx and their

favorite prey. To blend in with the ground cover, the hares coat changes from brown in summer to

snowy white in early winter, a camouflage switch that (in Montana) typically happens in October, as

daylight grows dramatically shorter. But hares are now sometimes white against a snowless brown

background, possibly making them targets for other predators and leaving fewer for lynx, one of the

most specialized carnivores. Specialization has led to success for them, says L. Scott Mills, a

University of Montana wildlife biologist who studies hares. But might that specialization become a

trap as conditions change?

The lynxs precarious status makes even slight climate changes worrisome. Its surprising to me

how consistently low their productivity is over time and how they persist, Squires says. Theyre

living right on the edge.

To follow the cats into the folds of the Rockies, Squires employs a research team of former trappersand the hardiest grad studentsmen and women who dont mind camping in snow, harvesting

roadkill for bait, hauling supply sleds on cross-country skis and snowshoeing through valleys where

the voices of wolves reverberate.


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In the early days of the study, the scientists retrieved the data-packed GPS collars by treeing lynx

with hounds; after a chase across hills and ravines, a luckless technician would don climbing spurs

and safety ropes, scale a neighboring tree and shoot a sedation dart at the lynx, a firefighters net

spread below in case the cat tumbled out. (There was no net for the researcher.) Now that the collars

are programmed to fall off automatically every August, the most aerobic (Squires euphemism for

backbreaking) aspect of the research is hunting for kittens in the spring. Thrillingly pretty, with eyes

blue as the big Montana sky, the kittens are practically impossible to locate in the deep woods, even

with the aid of tracking devices attached to their mothers. But the litters must be found, because

they indicate the populations overall health.

Squires research has shown time and again how particular lynx are. Cats are picky and this cats

pickier than most, Squires said. They tend to stick to older stands of forest in the winter and

venture to younger areas in the summer. In Montana, they almost exclusively colonize portions of

woods dominated by Engelmann spruce, with its peeling, fish-scale bark, and sub-alpine fir. They

avoid forest that has recently been logged or burned.

Such data are instrumental for forest managers, highway planners and everyone else obligated by

the Endangered Species Act to protect lynx habitat. The findings have also helped inform the Nature

Conservancys recent efforts to buy 310,000 acres of Montana mountains, including one of Squires

longtime study areas, from a timber company, one of the biggest conservation deals in the countrys

history. I knew there were lynx but didnt appreciate until I started working with John [Squires]

the particular importance of these parcels of land for lynx, says Maria Mantas, the Conservancys

western Montana director of science.

Squires goal is to map the lynxs entire range in the state, combining GPS data from collared cats in

the remotest areas with aerial photography and satellite images to identify prime habitat. Using

computer models of how climate change is progressing, Squires will predict how the lynxs forest

will change and identify the best management strategies to protect it.

The day after our run-in with M-120, the technicians and I drove west three hours across the

shortgrass prairie, parallel to the front of the Rockies, to set traps in a rugged unstudied zone along

the Teton River, in Lewis and Clark National Forest. The foothills were zigzagged with the trails of

bighorn sheep, the high peaks plumed with blowing snow. Gray rock faces grimaced down at us. The

vastness of the area and the cunning of our quarry made the task at hand seem suddenly impossible.


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What a drag, Squires said. She checked it out and said, Nope. Flat-out rejected it! He sounded

like a jilted bridegroom. He turned to the technicians with uncharacteristic sternness: The hares

all wadded upstretch it out so it looks like a hare! We need feathers in that trap. Wings!

Later that day, we drove back hundreds of miles to check the newly set traps in the Lewis and Clark

National Forest.

They were empty.

By lantern light in the cabin that night, Squires talked of shutting down the new trapline. There

were too many miles to cover between the Garnet and Lewis and Clark sites, he said. It was too

much work for a small crew.

In the morning, though, the air was fresh and chilly. The mud-encrusted truck was covered with

smudges where deer had licked off road salt in the night. New snow lay smooth as rolled dough,

with lynx prints as neat as if stamped with a cookie cutter.

Squires was reborn. Oh, Id like to trap that cat! he cried for what must have been the thousandth

time that season, blue eyes blazing.

The traplines stayed open.

Staff writerAbigail Tucker last wrote about the artist Arcimboldo. Ted Wood is a nature

photographer in Boulder, Colorado.

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