It's like it was just suctioned to the tree," says Wiebe. Wiebe managed to park his truck and wade through deep snow to capture the wildcats' effortless acrobatics on video. "These two lynx were just flying around up in the trees." "All of a sudden, I saw a commotion," he says. Wiebe was searching for northern pygmy owls to photograph when a flurry of movement caught his eye. ( Read about the lynx's return to Canada.) So, does this social behavior influence their ability to find and kill prey? This is one of the many new questions we have about lynx behavior as we continue to delve into the lives of these amazing boreal predators.When it comes to courtship in the animal kingdom, frogs peep, crickets chirp, and cicadas click.īut nothing on Earth compares to the ruckus rendered by a male Canada lynx defending his mate.Īmos Wiebe, a photographer in Grande Prairie, Canada, personally experienced this otherworldly racket last week when he stumbled upon a trio of lynx while driving down a remote logging road. But many of our collared lynx, especially adult females, appeared to interact extensively with each other in groups of two to three: sleeping, grooming, traveling and even hunting side-by-side.Īlthough our collars revealed this surprisingly social behavior, it seems that lynx don't share food: after a kill, we would often hear lots of growling and snarling as if to ward off feeding attempts by other lynx. Lynx are known as solitary animals that live and hunt on their own for most of the year. Intriguingly, we also noticed much more social behavior than we originally expected. ![]() Our custom-built collars are helping to understand when this switch may happen, as well as whether individual lynx respond differently to declining numbers of snowshoe hare. This all occurs over a period of about eight to 10 years.īut the story may be more complex: lynx switch to alternate prey-like red squirrels-when hares are not available. When hares are preyed on less due to lower lynx numbers, the population increases again, thus re-starting the cycle. When hare populations are high, lynx have lots to eat-but then the high numbers of lynx cause hare populations to crash, consequently leading to a crash in lynx populations. Of particular interest to us is hunting behavior.Ĭanada lynx and the snowshoe hare populations follow a cycle of population booms and busts. ![]() Together with GPS tracking devices, these " biologging technologies" provide unprecedented insight into the complex behaviors of these cats. In addition to audio recorders, we also attached accelerometers-small devices that measure activity over time like you would find in a FitBit. But by recording multiple lynx, we could collect information 24 hours a day, while we warmed our feet by a wood stove in a rustic cabin. Previously, to know that a single kill had been made often required a full day of intensive snowshoeing and tracking during the short winter days in the Yukon. ![]() After using various methods of data processing, we were able to identify kills by Canada lynx with 87 percent accuracy-an impressive feat. Over the five years of our study in the Yukon's Kluane region, we collected over 14,000 hours of audio recordings from 26 individual lynx. Much to our excitement, these recorders were very effective at capturing the behavior of the lynx: "cats being cats" (grooming, sleeping) social behavior (aggressive interactions, purring, long-distance social calls) and hunting behavior (chases, kills, feeding). After multiple failed attempts and some clever solutions, we figured out how to safely attach a small microphone to our lynx collars-and it opened a whole new world. In our case, we wanted to delve deeper into the secret lives of this mysterious cat and record their soundscapes. Although GPS tracking of wildlife is not new, it is typically only used to monitor movement behavior of wildlife. In a recently published research study, we unlocked a new and effective way to monitor the behavior of one of the most elusive predators in the boreal forest: the Canada lynx. As wildlife ecologists, we know that when we observe wildlife, we cannot know what effect our presence has on the behavior of our subject -not to mention the difficulties of observing animals in the wild, including those which roam across vast forested landscapes.
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