The Canada lynx rises and falls with the snowshoe hare
A Canada lynx is built around one prey animal. Its huge furry paws spread up to 10 centimetres across and hold nearly twice the weight a bobcat's can before sinking in snow, perfect for chasing snowshoe hares. When hare numbers crash, lynx numbers follow.
This medium-sized cat has long, dense fur, black tufts on the tips of triangular ears, and hind legs longer than its front ones, so its back slopes down towards the shoulders. It stands 48 to 56 centimetres tall and weighs from 5 to 17 kilograms, males being bigger than females. The thick coat is mostly yellowish brown with a white belly, longer in winter than summer; in Newfoundland it turns a grizzled grey in the cold months, and one Alaskan animal was reported as bluish grey. It swims well and climbs nimbly.
Dense boreal forest across Alaska, Canada and the northern United States is its home. Because it relies so heavily on the snowshoe hare, the lynx follows the hare's multi-year boom-and-bust cycle in Alaska and central Canada: when hares multiply, so do lynx, and when they become scarce, lynx move elsewhere and raise fewer young. It hunts mostly at dusk or at night, when hares are active.
Robert Kerr named it in 1792. For a long time scientists disagreed about whether Lynx deserved to be its own genus and whether this cat was a separate species at all; only in 2005 was it firmly listed alongside the bobcat, the Eurasian lynx and the Iberian lynx. Proposed subspecies, such as a darker Newfoundland form, have largely been abandoned, and a specialist group treated it as a single undivided species in 2017, although the island population seems to have split from mainland cats 20,000 to 33,000 years ago, after the last glaciation.
Some 8.5 to 8 million years ago, the forerunners of lynx and several other cat lineages crossed from Asia into North America. Today the species is rated Least Concern, trapped for fur in much of Alaska and Canada but protected in the southern half of its range, where habitat loss threatens it. Colorado reintroduced lynx in the 1990s.
Source: Canada lynx
