This is a really good video about someone attracting a Canada lynx to the back of a cabin.
This is my favorite species of wild cat.
I think they are so beautiful with their gray pelts and tufted ears.
They have a sort of profound elegance one does not see in the bobcat.
It’s a frosty, steely presence that is hard to describe.
It’s the cat of the Great White North.
Gray as the boreal forest in January, it is the slayer of snowshoe hares.
Its wagon is attached to the hare’s wagon, and should the hare population crash, the lynx population soon follows.
But it will scavenge and even eat the flesh of its own kind.
It is only through this way that it’s been able to survive in the subarctic forests, where no other cats live or even dare to tread.
It is not beyond its nature for humans to be able to attract them with bits of meat.
I bet some old trappers and mountain men once dreamed of being able to tame them.
But we never have.
They come for the hand-outs, and then they melt back into the forest– wild phantoms whose world we can never fully understand.
If I am correct they are considered Bob Cats or Lynx. I agree this is a beautiful species prefer it to the Florida swamp area spotted variety. They seem to be solitary and only a keen eye can generally spot one.
No. There are two different species. Bobcats are the ones that are found throughout the United States, and Canada lynx are found along the US/Canadian border northward. There are some in the Rockies, too. Bobcats are an older species that descend from Eurasian lynx colonized North America from Eurasia a long time ago, but Canada lynx descend from Eurasian lynx that came over toward the end of the Pleistocene.
Do you think lynx will recolonize their former range in the USA the way wolves and pumas seem to be doing?
They are to a certain extent, but they aren’t likely to return to their entire former range, which was as far south as the mountains of Virginia. They are very dependent upon snowshoe hares for sustenance, and snowshoe hare numbers aren’t as high as they once were in the southern part of their range.
They also face competition from Bobcats and according to my reading, are out-competed by same in most terrains w/ the exception of the Boreal forests.
Bobcats are much more effective predators of larger game, and tom bobcats are more aggressive than male Canada lynx. And the biggest tom bobcats, which live right on the edge of lynx territory, are heavier than Canada lynx– often by quite a bit.
Can bobcats and lynx interbreed?
Yes, and they have in the wild:
http://www.nrri.umn.edu/lynx/information/hybrid.html