Few North American mammals are so phantasmal as the Canada lynx, a grey ghost of a hunter primarily found in the continent’s sprawling boreal forest. Getting a good look at these normally ultra-elusive wildcats makes for a red-letter day. One such day just transpired in Minnesota, USA, along the extreme southern fringes of that taiga realm.
Sarah Hamilton, the owner of the Trail Center Lodge in Grand Marais, filmed a lynx pacing along the property’s snowy deck on February 23rd. It’s a strikingly up-close and extended view of a carnivore rarely spied at all in the state. A dog inside certainly seems plenty excited by the sighting, its barks at one point in the footage causing the lynx to cast a bit of side-eye. (Back in 2020, an even rarer observation—a black, aka melanistic, lynx in Yukon, Canada—inspired a similar uproar from a pooch.)
The Trail Center Lodge lies along the Gunflint Trail, a historic highway set in the Border Lakes ecoregion of far northeastern Minnesota near the state’s border with Ontario (and the expansive Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness). This corner of the state has produced the majority of recent lynx sightings in Minnesota.
The great bulk of that boreal forest lapping down into Minnesota and some other northerly parts of the lower 48 U.S. states lies in Canada and Alaska, and that’s also where most of Canada’s lynx reside. Studies suggest Minnesota harbours a small, low-density breeding population of lynx as well as Canadian wanderers coming down from the north, their patterns more tied to the boom-and-bust population cycles of the snowshoe hare, the wildcat’s preferred prey. (The outsized paws of the Canada lynx allow it to float over the snowpack: a valuable adaptation when pursuing the similarly endowed hare through the boreal woods, where Old Man Winter holds court for a big chunk of the year.)
Protected in Minnesota since 1984, the Canada lynx in the “Lower 48” is a federally threatened species. Another member of the lynx genus, the bobcat, is vastly more numerous in Minnesota, vastly more widespread in the conterminous US, and a textbook generalist sort of carnivore compared to its heavily (though not exclusively) hare-focused cousin. It also seems more tolerant of human activity and development (case in point: hauling urban squirrels down into storm drains).
The stubbier, comparatively small-footed bobcat looks smaller than the lanky and lithe Canada lynx, but in fact these two medium-sized wildcats overlap significantly in the weight department. Generally speaking, the bobcat, which can thrive everywhere from hardwood forests and swamps to prairies and deserts, seems to essentially “take over” for the Canada lynx south of the taiga (though in western North America the latter does haunt a modest range southward into the high-elevation conifer forests of the U.S. Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, also bobcat country). Some evidence suggests that potential climate-change impacts on snow cover and depth regimes might allow bobcats to invade northward at the expense of the grey ghost.
It’s worth acknowledging that Minnesota has a third—and much heftier—native felid: the cougar or puma, extirpated from the state during the early phase of Euro-American settlement, but increasingly showing up in these old haunts of theirs. That said, there’s currently no evidence of a breeding puma population. And a 2024 study wasn’t terribly bullish on the odds of significant cougar recolonisation of eastern North America, despite the extensive recent wanderings by the large cats—mainly males—back into the region, including into the Upper Midwest wildlands of the so-called “North Woods” that encompass northern Minnesota.
Top header image: Marty Mellway/Flickr
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