Lynx number one was a hard-luck kitten. He was barely a year old, in March 2003, when he walked into a box-like trap near Isabella, deep in the Superior National Forest. Isabella is an old logging village bisected by Highway 1 as it slices inland from Lake Superior to Ely. Beyond the village is a small network of forest roads and great patches of spruce, pine, and balsam. It’s wild and dense country that few humans ever see. This vast forest, interspersed by small, alder-choked streams and rocky lakes, is one of the areas in northeast Minnesota that biologists have recently focused on in their search for lynx in Minnesota. Lynx One’s trap was like those used by urban trappers to catch dogs harmlessly.
Although evolution had molded Lynx One, with his long back legs and fur-padded feet, to have a special taste for snowshoe hare, his trap was baited with beaver meat. Only L1, which is how history remembers him, knew what that trap door slamming shut in the woods sounded like. When researchers got to him a few hours later, they used a syringe on a pole to dose him with ketamine hydrochloride and xylazine hydrochloride. One of the side effects of the sedatives, commonly used by neighborhood vets, would be to fuzz over the sharp edges of any bitter memory of the experience. They also allowed the biologists to handle him: First they slipped a hood over his head to protect his eyes. Then they weighed him, measured him, sexed him, and aged him. They also removed a skin plug from an ear—a sample for a DNA record—and fitted him with a battery-operated radio collar. When the wild cat was done being manhandled he was injected with antibiotics. It’s a rough life being a young male lynx in Isabella.
When he was released, L1 shot away from his captors like a cat out of hell. But records show he didn’t go far. His radio collar allowed him to be repeatedly located in a small area around Isabella during a three-week period. If you care to be anthropomorphic, you might say L1 wasn’t just sulking. He was carefully considering his options in the face of a cruel world. Then he decided. He was a young cat. The world was big. No way was he being drafted into a twisted human research project. L1 set out on his immense journey. Traveling more than a hundred miles, crossing streams and lakes and clawing through the great Boundary Waters blowdown of 1999, he didn’t rest until he’d crossed into Canada. During this trip, which biologists call a dispersal, L1 was lost to radio contact. He may, like the lynx photographed last summer at a Saginaw Lake campsite, have passed close to human visitors on his journey. And like all lynx, except during mating season in January, he traveled alone. He often hunted, failed, and was hungry. But he found enough prey—hare, squirrels, grouse—to sustain him. He was located again by biologists later in the spring when he settled into a new area deep in Ontario. After that, airborne radio trackers kept him on the air all summer and into the fall.
Then, on November 28, L1 blundered into another trap. This time he died. Or, as biologists say, he was harvested.
In Ontario, it is legal to hunt lynx. In Minnesota, it is not. In fact, it is illegal throughout the lower forty-eight states. In 2000, the Canadian lynx (the scientific name is Lynx canadensis) was given threatened status under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This was the result of five lawsuits filed by a group called the Defenders of Wildlife. A flurry of funding for studies of the mysterious cat followed. L1’s northward dispersal is emblematic of the evolving state of knowledge regarding lynx.
“It’s normal for them to disperse, but the conventional wisdom is that they disperse from Canada south,” said Ron Moen, a biologist involved in the first radio collar study, which was conducted by the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. “The conventional wisdom says our animals should not be going to Canada. We don’t know why L1 went north.”
Conventional wisdom regarding lynx in Minnesota is amorphous at best. Some believe there are a few itinerant migrants from Canada that may be traveling through northeast Minnesota. Others think Canadian-born animals may come to Minnesota in the height of winter to breed. Others say lynx have never been particularly rare in Minnesota, they’re just too stealthy to be seen. Those beliefs, so far based primarily on intuition and anecdotal evidence, don’t add up to much. Biologists, woods workers, and environmentalists are an independent-thinking lot. With no solid science until the last four years, the state of the lynx in Minnesota has been more opinion than fact.
In the human world, we often arrive at larger truths by “following the money.” In the animal world, the focus is on food sources. Like any predator, lynx are inextricably linked to their primary prey. Wildlife biologists says that when populations of snowshoe hare are low in prime Canadian lynx habitat, younger cats like L1 range farther afield. They disperse south, to what has been thought to be less desirable habitat, and take up temporary residence in Minnesota. All species of predators disperse from their place of birth in search of new territory with good habitat, minimal competition, and adequate prey. If they find it, they thrive. If they don’t, they die. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of how privatizing property—putting up fences and building roads—compartmentalizes nature, and limits the movements of flora and fauna. But this is not yet a problem in northeastern Minnesota.
