Wild Cats of the World by Luke Hunter

Wild Cats of the World by Luke Hunter

Author:Luke Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472912206
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-22T16:00:00+00:00


The Eurasian Lynx is the only lynx species that specialises on ungulate prey across most of its range. This adult female in the Jura Mountains, Switzerland has killed a male European Roe Deer, an animal around twice her weight.

Social and spatial behaviour

The Eurasian Lynx is solitary and broadly territorial, with the best available information from populations in western Europe and Fennoscandia; less information is available from Russian and Asian populations. Male ranges are larger than female ranges, and overlap between males is greater than between females. Both sexes demarcate territorial boundaries with urine-marks but home ranges are generally too large to permit a high degree of exclusivity, except in small core areas. Little is known about territorial defence but encounters between adults are occasionally fatal; a resident five-year-old male in Norway was found fatally injured by another male. Range size increases from south to north reflecting the availability of prey, with the largest ranges occurring in areas where Lynx depend mainly on hares. These populations are also subject to dramatic, cyclical fluctuations in hare numbers (as for the Canada Lynx), which may make home ranges less stable. Although not as well studied as for the Canada Lynx, hare shortages appear to provoke a similar pattern of Eurasian Lynx expanding the size of their range and abandoning it entirely if hare populations remain low for a protracted period. Presumably, as for Canada Lynx, the recovery of hare numbers permits these Eurasian Lynx to re-establish stable ranges.

The size of home ranges across the distribution varies from 98km2 to 1,850km2 for females and 180km2 to 3,000km2 for males. Range size estimates are best known for well-studied populations preying mainly on ungulates in which range size differences can be explained mostly by declining ungulate density from south to north. Among such populations, average range sizes for females and males respectively are: 106−168km2 and 159−264km2 (north-west Alps and Jura Mountains, France and Switzerland); 133km2 and 248km2 (Bialowieza Primeval Forest, Poland); 177km2 and 200km2 (Kočevje, southern Slovenia); 409km2 and 709km2 (Sarek, northern Sweden); 350km2 and 812km2 (Akershus, southern Norway); 561km2 and 1,515km2 (Nord-Trøndelag, central Norway); and 832km2 and 1,456km2 (Hedmark, southern Norway). Range size is expected to be very large in most of Russia and the Tibetan Plateau. Density estimates include 0.25 Lynx per 100km2 (southern Norway), 0.4 Lynx per 100km2 (Bavarian National Park, Germany), 1.5 Lynx per 100km2 (Swiss Alps) and 1.9−3.2 per 100km2 (Poland).



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