(profound ambient music)
- Lynx are representative of wilderness,
of wild values, of the natural world.
- They're one of those species
that is sort of an indicator for wildness.
When think of those places,
you think of places that are hard to get to,
you think of places that are rugged,
that are tough to survive in.
There's this sort of mystical suite of species
that live out there that are rare
and kind of reclusive.
When I get out there and I see these tracks
or I hear this sound,
that's an indicator to me that I'm off the grid
- The thrill of having lynx out there is more vicarious
in that we all know there's lynx out there
and that makes the system better
but we rarely get to see them.
(slow intense music)
We don't really know what caused the extirpation
of lynx in Colorado.
Lynx are vulnerable to trapping
and their fur has always been very, very valuable
the boom of mining and the alteration in streams,
some of the archaic, I'll call it,
forest management practices
clear cuts that occurred were bad.
Many of these causes were human induced.
We also have the ability to reverse some of those.
Aldo Leopold said, "you need to keep all the cogs
in the wheel to have it properly functioning ecosystem."
- We are responsible for conservation
and management of all native species in Colorado.
Part of our job and part of our mission
as an agency is to take care of the native species
in this state and lynx were one of them.
- I started working on the Lynx project
in 1997. To restore a species
into its native habitat is a unique thrill.
No other States or Provinces
or anybody had ever done a successful lynx reintroduction.
So we were pioneering how to do it.
We initially were working with British Columbia and Alaska.
Their populations were high.
They were actively trapping them.
They were as thrilled to be involved
in a reintroduction in Colorado as I was.
The first release was such a spectacle.
We had been working towards this for three years.
The act of opening the door
and the lynx takes a tentative step out,
looks around and then starts to trot off.
It was magical to think, wow, I had been part of this
and now that beautiful critter is back on the landscape.
(soft calming music)
What happened was surprising
to everybody. Within about three weeks
we saw the first starvation
and that was catastrophic to us.
In retrospect, they were already starting to starve
and they came to us in marginal condition.
We reconfigured the whole program
so that we were gonna hold them for a minimum of
three weeks and feed them well. Following that protocol
the starvations stopped.
In 2010, we said the reintroduction phase was successful
and was now complete.
At that point, the attention turned to help sustain lynx'
presence forever.
(cheery music)
- We know from the research we've done here
that about three quarters of what they eat
in terms of their diet is snowshoe hares.
Bottom line of lynx conservation
and keeping lynx on the landscape
comes down to management of snowshoe hares
and snowshoe hares are heavily influenced
by forest management.
(cheery music)
- Our relationship with the Forest Service
is pretty important.
Our agency is the agency that put these animals back.
We're in charge of the management of that species
and monitoring of that species
but that species lives in the National Forest system.
So they're the ones that really provide the habitat
for lynx and for snowshoe hares.
Forest management is a pretty complex endeavor
from a Parks and Wildlife standpoint,
we wanna make sure that we have big chunks
of good lynx habitat and good hare habitat.
From a Forest Service standpoint,
they have a mandate to provide forest products
for the public.
In addition to providing habitat for wildlife and a series
of other things that they need to pay attention to.
From an operator's standpoint,
they need to be able to get the product off of the land
and turn a profit off of that
and so the name of the game there
is to get all those folks together
and figure out how to compromise
so that we can all get what we need.
One of the really valuable things that we do
with our Forest Service partners are these field trips.
There's no substitute for being out on the ground,
to see, you know, the kinds of things
that they're implementing, to try to understand their world
and make sure that they understand our world
in terms of lynx and hare biology and ecology.
(cheery calming music)
- Some of the things that we noted when we saw data
of where lynx from the first reintroductions
were hanging out is a lot of those coincided to areas
that we've managed pretty heavily in the past.
Those actions actually thin the over story
and initiated new undergrowth.
So that created the conditions favorable for hare
which then supported lynx in those areas.
- Good hare habitat, generally comes down
to what we call dense horizontal cover.
When you look sort of sideways through the forest
from two meters on down toward the ground, you know
how much of that is actually covered up?
That is really key for snowshoe hares.
These little trees like this stuff here
those saplings provide both cover hiding cover
for hares and also the needles are what they eat.
That's what sustains them all through the winter.
That's the important thing to look for when walking
through a forest and trying to figure out
if it's good for hares or not.
- [Kevin Duda] One of the forest wide objectives is to
provide a sustainable supply of timber
to the local and regional timber economies.
America needs wood.
We have changed forest conditions
now with wide-scale beetle kill. Big outbreaks
like we've experienced here
don't really mesh well with that objective.
The purpose of a lot of our salvage is really just aimed at
recovering the economic value
of these dead trees. Efforts that we can take now
really to protect a regeneration are good
for a timber management approach
and they also benefit wildlife,
so there's a mutual benefit between the resources there.
- This was a big sale they'd been working on
for several years.
Just finished it up a couple months ago
got a lot of volume of timber out of this.
As you can see, I mean, that's just the slash pile
of stuff that wasn't usable material.
The cool part though, is this stand,
had a lot of green in it,
a lot of subalpine fir component
and they did a nice job
of leaving as much of that as they could
and so there's a lot of patches that look just like this
where there's a nice wall of green,
you got a lot of nice dense, horizontal cover,
a lot of good places for hares to hang out and eat
and good habitat for them to survive the winter.
So this is a good example
of a nice compromise in terms of timber management.
They got a lot of volume, but at the same time
left a good portion of it for for hares and for lynx
and did a nice job here.
Monitoring hare populations is obviously incredibly
important to intelligent management.
We accomplish that in a variety of ways.