The question then becomes: Does Minnesota really have a permanent lynx population? Or are the few that are padding around the north woods just tourists—lost anomalies wandering far from home?
In the mid-nineties, that was the million-dollar question. Even people who spend lots of time in the forest, like hunters and trappers, weren’t seeing lynx. Maybe the rare track or two, but rarely a living, breathing cat. Based partly on those practical observations, Minnesota’s hair snare project was born in 1999. The snare involved a Velcro-like pad baited with catnip and castor oil. Hundreds of shiny pie tins were placed on a grid pattern across a small portion of the woods. The tins would pique the cat’s curiosity and lynx would, scientists speculated, come to rub against the deliciously scented pads. Hair left on the pads would have been sent to a lab and analyzed for DNA—if there had been any. None was collected. The conclusion many biologists officially endorsed: There were no lynx in Minnesota.
Whether or not lynx are a functioning part of life’s web in northeastern Minnesota has institutional and social implications. If there are lynx they must be managed and, most likely, protected. Management means gearing up scientific and regulatory bureaucracies. Protection may have significant implications for land use. At least this is the typical human scramble to get on the case—and the most responsible one, knowing what we now do about how human behaviors impact nature, even at a great distance.
But there are also aesthetic, even spiritual, issues at play. If the lynx is as much a part of northeastern Minnesota as the loon, wolf, and lichen, then those who gather deeper meaning from visiting these wilderness areas must value the wild cat on its own terms, as they do those other creatures. This duality lies at the heart of any serious conversation about human stewardship: We must protect these resources for ourselves and for themselves.
That the lynx has not achieved the poster– child status of the loon or wolf has to do with the lack of scientific understanding, as well as institutional inertia. Quoted in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer one month before L1 was trapped, Paul Burke, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “I think we have a very small number, but we do have some lynx. We may even have some reproduction, but that doesn’t make it a viable population.”
“Not a viable population” is a sort of purgatory into which another one of Minnesota’s feline predators has been cast. It’s an imprecise term, but it is what biologists say about mountain lions in Minnesota. For example, even after hundreds of accidental but confirmed sightings of adults and kittens, state and federal biologists insist that Minnesota’s mountain lion population is not viable. Since the population is “not viable,” they don’t take a closer look, because that could lead to a legal status as threatened or endangered. Government agencies—not to mention private business interests—don’t want another endangered species. Among other things, it raises the specter of the timber wolf, which, following its listing as endangered, was studied by a generation of scientists for a quarter of a century at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Mountain lions linger in nonviable status. Environmentalists weren’t about to let the lynx languish there, though.
Burke’s comments were controversial, the more so because they came in the wake of the lynx finally being listed as threatened—in other words, the judgment was made that there actually was a viable population, and that it needed protection. It was a victory for activist groups like Defenders of Wildlife, but federal officials still seemed to be refusing to believe it. Mike Leahy, a biologist for the Defenders, saw Burke’ s comments as the rear guard of a lost battle.
“We sued the Fish and Wildlife Service five times and won every time,” he said. “In spite of their mandate to protect species, federal agencies sometimes fear the implications of carrying out their duty with a listing. In the fifth lawsuit, though, even FWS scientists acknowledged that listing was warranted.”
So what happened to overturn the previous conclusions? How had scientists failed to find lynx others were so certain were here? It is now widely assumed that the hair-snare study, which failed to find any cats in 1999, worked elsewhere in the country, but for some unknown reason didn’t work in Minnesota. The main reason that assumption is made is because, while the scientists’ snares did not capture any lynx hair, ordinary Minnesotans were seeing and photographing lynx. People who spend a lot of time in the woods were reporting growing numbers of snowshoe hare. Was there a connection between an upswing in the hare population and more lynx sightings?
