How do you count the elusive lynx?

When winter descends upon the Northern United States, deep snow blankets the boreal forest for months on end. It’s a stark season, but that very harshness helps lynx out-hunt other predators. These elusive felids, which caterwaul during mating season like Taylor Swift superfans with front-row seats , grow shaggy gray winter coats, blending into the landscape. With long hind legs and large furry feet, they bound across the snow, pursuing snowshoe hares where other predators tend to posthole.

Canada lynx in the U.S. live at the southern end of the species’ range, and they depend on forests that are increasingly affected by climate change. One of their most important habitats in the West is northern Montana’s Glacier National Park, created in the early 1900s after the United States starved and massacred the region’s Indigenous peoples, including the Blackfeet Nation. Today, the Blackfeet Nation’s reservation land, which covers 1.5 million acres to the east of the park, includes lynx habitat. Faced with warming temperatures and changing snowpacks, the nation has begun developing a climate adaptation plan to try to conserve habitat for species including the Canada lynx. Because Glacier prohibits mining, logging and other landscape-fracturing endeavors, the park could also become a refuge for lynx as the West becomes drier and hotter.

But studying the region’s lynx is difficult. In other places, winter offers a chance to track lynx by following their prints in the snow, but most of Glacier’s roads and trails are impassible in winter.

Now, according to a study in The Journal of Wildlife Management, researchers have found a way to track the park’s lynx in the summer. Using motion-sensitive trail cameras, biologists have identified lynx by the patterns on their inner legs. This technique will help researchers learn which habitats lynx use, how close to one another they live and how they are responding to climate change.

It “gives us this baseline information for lynx populations in Glacier Park,” Alissa Anderson, a biologist who led this study for her graduate research at Washington State University, said. Anderson monitored cameras on most of the park’s trails over four summers, changing out memory cards and making sure the cameras hadn’t been mangled by curious bears. One summer, she collected data in the park’s southeastern section using paired cameras, which took pictures of passing lynx from both sides. This setup made it easier to capture their unique inner-leg markings. From those photos, she estimated that about 50 lynx live in the park.

Camera traps are far less intrusive than other types of monitoring, which can involve piercing the ears of wide-eyed kittens or collaring individuals to track them using GPS. “It doesn’t bother them, doesn’t alter their behavior. They are already using the trails,” Anderson said.

This approach is also easier on the biologists. “I basically spent the summer hiking,” she added.

“It doesn’t bother them, doesn’t alter their behavior. They are already using the trails.”

Stan Boutin, a boreal ecologist who has studied lynx in Canada’s southwest Yukon for more than 30 years, said the method is a “real breakthrough.” The 50-lynx estimate is rough, using only one year of data for a species that follows a boom-and-bust survival pattern linked to snowshoe hare population cycles. Still, it’s a “very good first approximation,” Boutin said.

Camera traps could prove transformative for understanding lynx’s vulnerability to climate change, which has been missing from previous assessments by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2017, the agency attempted to remove federal Canada lynx protections after looking at threats to the species only until the middle of the century, a time frame too narrow to include the most severe climate change impacts.

Camera traps set by researchers in Glacier National Park captured photos of passing lynx as part of a Washington State University study. Credit: Courtesy Alissa Anderson

Dan Thornton, a wildlife ecologist at Washington State University and Anderson’s research advisor, said one concern is that changing snow texture could cost lynx their winter advantage over generalist predators.

“If there are more rain-on-snow events that lead to changes in density of snow, making it harder and more compact, that will likely result in increased ability of other species to get up in those environments,” Thornton said. At the very least, lynx may contend with a world in which boreal forests move north and upslope, and snowshoe hares become harder to come by. Lynx’s long leaps and giant paws will take them only so far in a warming future.

In “On the move,” Maya L. Kapoor writes about how the climate crisis is shifting life in the West. She writes about climate change, biodiversity and environmental justice. Previously, Maya was an associate editor at High Country News.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Where the wildcats go.

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