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Biologists launch lynx study

10-year project designed to monitor population
Biologists with Colorado Parks and Wildlife began a 10-year study of the state’s lynx population. The cats, first reintroduced in 1999, will be monitored at 50 locations.

There’s no doubt the reintroduced Canada lynx once again calls the high country of Colorado home.

Now, biologists have begun a 10-year study to determine if the population of the reclusive carnivore is remaining steady or is fluctuating.

Scott Wait, senior terrestrial biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, is in charge of the project. Jake Ivan, a mammal researcher, and Eric Odell, a species conservation coordinator, both in Fort Collins, are involved, too.

The field work will require a team of up to 40, including representatives from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

The research is concentrating on 5,400 square miles in the San Juan Mountains that contain the Weminuche, Uncompahgre, Lizard Head, Powderhorn, La Garita, Mount Sneffels and South San Juan wilderness areas.

Fifty study areas, about 30 square miles each, the typical size of a lynx home range, were selected.

In each of the 32 plots – inaccessible in the winter – four motion- and heat-sensitive cameras were installed last fall. Researchers will retrieve the cameras each summer to study the images and then return the cameras to the same spots.

Teams will visit the remaining 18 sites three times each during the winter to search for lynx tracks and take genetic samples of hair and scat to positively identify the species and individual animals.

The on-site surveys will be done annually from January through March.

The Canada lynx is a medium-sized feline with a short tail and tufted ears. It eats mainly the snowshoe hare but also feeds on pine squirrels, rodents and roadkill.

Lynx had not been seen in Colorado since the late 1970s when in 1999 lynx trapped in Canada and Alaska were released into the San Juan Mountains. The area was chosen for its few roads, good snowfall and sizeable population of snowshoe hares.

Lynx, 218 in all, were released from 1999 through 2006. All were outfitted with a radio collar in order to track their activities. Dens were searched in the spring through 2010, when most of the radio collars stopped functioning.

Biologists called the project a success because several generations of lynx had reproduced and seemed to be finding adequate food.

But without radio collars, biologists lost direct contact with the lynx, hence the current project to keep close tabs on the population.

Researchers won’t try to count the number of individual lynx, Wait said, but instead use information from cameras and on-site tracking to determine the territory occupied by the lynx, their food supply and extent of mating and whether their numbers are fluctuating.

The approach is experimental, Wait said. But if results in the next two years match what was found when radio collars were working in 2009 and 2010, researchers will know the method is valid, he said.

“This type of long-term monitoring has never been done with lynx or forest carnivores,” Wait said. “It may give us information that no one has ever had.”

daler@durangoherald.com



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