Colorado’s 11-year effort to return the lynx to one of its original homes has worked.
The big cats with the distinctive tufted ears, ruffed faces and bobbed tails are doing well enough in Colorado that more of them are born every year than die. It’s a success story that the state’s Division of Wildlife (DOW) can be proud of.
The result is that the DOW no longer needs to bring in lynx captured in the wilds of Canada and Alaska, as the division started doing in 1999, and release them in the Colorado wilderness to keep the litters coming.
Getting to this point was no easy task. In the first year, substantial numbers of lynx released in the San Juan Mountains starved to death. The theory had been to release the cats as quickly as possible after they were trapped.
Lynx hunt snowshoe hares and other high-mountain animals.
Wildlife officials changed their tactic and fattened up captured lynx before releasing them just before the breeding season in late winter.
More than 200 of the cats were released. By 2003, Colorado-based lynx had littered kittens. By 2006, three generations of the husky cats were living here. The DOW says at least 141 are Colorado-born.
Exact numbers are difficult to come by. The cats prefer the remoteness of the San Juans, and who can blame them?
Though lynx once thrived in Colorado, they were wiped out by the 1970s by trappers, poisoning and human development.
We like knowing they’re back out there, raising litters in high-mountain dens, tracking snowshoe hares on their long legs and restoring some balance to Colorado’s wild lands.