We can go out into the woods
and set a bunch of traps and capture, recapture hares,
you can get density, you can put collars on these animals
and figure out where they're going and what types
of habitats they're using and resource selection
and that's super helpful.
That's also expensive and time consuming.
At the other end of the spectrum,
you can do sort of non-invasive stuff.
You can sample hundreds and hundreds of plots
and count the number of hare pellets in those plots
and that's a good index for hare density as well.
We have these site maps of the area.
All of the black dots are these random sampling points.
We've put stakes in the ground
that we need to revisit and count and clear the pellets
and so we split all those things up but they're
random points so they're kinda all over the place.
We gotta make sure that we get them all
and we duplicate stuff.
So each person will draw out a plan
in the order of where they're gonna go.
I was in the office one day making these
and my daughter happened to be in there.
she was like six maybe
and thought these are all like connect the dots things
and just started like just drawing lines
like one, two, three, four
and I'm like, no, they're not connect the dot
but then it dawned on me,
that's actually a very good idea.
(calming music)
- [Kirsten Terkildsen] The amount of pellets in a stand
has a pretty good correlation to the number of hares
and then that's compared to the number of lynx.
There's different stands they're called
with different forest treatments
and there's 50 stakes that have just been
kinda randomly put out within the stand.
This site is a control site.
The Forest Service hasn't come in
and done any thinning or anything like that.
It's just all natural.
The control site just kinda gives us a base
of if nothing had been done,
that's how many hares would be in the area.
Working on a project that has to do with lynx success,
sometimes it's kinda hard.
Like I forget while I'm out here
just counting rabbit poop all the time,
I kinda have to stop and remind myself
that it's important data
'cause it's keeping tabs on what the lynx are doing
and how they're surviving up here.
They've got an incredible background in Colorado.
The lynx are kind of a little shimmer of hope
cause they've done so well.
I knew it.
GPS has done me wrong.
- Defining success with a reintroduction is kind
of a difficult thing to do.
We wanna make sure that they're here
decade after decade after decade
and so the way to do that is to implement
some sort of a long-term monitoring program.
- Jake started to design a protocol
of how to monitor this population of lynx
that were spread out throughout the San Juan's low density
and rarely observed.
- [Jake Ivan] It's hard to get a handle on them.
You can't just go out into an area
and count the number of lynx,
you can just go out there and observe them
and say, "yep, they're still here."
So what we're left with, is going into these units
and trying to find evidence that they're here.
- We have grids set out up on the landscape
which represents an animal's home range
during the winter time.
Within those grids, the ideal way would be to go out
after a fresh snow, look for lynx tracks.
There are some areas we just can't get to
or it's just not safe to get to during the wintertime
and those are areas what we'll do is
we'll put game cameras up
and we set these cameras up in the fall,
leave them out during the winter time
and then we'll pick him up into the spring or summer.
Lynx are a cat, their behavior's a lot like the house cat.
To catch attention from far away,
it's visual trying to get that visual stimulus in the cat.
And then once they come in to use a scent lure to
help bring the animal in front of the camera
and we can get that picture of them.
Even though I'm out there in the woods
and I don't see any lynx,
I just know that they're there and then
to actually get confirmation,
to me that's pretty exciting.
- [Scott Wait] Tracking is much more efficient
in that typically on a snowmobile,
two to five miles and you'll cross a track.
(calming music)
- The issue with tracks, is under certain conditions,
it's easy to confuse one species with another.
Tracks may be several weeks old,
they may be melted out,
they may have fresh snow on top of them.
We drive around until we find tracks that look right
in terms of the size of the individual prints, the gait
and the stride length and those sorts of things
but we investigate further.
- This track had kind of the pattern
or the spacing that I've seen often before.
Since it's underneath a lot of fresh snow,
I'm gonna dig up around one of the divots
and try to get underneath the compaction zone
where the foot of the lynx actually pushes into the snow.
So I'm just kinda tossing all the fragile snow.
You can see the track inside
and then you can see the classic shape here
and because of that,
that's starting to look pretty good as the lynx track.
- So now that Doug has dug
up this compression signature, we're pretty sure
this is a lynx - set of lynx tracks that we're on.
So the next thing is we wanna get an eDNA sample.
And the eDNA, it stand for environmental DNA,
as it walk through the snow,
there are skin cells that it left
in the prints as it was walking
and so what we wanna try to do is collect
some of those skin cells
so that we can send them off to the lab
and confirm that this is in fact, a lynx track
and that there's lynx here still in this sample unit.
We need to dig down through the fresh snow
to get down to the point here where
the foot actually was touching the snow
and that's where we want to sample
and fill up our sampling bags.
eDNA is a new technology it's been around
for a handful of years, only been two or three years,
I think, they've been using it in snow.
It's pretty cool technology
but it only gets us down to the level of species.
So there isn't a lot of genetic material to work with.
Just like I say, a few skin cells that are sloughed off
in each print but it can tell us if this is a lynx or not,
confirm that it is.
- [Doug Clark] I started on the project in 2004.
So it's been kinda nice to continue to see lynx tracks
at this very moment.
It's exciting to be part of this still
and exciting that the lynx are here.
- Conservation of a species like lynx
is pretty complicated.
There's a lot of moving parts.
How you manage the forest,
influences what happens with the hare world
and what happens in the hare world then influences
what happens with lynx.
Such a cool species to work with.
Canada Lynx is something you see
on National Geographic,
so when you actually get the opportunity
to work at a project like that,
it's pretty cool to play any kind of a role,
especially, you know when it turns out to be
a successful program to re-establish
a species where it was extirpated
and to do it in a way that I think, you know
most of the folks in our agency
and the general public in Colorado
is sort of proud of the fact that
lynx are back here on the landscape.
(soft music)