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July/August 2010 issue

Living in the boreal forest, the Lynx, a medium-sized wild cat, can grow to a metre in length and averages 5 to 15 kilograms.

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Catch a glimpse of the elusive cross-border cat in an expanded photo essay. View now

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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.

Ron Moen rattles his grey pickup truck down a back road covered by hard-packed snow in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, a few dozen kilometres south of the Canada–U.S. border. We’re surrounded by a winter wonderland of rime-tipped balsam firs and frozen lakes that stretches north to Ontario and beyond. Moen skids to a halt beside a steep snowdrift, and we step out of the truck into banks so deep, they stop the six-foot-tall wildlife biologist in his tracks. It’s early March, dusk is settling, and all is silent. Moen and I slog a few metres toward the forest edge and enter a thicket of firs and alders, their boughs doubled over with ice from a recent storm. His voice muffled by the collar of his parka, Moen whispers, “It’s out there. Somewhere.”

Map the Lynx’s range around Lake Superior.

“It” is Lynx canadensis, a northern forest cat as elusive as sasquatch. Known to the Ojibwa as “the vigilant protector of the people,” the lynx sees without being seen in this white-on-white world. Here in the boreal forest, the medium-sized wild cat, which can grow to a metre in length and averages 5 to 15 kilograms, appears to have it all: its main prey, the snowshoe hare; the brushy woods the hare prefers; and the deep snows that the lynx and hare bound across using the thick cushions of hair on the soles of their large feet. But the lynx — which lives in all provinces except Prince Edward Island and in Minnesota, Maine, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, Alaska and Colorado, where a reintroduction program has been under way since 1999 — became a prize catch when fur prices boomed in the 1970s and 1980s. It was hunted and pushed to the brink in the lower 48 states and has been listed as a threatened species for a decade, even though it is still trapped, mostly for fur coats, in Canada. (In response to overharvesting in the early 1900s, Ontario instituted a trapline registration system in 1947; the province’s population is said to be recovering.)

Biologists at Environment Canada believe there are at least 110,000 lynx in the country. Because the lynx is so secretive, however, population estimates are just that — estimates. Nobody knows how many live in the United States. (There may be lynx in Oregon and Idaho and from Wisconsin to New Hampshire, but experts believe the animals occasionally pass through and do not constitute established populations.) Fewer than 250 likely live in Minnesota, says Moen, a reserved 49-year-old based at the University of Minnesota Duluth. And as the continuous snow cover and boreal forest shift north, a scenario predicted by climate-change models, the cat’s habitat could move as much as 200 kilometres by 2100. Which means, says forest ecologist Lee Frelich of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, “Canadian wildlife biologists need only look south” to see the conservation challenges they’ll be facing in the near future.

Scientists on both sides of the border are trying to discover how much lynx populations in Ontario and Minnesota intermingle and which parts of the landscape play a critical role in their border crossings. Needless to say, lynx don’t respect the international boundary, crossing the line regularly in search of meals or mates. Yet because they’re a threatened species in the United States, they’re managed completely differently in the two countries, says Justina Ray, a biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.

Minnesota is currently at the southern edge of the lynx’s range east of the Rockies. Superior National Forest and Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming are two “priority areas” for lynx conservation, according to a 2007 report by The Nature Conservancy. “Intensive natural resources management intervention” will be required, the report says — in other words, the type of work that has taken Moen into these woods in search of lynx for more than seven years.

Out of sight behind the alders, Moen has set five box traps. Made of steel fencing and wood, with a trigger mechanism that shuts the door, the rectangular enclosures are baited with road-killed deer. Once trapped, as 35 have been over the years, the lynx is tranquilized using a pole syringe and is fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) or a Very High Frequency (VHF) radio collar so that Moen and his colleagues can track its movements. Moen also takes a blood sample to determine the animal’s health and for DNA analysis to identify individuals.

There are no lynx in Moen’s traps today, so we retreat to his truck. He opens the door and leans in, then emerges brandishing what looks like old-style TV rabbit ears to listen for the lynx already collared for his study. Each collar has its own frequency, which Moen can search for on his radio receiver. At first, we hear static. Then suddenly: beep-beep-beep.

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