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July/August 2010 issue

Scientists trap and fit lynx with a radio collar, allowing them to follow the cat’s every move. One lynx is reported to have ventured more than 2,000 kilometres from Colorado to Alberta.

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Lynx don’t care about the line between Ontario and Minnesota, and researchers on both sides are starting to pay attention.

“It’s probably closer than we know,” says Moen, peering into the darkness. Still, he decides to head back to town for the night. Lynx are most active at sunrise and sunset, so we’ll return at dawn. The best way to catch a lynx, he says, is to think like one.

Map the range of the Lynx around Lake Superior.

While we sleep at a ski-and-snowshoe lodge about 40 kilometres from Moen’s traps — an outpost complete with snowshoes hanging cross-hatched above a stone fireplace — lynx number 28 in Moen’s study roams the forest. By the waning light of a last-quarter moon, L-28 walks with its hindquarters up and head down — typical lynx posture — leaving paw prints as big as a man’s hand in the deep snow. The lynx circles a small lake and crosses a frozen alder swamp; it can smell fresh deer meat. It pads along a snowmobile trail a meal, the door of trap number one slams shut.

Next morning, I’m on my way back to the woods with Moen, two of his students and a field assistant. We park in yesterday’s tire marks and see lynx tracks leading into the trees, as well as signs of a snowshoe hare darting to and fro.

Moen follows his boot prints to the first trap and is met by a pair of soul-searching, translucent green eyes. Crouching in the back of the trap, distinctive black ear tufts standing up, L-28 makes a low noise that’s half growl, half hiss. Clearly, the cat didn’t appreciate its overnight accommodations. Because L-28 already has a radio collar — it was first trapped in 2005 — Moen sidles to the back of the trap and slides open the door. I stand a metre away in thigh-deep snow. L-28 bounds out and over the snow in a flash, his oversized paws in near-gallop, lynx and forest blurring together as one.

One way to ensure that the lynx has a future in Minnesota, says Moen, is through “responsible” management programs in Canada and the United States that consider the animal’s habitat along natural and not political lines. He has been quietly working to make that happen, organizing international workshops and collaborating with researchers, including OntarioMinistry of Natural Resources biologist Neil Dawson and Trent University ecologist Dennis Murray. They attended a 2007 gathering in Grand Portage, Minnesota, that drew together more than 70 wildlife biologists. It was the first workshop to assemble such a large number of lynx researchers from both sides of the border, fostering a small wave of international collaboration among scientists studying the animal. Which is important, because, as Moen says, “the frequency of cross-border lynx travel turns out to be much higher than anyone anticipated.”

Some lynx in Moen’s study, such as L-15, are veterans of back-and-forth forays. Trapped in Grand Marais, Minnesota, on March 30, 2004, L-15 was recorded northwest of Thunder Bay five months later — more than 150 kilometres away. Less than two weeks after that, L-15 was back in Grand Marais. It’s usually males that wander far afield, says Moen. Females, probably because they have kittens, have smaller home ranges, which can vary from 60 to 100 square kilometres. This spring, however, a lynx in another study set a new record, travelling 2,000 kilometres from its transplanted home in Colorado back to Alberta before meeting its end in a fur trap.

Minnesota logger Joe Foster saw a lynx mother with her young in 2002. Two years later, Moen found lynx dens and saw a female lynx with kittens. These sightings constituted the first direct evidence that Minnesota has a resident lynx population.

There’s another connection between logging and lynx: researchers have concluded that the success of a lynx population in its southern range depends not on old-growth forest, as had long been thought, but on early successional forest — woods with trees from 10 to 30 years old. Snowshoe hares, which make up more than 80 percent of the lynx’s diet, hide there in young thickets or in “edgerows,” the northern wilderness equivalent of the hedgerows where rabbits hop. Moen’s traps are located in a region of spruce-fir forests in early successional stages. Sections periodically harvested for timber are scattered across the area. Many have young trees springing up amid a lynx favourite: jumbles of downed branches atop scrubby undergrowth. “Logging isn’t all bad for lynx,” says Moen. “In some ways, it’s the modern equivalent of [the regenerative] fires that once burned [but are now suppressed] from here through Canada.”

National borders mean nothing to a fire, a forest or a lynx, says biologist Luke Hunter, executive director of Panthera, a New York City-based conservation organization founded in 2006 to protect the world’s 36 species of wild cats. Panthera supports research such as the work of Megan Hornseth, a graduate student of Trent’s Dennis Murray, who is studying how various types of forest edge affect lynx movement. “Co-operation between Canada and the United States,” says Hunter, “could be a model for how to approach cat conservation around the world.”

Ecologist and writer Cheryl Lyn Dybas lives just outside Washington, D.C. Photographer Ilya Raskin is a biology professor at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.