The Daunting Challenges Facing Canada Lynx

CORRECTION: Two of the photographs in the following story have been changed. We incorrectly identified Eurasian lynx as Canada lynx. While they are closely related and of the same genus, Lynx, they are different species. Canada lynx: Lynx canadensis; Eurasian lynx: Lynx lynx. Read more about the Eurasian lynx in the caption on the last photograph in this article.

What Aldo Leopold wrote about grizzly bears in his 1949 essay collection, A Sand County Almanac, applies equally to a smaller yet no less threatened species, the Canada lynx: “There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me ... Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”

Canada lynx thrive in Alaska and Canada but face daunting challenges in the Lower 48 where global warming, development, logging and road building erode their habitat and where old-school state game and fish managers sometimes ignore their needs.

Lynx are only slightly larger than their close relatives, bobcats, with which they occasionally interbreed. But they appear to dwarf bobcats because they have long legs and cougar-size paws that serve as snowshoes. Their fur is light gray and faintly spotted in winter, shorter and reddish-brown in summer. Their black ear tufts are more prominent than those of bobcats, and they have more black coloring on their tail tips.

Boreal forests with deep and lengthy snow cover are essential for lynx survival. And, while they will take the occasional red squirrel, ptarmigan or grouse, lynx are almost obligate predators of snowshoe hares.

Relegating lynx to Canada and Alaska wasn’t good enough for the Clinton administration. So, in 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed lynx as threatened in the contiguous states under the Endangered Species Act. The agency established six disjunct critical habitat units: 50,640 square miles in Maine, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota, Idaho, and Montana.

It’s virtually impossible to get lynx population estimates, but the Northern Rockies critical habitat unit in northwestern Montana and northern Idaho is presumed to sustain the best numbers, according to Dr. John Squires, a Forest Service biologist who for 20 years has led lynx studies from Montana through southern Colorado.

“Some of the best lynx habitat [in the Lower 48] is in Montana,” Squires said. “[Specifically,] the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex and associated Forest Service lands, and in the Purcell Mountains of the Kootenai National Forest.”

Another stronghold is Montana’s Glacier National Park. In an interview with the Glacier National Park Conservancy, park wildlife biologist Alissa Anderson said that Glacier’s high elevations and rough topography may provide a haven for lynx in the face of a warming climate.

“We found lynx in about half the grid cells we surveyed, mostly in the lower elevations of the park,” Anderson said. “One of our main conclusions was that GNP has the potential to become an important area of climate refugia for lynx if upslope migration of boreal habitats occurs … I think this just reiterates the increasingly important conservation impact that GNP may have in years to come.”

The situation is especially grim in Washington state where habitat loss mainly due to wildfires has caused a sharp decline in lynx populations over the past two decades.

“We’re not sure how many there are, but certainly under 100,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a biologist with the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It may be more like 50 or fewer … This year and in the last several years we’ve dodged bad wildfires in Okanogan County, so that’s been very positive. During this time some of the burned areas could have grown back up into habitat that would support snowshoe hares. We also don’t know how much the snowpack has shrunk and become more suitable for bobcats, cougars and coyotes: all competitors of lynx.”

Historically, lynx also occurred in New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Oregon, Utah, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Wyoming. But it’s not clear if these were part of breeding populations or if sightings and trapping reports resulted from cyclical irruptions of lynx moving south from Canada in sparse hare years. In Alaska and Canada, hare populations undergo well-documented and dramatic 8- to 12-year fluctuations, crashing or increasing by as much as 25-fold.

Lynx biology refutes everything we learned in Ecology 101 about predator-prey relationships. Lynx don’t control prey. Prey controls lynx. When snowshoe hares are abundant, lynx litters increase, and there’s less kitten and adult mortality. When hares crash, lynx produce few litters or none, kitten and adult mortality increase, and surviving adults stream south into contiguous states, sometimes into habitat that can’t support them.

Relegating lynx to Canada and Alaska was good enough for the Trump administration which, with no scientific evidence, proclaimed in 2017 that lynx no longer needed ESA protection, thereby triggering a lawsuit by wildlife-advocacy groups. Three years later, Trump’s Fish and Wildlife Service began developing a rule to remove ESA protections for lynx. And it started writing a post-delisting monitoring plan, despite the fact that it had yet to hatch a recovery plan.

The Biden administration promptly settled the case, maintaining ESA protections.

In the Rocky Mountain West, lynx are restricted to high-elevation, subalpine forests that have undergone regular and natural disturbances for thousands of years. But now the disturbances are more frequent, more severe and less natural.

These forests are warming faster than most places on the planet. According to climate models, winter warming in high-altitude boreal forests is likely to be 40 percent faster than the global mean. And rising summer temperatures impede growth and regeneration of spruce and fir.

Damage to lynx habitat due to climate change manifests in multiple and unexpected forms, but none is more detrimental to the wild cats than wildfire.

“Prior to lynx [ESA] listing in 2000 there was almost no fire in lynx habitat,” Squires said. “The world has definitely changed since then. Fire is now the issue. It dwarfs everything else. Not only are there more fires but they’re more severe than they’ve ever been. And the continued rise in temperature is drying out forests... Lynx depend on high-elevation, moist, spruce-fir-dominated forests. With large-scale fires in Montana, spruce-fir forests are being converted to early-successional lodgepole pine forests.”

Squires’ team found that lynx do fine in natural, low-intensity burn sites but that they won’t return to badly burned areas in Montana for about 30 years. According to Squires, that finding can and should drive prescribed burns and thinning management of intact forests in all contiguous states with lynx habitat.

