Review by Allen Best
Wildlife – November 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ecology and Conservation of Lynx in the United States
Leonard F. Ruggiero, et ali
Published in 2000 by University Press of Colorado and the USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station
480 pages
ISBN: 0-87081-577-6
SEVERAL YEARS AGO a consulting wildlife biologist from Boulder wrote an e-mail to the U.S. Forest Service in Minturn about plans to expand into lynx terrain. “We don’t know squat about the lynx,” he said. Now, we have a 480-page book, assembled by a team of scientists, that says essentially the same thing.
Of course, in art as in life, not knowing something never has precluded a good story, so why should it in science? From Columbus to John Charles Frémont, our explorers have fumbled their way into the unknown, defining new country as much by what they didn’t know as by what they did. That’s partly what’s going on here.
Increasingly at issue in the wake of the sharp decline of the spotted owl is how the federal lands can be managed without threatening rare and endangered species. Among those species is the Canada lynx, a species that a century ago was common to Colorado’s mountains if not exactly thick. Now listed for protection under the nation’s Endangered Species Act, federal agencies have a legal responsibility to ask how they can protect the animal from extirpation, a nice word that means extinct in a localized area.
This is an academic question with varied and sometimes significant consequences for anybody who plays on or whose paycheck depends on public lands in the 16 states, including Colorado, where the species is now formally protected. As best as I can tell, that includes about everybody in Central Colorado.
Authors of this book (also available on the Internet at http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/planning/lynx/lynx.html if you have Acrobat 3.0 for downloading PDF files) brim with caution. They specifically warn against hastily adopting “solutions” for broad areas based on thin evidence.
For example, should timber be cut to provide saplings that, in theory, will hasten a new crop of snowshoe hares, the four-square of a lynx diet? That was the skimpy solution of the Forest Service in response to skimpy evidence that expanding the Vail ski area would displace lynx.
But that theory of the providence of timber-harvesting has holes, this report says. “Management-induced landscape changes, when based on untested hypotheses, can result in conditions antithetical to their stated purpose.”
In other words, the Forest Service shouldn’t rush out, in the name of the lynx, to cut trees hither and thither, winning in the process the good favor of the timber industry.
The scientists are also cautious about coyotes and snowmobile tracks.
Without wolves to check their numbers, coyotes have proliferated across the nation during the 20th century. They handily snack on snowshoe hares and even lynx at times. It is, after all, a dog eat cat world.
The lynx’s advantage is its huge paws, which allow it to pad about soft winter snow. Coyotes are stumped-footed, as are we. But if coyotes, or mountain lions, or bobcats have packed snowmobile or snowshoe trails to follow, then the lynx loses its advantage in grabbing lunch.
Based on this anecdotal evidence, snowmobile trails and backcountry ski huts are being curtailed in suspected lynx habitat in Colorado. The federal scientists seem unsure the science warrants this. “Winter trails may impact lynx indirectly by providing increased access to competitors, especially coyotes.”
“May” appears often in this book.
THEY ARE FAR LESS CAUTIOUS, however, in accepting the idea of island biogeography. This thinking says that wide-ranging animals such as lynx need large blocks of habitat and connections between those blocks, or else the species eventually dies out. That’s why a connection between the San Juan Mountains and the Sawatch Range becomes important, giving the connecting Cochetopa Hills more prominence to biologists than to the traveling public.
Incidentally, this report makes virtually no mention of Colorado’s transplanted lynx, something launched as the book was being edited. It does state that such transfers entail “significant conservation risks” — the risk is in transplanting entirely different subspecies from one locale to another.
I found no mention of the underlying question about why we should bother to worry about reintroducing lynx and whether, as asked by the Colorado Central publisher, the lynx actually serves no different purpose in the Southern Rockies ecology than a bobcat. I do believe it’s a part of our local landscape worth keeping, but that’s another essay.
Crack this book at some risk. With chapters like “Lynx Home Range and Movements in Montana and Wyoming: Preliminary Results,” this book isn’t lunch-counter reading. I found scanning it worthwhile because I’m interested in the nuances of our turn-of-the-century tug of war between development and conservation.
The actual science of wildlife biology is only a part of that tugging, something that becomes increasingly evident with time. The fact is, as the consulting biologists and everybody else has said, we really don’t know much at all about lynx in the Southern Rockies and what they need to survive. By the law, we shouldn’t be expanding ski areas into terrain that seems to supply important connecting corridors. In fact, we’re in such a hurry we obey the wildlife laws about as well as we drive the speed limit on our interstate highways.
— Allen Best