Cat's Cradle

AMC Outdoors, December 2007

The rare Canada lynx, a northern wildcat known for its secretiveness and penchant for snowshoe hares, dens and breeds in Maine, but development pressures and changing forestry practices are jeopardizing its home turf. Can we prevent this nationally threatened cat from disappearing from the North Woods?

It’s the coldest night of winter, February 2007, when I arrive in Maine’s North Country up near Moosehead Lake. “Wind chill just hit 50 below,” says one local after seeing the news on the TV by the bar of the Rod ’n Reel Cafe. “Nah, can’t be more ’n 48,” says another. Either way, the allure of snowshoeing next morning is suddenly plunging with the temperature.
 
But the furtive mystery of the rare Canada lynx and the beauty of its remote home call to me. So I go.

The Field
It’s dawn. The air is brittle and the sky is stretched in unyielding blue. I layer up, meet Maine Audubon ecologist Laura Sebastianelli and the rest of the team, and leave civilization behind to track lynx and their wild neighbors.

Immediately we see a line of wide, webby paw prints belonging to an adult lynx. Inside each of these perfect prints is another print, belonging to a coyote that recently traveled on the tracks of the lynx to conserve energy. This practice is common in the deep woods, even among competing predators and their prey.

Winding far into the thicket, snapping through tight branches and thrilling over bits of scat, we follow the tracks, yelling out to one another: “Here’s another set; here’s another!” We find a dozen series of tracks before darkness returns. Some reveal lazy strides aside tracks showing the cats in full throttle bounding after a hare. “Kill site!” someone shouts, but no such luck. The thrill of it is almost enough for me to forget about my freezing toes and growling belly.

In one case, a long, single track suddenly splits into three. My guides explain that two kittens had been following in their mother’s tracks until venturing out independently. The notion of being this close to the elusive critters and seeing what it’s really like in their neighborhood is as powerful and humbling as Katahdin, sitting like a mindful giant in the distance.

The Cat
Lynx, which are larger but more diffident than bobcats, hold a mythic status in the minds of many because of their stealth. They are seldom spotted in the wild, and when they are, they display a certain nonchalance in encounters with humans. Typically hunting alone, night and day, an adult lynx weighs 20 pounds or more and has dark gray-brown fur, a small tail, and long ear tufts. A lynx’s tracks can be three and a half to five inches wide, the largest track made by any known carnivore in Maine.

Maine is the only state in the Eastern U.S. where it has been confirmed that lynx have dens and breed, mostly in the commercial forests in the northern part of the state. Roughly 500 Canada lynx reside in Maine.

Lynx are listed as a threatened species nationwide by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), under the Endangered Species Act. The sighting of lynx or their tracks in Vermont and New Hampshire in the past few years has generated excitement, as well as speculation that the species is migrating from Maine. Resident lynx populations have not yet been confirmed in neighboring states, but the sightings suggest that unfragmented ecosystems, like the 30-million-acre Northern Forest that stretches across northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, are critical to the lynx’s long-term recovery in the Northeast.

Lynx once inhabited the boreal and sub-boreal spruce-fir forests of the northeastern U.S., Canada, Alaska, and even south-ward into Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. But excessive trapping, loss of habitat from forestry practices and development, and more competition from bobcats and coyotes sparked a precipitous decline in numbers of the graceful feline. Now, hunting and trapping the remaining lynx is prohibited in the Lower 48, although the cats are still trapped for their fur throughout much of Canada and Alaska, where they are more common. With almost no predators except the feisty fisher, the lynx’s greatest threat is human activity.

The Return
Biologists with Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IFW) discovered in 1999 that female lynx were denning in the state rather than just wandering through. When the number of kittens born in northern Maine increased by 30 percent in one season, others began to take notice. Lynx are nomads, so finding tracks is not nearly as significant as finding dens with kittens.

Since the discovery of den activity, 95 kittens in 35 litters have been fitted with PIT (positive integrated transponder) tags. The tags are microchips the size of a grain of rice that are injected under the kittens’ skin, much like how a child’s immunization shot is delivered. Each tag contains a one-of-a-kind bar code that can be read with a hand-held scanner. The kittens also have small green plastic IFW tags clipped into their ears.

The increase in the number of rare cats residing in Maine’s North Woods follows a marked increase in snowshoe hare populations.

Snowshoe hares favor regenerating conifer clearcuts, which are currently prevalent in northern Maine. Clearcutting and salvage forestry operations that began after a budworm epidemic in the 1960s were conducted in earnest from the mid-1970s through most of the 1990s, producing today’s young spruce and fir stands with the dense understory hares need to hide from predators. As these stands mature and the crowded understory yields to fewer, bigger trees that shade more open spaces underneath, the habitat is no longer ideal for hares and their population can drop significantly. Lynx consume up to 200 hares a year, so if there is one hare or less per 2.5 acres, the cats often stop breeding.

Clearcutting has declined significantly to comprise less than 5 percent of annual forest harvests in Maine, due, in part, to a 1990 law that limited the size and number of clearcuts. Some proponents of clearcutting argue that fewer clearcuts will lead to fewer areas suitable for lynx habitat as young forests mature over the next two decades.

The bubble in lynx populations may have already burst. In 2007, for the second year in a row, biologists documented only one litter with two kits. This is an alarming drop from the previous six years, where eight or nine litters, with two to four kits in each, were born to radio-collared females each year. IFW biologists also found 10 of the 24 radio-collared lynx dead last winter, and necropsies revealed that several of them had died from lung worm, a parasite that is difficult to track and has unknown effects on a lynx’s reproductive health. The other cats died from starvation or predation. Counting of hare pellets at designated research sites has revealed a parallel decline in snowshoe hare populations over the same time period. With no immediate, conclusive answers for these anomalies, IFW biologists think that populations of both species may have begun to decline. Understanding habitat usage by the hare and lynx has, therefore, become increasingly urgent.

Cat's Cradle, cont'd >>