Before Forest Service researchers started their investigations, the assumption was that these early lodgepole-pine forests were useless to lynx and hares. To everyone’s astonishment, including the researchers, it turns out lynx use them when the boughs touch the snow surface, providing hare cover. But when the lodgepole trees mature and lift their boughs off the snow, hare numbers plummet. Squires and other researchers say this science can and should drive lodgepole management plans.

Snowshoe hares, also called “varying hares,” turn white in winter. But with climate change, this camouflage often fails with little snow. White hares stick out in the brown woods like surrender flags, invitations to all predators. And lynx suffer.

As the climate warms, forests dry out. And more insect pests, like spruce beetles, make it through the winter, then proliferate in the dry timber. In the last 25 years, according to Forest Service research, spruce beetles have destroyed 25 million board feet of spruce in Montana, 31 million board feet in Idaho and 100 million board feet in Arizona. In the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, they’ve killed 95 percent of the Englemann spruce.

Until Squires’ team and partners began investigating habitat selection and movements of lynx, wildlife managers assumed that lynx vacated beetle-blighted habitat. Again, to the surprise of everyone including the researchers, it turns out lynx do well there because a few islands of live spruce and subalpine fir usually remain. Lynx and hares use large-diameter dead spruce with understories of subalpine fir—ignored by beetles—and spruce that survive beetles. Hares persist because the remaining sub-canopy provides cover.

In this case, good science has driven wildlife management. The Forest Service has revised plans for salvage of beetle-killed spruce and logging in the green islands.

“The public and the Forest Service want to salvage these beetle-killed spruce trees while they’re still marketable,” Squires said. “How do you do that in a way that’s consistent with lynx conservation? We built a resource selection model that predicted higher and lower probability of where lynx [existed]. We were challenged on it, and it withstood scrutiny in court. I thought it was one of the best examples in my career of where science was able to provide useful guidance to management.”

But sometimes state game and fish agencies fail to coordinate scientific management even within their own shops. For example, the only coyote control measure that ever worked are wolves. According to a study by scientists at Oregon State University, the University of Washington and the University of Wyoming, wildlife managers’ war on wolves has created an explosion of coyotes which, to the detriment of lynx, are chowing down on hares.

“Before they were largely extirpated, wolves used to kill coyotes and also disrupt their behavior through what we call the ‘ecology of fear,'” wrote lead author OSU ecology professor Dr. William Ripple in a press release. “The ‘ecology of fear’ means that coyotes will be far more wary to venture into certain areas if they know wolves are present. Coyotes have a flexible, wide-ranging diet, but they really prefer rabbits and hares, and they may also be killing lynx directly.”

Trapping, poisoning and loss of habitat devastated lynx south of Alaska and Canada, extirpating them in Colorado. In 1999, Colorado Parks and Wildlife began a recovery program in the San Juan Mountains, releasing 41 animals that had been captured in Alaska and Canada. Most died of starvation. But from 2000 to 2006, “soft releases,” wherein lynx were held in outdoor pens and fed prior to release, produced better results. Many of the additional 177 lynx habituated to the old habitat and in some cases reproduced.

Every state in lynx habitat permits nearly unrestricted trapping and hunting of bobcats, says veteran bobcat researcher Dr. Mark Elbroch of the native cat conservation group Panthera. Though there’s no way to quantify it, there’s “incidental take” of lynx a term referencing the accidental killing of lynx by bobcat trappers. It’s even allowed by FWS.

“There are no bag limits, no data on how many are out there,” Elbroch said. “The hunting community gets super excited about what it calls the ‘North American Model of Conservation,’ and one of the tenets is you don’t kill for profit or trade. Trapping violates that model in every way. Bobcat trapping is the extreme: selling fur for luxury items. It’s sickening.”

Ethical, fair-chase hunters—Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, William Hornaday, Congressman John Lacey, and other Boone and Crockett Club members—successfully lobbied to get market hunting for waterfowl, shorebirds and ungulates banned in 1918. But vestigial market hunting persists for furbearers in the form of trapping. It’s driven not by science but by the pelt market.

Jessica Karjala, executive director of Footloose Montana, a nonprofit outfit that opposes trapping, says that Fish and Wildlife is promoting—intentionally or not—increased lynx mortality. “When the USFWS allows incidental take, it allows lynx killing,” Karjala said. “You’re not protecting a species if you allow incidental take. The USFWS has no way of monitoring trapping, so there is no telling how many lynx are being killed by trappers. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks claims they’re ‘watching the circumstance very closely,’ but that’s lip service.”

On November 5, Coloradans rejected a ballot measure that would have banned trophy hunting for cougars while preventing incidental take of lynx via bobcat protection. “Voters didn’t embrace a ban on bobcat trapping or hounding of mountain lions,” says Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “They got bamboozled by a Safari Club opposition campaign that asked ‘experts’ at [Colorado Parks and Wildlife] to handle the issue. CPW and the Colorado Wildlife Commission should accept the invitation and ban baited trapping and hounding of bobcats that is a direct threat to lynx survival.”

Is trying to maintain Canada lynx in their shrinking and peripheral habitat worth all the trouble and expense? It depends on one’s perspective of the natural world.

For some old-school state game and fish managers who ignore the needs of lynx and have yet to retire, relegating lynx to Canada and Alaska appears to be sufficient. But most of the young breed, especially Forest Service wildlife managers, share the perspective of Aldo Leopold who, in the foreword to A Sand County Almanac, speaks to them 75 years after publication.

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” Leopold wrote. “These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now, we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free.”

Ted Williams, a former game and fish agency information officer, writes exclusively about fish and wildlife. His most recent piece for Mountain Journal, “Hunters Should Recognize Predators as Allies, not Competitors,” appeared October 18, 2024.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mountain Journal is a nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization dedicated to covering the wildlife and wild lands of Greater Yellowstone. We take pride in our work, yet to keep bold, independent journalism free, we need your support. Please donate here. Thank you.