Ed Lindquist, a U.S. Forest Service biologist, decided there must be a common-sense approach to the growing evidence of lynx in the north woods. Lindquist began an old-fashioned lynx tracking program in the winter of 2001-2002. His idea was that if experienced trackers found lynx prints in the snow, and followed them backward, they would find what the hair snares failed to find: hair or droppings. Both would contain DNA. Lindquist’s tracking team started late the first winter, but they found more lynx sign than expected. The following winter they found more.
“We’ve identified between fifty and sixty unique individuals,” Lindquist told me in August 2003. “We only surveyed about ten percent of the forest, so we believe there are lots more out there.”
Lindquist’s team found more lynx, in part, because he looked in a way no one had previously. But he also likely found more because when snowshoe hare are abundant, lynx tend to have larger litters of kittens, and the kittens have a greater chance of surviving to adulthood. Although little is known about lynx in Minnesota, females appear to have their kittens in dens, often in hollow logs. Where lynx have been studied, they have between one to five kittens. If it’s true that lynx rely on snowshoe hare, and they thrive when their prey thrives, then there are still plenty of hare to support above-average lynx birth rates.
When lynx kittens are grown, at about two years old, they weigh from twenty to forty pounds and are brown to gray on top with a gray to white belly. Not much is known about the size of a lynx’s territory: Canadian researchers have documented territories ranging from four square miles to one hundred square miles.
Lindquist has much to say about the embryonic understanding of Minnesota’s lynx population and the advanced technologies used to study it. Even microscopic DNA work is more mutable then you might expect. “The lab has taken another look at the genetics and taken more strict rules in determining what constitutes an individual,” he told me last year, regarding the numbers of individuals his tracking team had located. “So our numbers were reduced slightly under these new rules.” Scientific understanding of evolution and short-range patterns can be like trying to get into a moving vehicle. However, there is now a generally set scientific assumption that lynx and snowshoe hare numbers, like many things in Minnesota’s northern boreal forest, ebb and flow in cyclical patterns. Lynx populations are thought to crest just behind the hare population’s peak. Declining hare numbers, it is believed, will drag lynx down with them. But nobody has watched closely before. It’s unclear what population peaks look like.
When Burke grudgingly acknowledged there were a few lynx in Minnesota three years ago, he also said the hare were at their peak. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources biologists, who tabulate lynx sightings in Minnesota, said the same thing last year. Catching the peak of a population cycle is like corporate revenue forecasting. Reality is recorded well after the fact.
“We’ve had a fairly high hare population for some time,” said Ron Moen, the NRRI biologist involved in the first radio-collaring project. “Some people say it’s starting to go down, or has been declining, for a while. But it varies in different parts of Northern Minnesota. It’s hard to pinpoint whether we’re down this year or next year.”
During the few years that wildlife biologists have tuned their radar to lynx, they have gradually refined their research methodology. First there was the hair snare. Ed Lindquist and his tracking team followed. Now a team of agencies and biologists, along with a little financial help from Defenders of Wildlife, are concentrating their efforts on more NRRI collaring studies. Accuracy of scientific knowledge is often a function of how long research studies are conducted, and this is especially the case with lynx. “The research going on through NRRI is going to be extremely valuable because it will help us determine if lynx persist in Minnesota through the low part of the hare cycle,” said Phil Delphey, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Minneapolis. “What NRRI is doing is really exciting.”
When L1 took his long journey north, he was a lone ping in the wilderness. Since then, NRRI biologists have captured, collared, and released fourteen more lynx between Ely and Grand Marais. They’ve also added a satellite tracking component to some radio collars. These GPS collars allow the biologists to locate a lynx four times a day. The result is a fairly precise understanding of what kinds of habitat lynx hunt and sleep in.
The data so far is a fairly raw conglomeration of details as meaningful, and puzzling, as L1’s journey. For instance, a mature female, L3, took a similar trip. She traveled northwest and disappeared. Her collar, but not her body, was discovered far from where she was originally trapped.
“We haven’t had most of them on the air long enough to determine the home range, but the ones that we have had on the air for several months seem to have some boundaries they stay within,” the NRRI’s Moen said. “On the other hand, three of them have made an exploratory movement outside of those boundaries. Biologists don’t know why they do this. Hopefully, we will have some answers by the time this study is done.”
The collars have given the researchers a license to act the voyeur. L5 and L7 spent an inordinate amount of time together in February, according to records. The talk around the office was that there had been a liaison. Kittens arrived in May or early June, and the NRRI was able to photograph them and post pictures on its website.
