Mammals
Eurasian Lynx
Lynx lynx · also called European lynx, Siberian lynx, common lynx
The Eurasian lynx is the big cat of the northern forest — a long-legged, tuft-eared, spotted predator large enough to hunt deer, quiet enough to live unseen beside people, and, across much of Europe, a species being deliberately returned to landscapes it was driven out of a century ago.
Overview
Eurasian lynx are animals of forest and rugged terrain, from the boreal woods of Scandinavia and Siberia to the montane forests of the Carpathians, the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. They need cover for stalking and denning and a good density of medium-sized prey. Each lynx holds a large exclusive territory — a male’s range overlaps those of one or more females — marked with scent and scrapes, and individuals may travel 20 km or more in a night.
The forest hunter
The Eurasian lynx is a stalk-and-ambush predator. It moves quietly through cover, closes to within a few metres of a resting or feeding animal, and rushes it, killing with a bite to the throat or nape. Its main prey are roe deer and chamois, supplemented by hares, grouse, foxes, and rodents; a lynx typically makes a deer-sized kill every five to seven days and caches the remains under snow or vegetation, returning to feed over several days.
Physically it is built for cold, snowy country: broad, furred feet that spread its weight on snow, long legs, dense insulating fur, acute hearing amplified by the ear tufts, and the short “bobbed” tail of all lynxes.
Reproduction
Lynx mate in late winter, and after about 70 days the female gives birth to one to four kittens in a well-hidden den among rocks, roots, or fallen timber. The kittens stay with her through their first winter, learning to hunt, and disperse to find their own territory at around 10 months — a dangerous period, as young lynx crossing open, roaded, developed country suffer high mortality.
Decline and return
The Eurasian lynx was exterminated across central and western Europe by the early 20th century through hunting and deforestation, hanging on only in the far north and east. From the 1970s, reintroduction projects released lynx into Switzerland, Slovenia, the Czech and Bavarian forests, the French Jura, and elsewhere, and natural recolonisation has continued from the Carpathian and Baltic strongholds.
The species is now Least Concern and overall increasing, with a large secure population in Russia. But the reintroduced western populations remain small, isolated, and inbred, and depend on continued protection, connectivity between forest blocks, reducing road and poaching mortality, and managing conflict with sheep farmers and hunters.
Eurasian Lynx: common questions
How big is a Eurasian lynx compared with a bobcat or Canada lynx?
Much bigger. The Eurasian lynx is the largest lynx by a wide margin — an adult male weighs 20–30 kg and stands around 70 cm at the shoulder, roughly double a Canada lynx or bobcat and comparable to a small leopard. That size lets it routinely kill deer, whereas the North American lynxes mostly take hares and rodents. In Europe it is the third-largest land predator after the brown bear and the wolf.
Are Eurasian lynx dangerous to humans?
Essentially not at all. There is no reliably documented case of a healthy wild Eurasian lynx killing a person. They are shy, avoid people, hunt at dawn and dusk in dense cover, and are so rarely seen that people can live in lynx country for years without knowing one is there. Attacks on livestock — mainly sheep left unguarded in forest pasture — do occur and are the main source of conflict.
Why did lynx disappear from so much of Europe?
Hunting and habitat loss. By the early 1900s the Eurasian lynx had been shot, trapped, and poisoned out of most of central and western Europe, surviving only in the north, the Carpathians, and the Balkans, as forests were cleared for farming and lynx were killed for fur, as trophies, and to protect game and livestock. The species has since been deliberately reintroduced to parts of the Alps, the Jura, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, and elsewhere, and its range is slowly expanding again.
What is the difference between a lynx's tufted ears and its "beard"?
Both are distinctive. The ear tufts are stiff black hairs up to 4–5 cm long that probably improve hearing and are used in signalling. The "beard" or ruff is the flared fringe of longer fur around the cheeks and throat, most obvious in winter coat, which frames the face. Combined with the short black-tipped tail and long legs, they make the lynx unmistakable even in a brief glimpse.