The Elusive Lynx

I stared open-mouthed in disbelief at the cat crossing the neighborhood street in front of my new house in Silver Bay, MN (I’ll be moving up full time in 2027). Trotting purposefully on long legs, with a body almost three feet long, this was no housecat. “Bobcat!” I exclaimed, eyeing the black tip on their short tail and dark blotches on gray-brown fur. Bobcats are common in Northern Wisconsin where I’ve been living for the past 15 years, and are often spotted around homes and roads, so that was the most likely identification my startled brain could find.

You can view the video on my Facebook or Instagram.

But as the cat climbed up the pile of dirty snow on the curb and into my neighbor’s yard, the size of their huge, furry feet came into full view. That, along with long black ear tufts visible against the white, confirmed their identity: Canada lynx.

In this still frame from a cell phone video, you can see the short, black-tipped tail, huge foot and striking black ear tufts characteristic of a Canada lynx. Photo by Emily Stone.

I’ve been lucky enough to see lynx before—once crossing the highway on a road trip across Canada, and again in Alaska when I helped a crew of biologists recover the body of a collared lynx who had died. But lynx are known to be elusive, solitary creatures who travel mostly by night in the tangled spruce-fir forests and conifer swamps of the far north.

While a small number of lynx once called Northern Wisconsin home, they’ve never been common, and declined rapidly as logging changed the forests, the winter snowpack thinned, and more aggressive bobcats took over. The last confirmed sighting in the state was in 1992, and was likely a visitor from Canada.

Minnesota is a different story. With an estimated 100-300 individual lynx in the state at any given time, Minnesota has the third largest lynx population in the U.S., after Alaska and Maine. And most of the lynx sightings occur in Cook and Lake County, where Silver Bay is located. In fact, a couple of different population maps from the DNR seem to indicate that the Superior National Forest just uphill from Silver Bay has relatively high numbers of lynx. It’s not hard to understand why—the ski trails I’ve visited up there are all crisscrossed by abundant snowshoe hare tracks. Hares make up 90% of a lynx’s diet, so good hare habitat equals good lynx habitat.

Figure 13. Lynx winter-specific occupancy probabilities (medians). Grid cells are 5×5 km and encompass Superior National Forest and designated lynx critical habitat in Minnesota, USA From:  Summary of the Superior National Forest’s Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) DNA database and population monitoring 2024. LINK 

You can see the large hind feet of a snowshoe hare in these tracks as they cross a ski trail. Lynx also use large feet to carry them across deep snow—in pursuit of hares to eat! Photo by Emily Stone.

This is what a snowshoe hare's foot looks like from the bottom! Big and hairy! Photo by Emily Stone, taken while assisting researchers in Alaska. 

When hare populations go up, lynx numbers go up, too. When the bunnies crash headlong into a population low, lynx follow. Hungry humans all across the North have been aware of this cycle for hundreds of years, since hares were a staple in their stew pots. The lynx-hare cycle has been highlighted in ecology textbooks since 1942, when British ecologists Elton and Nicholson did a quantitative analysis of lynx numbers in the fur trapping records of the Hudson Bay Company. (Read about some theories explaining why this happens here.)

But the lynx population in Minnesota stopped following the hare cycle closely in the 1980’s. Now there’s just a small bump in the lynx population a year or two after hare numbers peak. Ironically, it may be the recovery of other mid-sized predators, like bobcats, fishers, coyotes, and foxes that has made it tougher for lynx. These other carnivores also love to eat snowshoe hares, but are able to pursue a much more varied diet when the hare numbers are low. Lynx aren’t nearly as flexible. They really shine when super deep snow slows their competition down.

Lynx feet can be 4” round, and heavily furred, which helps them stay on top of deep snow. This foot belonged to the lynx in Alaska who we recovered after their radio collar put out a mortality signal. Photo by Emily Stone.

Scientists with the Minnesota DNR, the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute, and the U.S. Forest Service are all working to figure out how many lynx there are each year, how well they are surviving, and how forest management can help them thrive. They are gathering hair and scat samples to identify individual lynx by their DNA.

My fiancé and I watched the lanky cat lope toward a forest that slopes down toward Lake Superior. It’s breeding season for lynx—could this be a male out searching for a mate? We crossed the street to look for tracks. Their furred feet float so well that not even a scuff could be seen on the crusty snow. I didn’t think to look for hair, but later I reported the sighting through a Minnesota DNR portal. What a thrill for my new neighborhood to be a dot on their map!

Source: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/nhnrp/lynx_sightings.html 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.