Another interesting collateral truth confirmed by the most recent round of studies is that bobcats (Felis rufus) roam the north woods. Bobcats don’t have the big padded feet and long back legs that make lynx specialists at catching hare in deep snow. Beyond that, though, they look a lot like lynx, with only slight differences in ear shape and tail color.
There probably aren’t many bobcats in northeastern Minnesota, either, but two were captured in box traps in early April 2004. Both were given radio collars. Earlier, some DNA collected in the wild confirmed that there are at least two animals in Northern Minnesota that are what biologists are calling lynx-bobcat hybrids. Until very recently, biologists had not known mating occurred between the species. It was thought their territories rarely, if ever, overlapped.
In fact, one of the NRRI study’s explicit goals is to try to understand the relationship between lynx and bobcats. Some environmentalists say bobcat populations are increasing because logging roads provide them with access into new areas. They say logging roads give the presumably alien bobcat an advantage. But at least one member of Ed Lindquist’s tracking team has seen lynx using logging roads. It is possible that lynx and bobcats have always intermingled.
The matter of roads and habitat is not insignificant. With the Endangered Species Act listing, the Fish and Wildlife Service will be required to put together a recovery plan for the lynx. A recent sixth court victory by Defenders of Wildlife requires the federal government to designate critical lynx habitat before anybody really knows what it is, says Phil Delphey of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Critical habitat is the mix of habitat lynx need to feed, rest, and procreate successfully. Since it has barely been acknowledged that there are lynx in Minnesota, it may be presumptuous, at this point, to say what is ideal habitat for the species.
“Good lynx habitat is good snowshoe hare habitat,” Phil Delphey said. “Good habitat for snowshoe hare, beyond the issue of deep north woods snow, is habitat with a lot of stems. They like any kind of dense shrubs or dense tree regrowth. One type of potential habitat would be new growth after logging or fire. They can also prosper in old growth areas where trees have fallen and new growth starts. The blowdown in the Boundary Waters might be good snowshoe hare habitat.”
Having said that, Delphey, like L1 on his solitary journey northward, quietly questions the heart of conventional wisdom on lynx. Snowshoe hare, he asserts, may not be as central to a lynx diet, and thus its survival, as is currently believed
“A lot of people think lynx may not be well adapted to prey on anything other than snowshoe hares, but there’s at least one study that shows that lynx are able to switch pretty readily to prey on red squirrels,” he said. “Good red squirrel habitat is different than good snowshoe hare habitat, but those habitats can intermingle in patches.”
Delphey said his agency isn’t in any position to say what critical lynx habitat would look like. Neither does the agency have the knowledge to say what a healthy population of lynx, one that wouldn’t require protection under threatened status, would look like. Since the court has ordered critical habitat designation, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service will proceed.
“They were supposed to designate critical habitat when they listed in 2000,” Defenders of Wildlife biologist Leahy said. “We’ve been pushing them for ten years, saying that’s what they should be doing. They are charged with Endangered Species and they have the authority to err on the side of caution.”
Leahy’s organization says the bulk of lynx habitat, both in Minnesota and elsewhere in the country, is on public lands. Pressures for public land use, such as recreation and logging, are getting in the way of following the law, they say. Defenders of Wildlife say clear-cut logging, and the road-building it necessitates, along with overzealous fire suppression, have been destructive to both snowshoe hare and lynx habitats.
Defenders literature says, “Snowmobiling is of particular concern due to the compact trails that crisscross the landscape in the winter months. These trails allow coyotes and bobcats to reach areas that they were once unable to access. As a result, the lynx now must compete for the snowshoe hare, thus reducing their main food source.”
Many environmental organizations believe that recreational and industrial demands on public lands are keeping the FWS from exercising its statutory obligation. The government biologists, on the other hand, assert that the environmentalists have been trying to move too quickly these last ten years. Privately, at least one biologist asserted the organizations exaggerate the threatened nature of the species to build support for their organization.
Everybody, however, appears to be pleased with the direction of the NRRI study. Results produced by L1 and other radio-collared lynx may provide some answers, and lower the acrimony between the humans.
Last May, three radio-collared female lynx had kittens in Minnesota. One litter had five, another had three, and the third had two.