This footage was taken somewhere in Canada.
To be honest with you, I am envious of this person, because if you check this Youtube user’s channel, you’ll see all sorts of lynx footage. It’s really amazing stuff.
I live in prime bobcat territory, but bobcats know that they are a target species and stay as hidden from people and dogs as much as possible. I’ve seen bobcat tracks, and when I was kid, my dad hit one with a car.
But that’s all I’ve seen. They phantasmal creatures that only make appearances by their own errors. They were widely persecuted for fear that they were hazardous to livestock and for their their spotted coats. Those that have remained have been derived from those whose ancestors were the most wary of our kind.
As strange as it is to see a dappled red lynx in my part of the world, it seems that is even more unusual to see the loup cervier in northern forests.
To have four Canada lynx on camera is something quite remarkable.
I’m amazed at how bold these animals are.
Contrary to what is implied by the video, no species of lynx runs in packs or “families.”
My guess is that the queen is in season, and the resident tom has shown up to service her. I think I can hear a the sound of a queen in estrous the video, but I could be wrong.
The kittens are queen kittens, and the tom has no reason to run them off.
Or it could be the two related queens that have adjacent territories that have gotten together during the winter. I have seen footage of a tigress in India that shared a kill with her adult daughter and her adult daughter’s cubs. The adult daughter had dispersed to her own territory, but she seemed to have regular contact with her mother throughout her adult life.
Perhaps that is what is happening here.
Who knows?
It is very strange to have footage of one Canada lynx running deep into the woods at the sight of a person or vehicle.
It is even stranger to see several of these animals out in the open that are paying very little attention to people or vehicles.
It’s just bizarre footage.
That’s all I can say.
At one of the sites for the sanctuary where I work, I used to enjoy watching a mom bobcat raise her cubs. She would use the potbellied pig pasture as one of her pathways. She did this for years, and it was a true joy to watch her, then her cub (usually one) grow up and move on. She was the smallest bobcat I’ve ever seen, she always looked like a baby herself.
She or her parents are the reasons why the sanctuary chickens now have a 7′ fence with roller bars. While she never showed interest in any of the other livestock, she did kill a few chickens before we implemented better predator protection. After that, we never lost another chicken.
In my area, they are widely hunted with dogs and from tree stands and widely trapped.
They have a really strong fear of people.
But ever since my dad hit one with a car when I was about 11 or 12, I’ve been fascinated with the Lynx species.
The ones here don’t bother anything.
At all.
In the early 80’s, my grandpa saw a Canada lynx wandering around in the woods here.
He described it as being a gray bobcat with tufts on its ears.
I always doubted the story, but my guess is some fool had it as a pet and turned it loose.
It probably starved– no snowshoe hares at this elevation and it was a captive-born cat.
If it did survive, it could have passed its genes into the bobcat population because the hybrids between the two are fully fertile.
When I lived in the Appalachians on the Tennessee/N.C. border, I saw quite a few bobcats over the years, sometimes in broad daylight, and usually while crossing a road in front of my vehicle. I also collected two road kills over the years–one was a lactating female, alas. This leggy cat was considerably taller than my 20 lb. Basenjis I had at the time, and I wrongly assumed it would weigh a good bit more, too. Nope, only weighed 15 lbs.! Yet it was a healthy(other than the fact that it was dead…) adult female–it is easy to overestimate wild animal sizes and weights! I also watched one hunting in daylight right out in the open in a brushy corridor in the middle of a busy 4-lane highway! I noticed it hopping over the tall grass tops, and spotted those DISTINCTIVE black ears with the white spots, and circled back around, parked, and watched it for quite awhile! And yes, it made me very late for work! My impression was it was a young cat just out on it’s own, and it hadn’t learned better than to hunt in front of traffic like this! Nobody else seemed to notice or care the whole time I watched–if they saw the bobcat at all, they probably thought it was a feral housecat! This is RARE to see something like this, though, around here. Cats are so visually oriented that they are very well aware of our ability to SEE them, and take very conscious measures to hide themselves, which they are very good at, and is why they are so rarely seen, even in areas where they are common. As hunting pressures ease in some places, some bobcats may become quite complacent about human prescence, and not go to such effort to hide themselves in front of humans–perhaps this is what is happening with this lynx. Another interesting bit of bobcat lore–unlike most cats, that are short-winded and fairly easy for dogs to tree, bobcats have excellent endurance, and can run before hard-pressing hounds for miles and miles, and then are notoriously hard to keep treed on the approach of hunters, at least in areas where they are regularly run with hounds…..