Accommodating a yearling male lynx in the original den where it was reared

Co-author Irina Rotenko

At the start of June, we discovered wolf pup tracks alongside numerous lynx footprints nestled between the root plates of two toppled spruces. We installed a camera trap at this location. Following our visit, the wolf pack seemed to have moved elsewhere. The camera trap documented numerically repeated visits by a yearling male lynx.

We discovered that beneath one of the root plates lay a burrow, previously unnoticed during our initial visit. Lynx hair was present in the sand bedding, buried 5-7 cm deep, as well as fresh hair on the cavity wall. The burrow featured a round chamber approximately 40-60 cm in diameter, with a 60 cm long passage leading from the entrance to the chamber. On the opposite side, the chamber wall was very thin, with a small, decayed root that could serve as a secondary exit in case of danger.

The subadult male lynx entered the burrow repeatedly, he visited the place almost every twenty-four hours, whether during the day or night, in sunny or rainy weather, and regardless of being hungry or sated. His visits to this dwelling place continued until mid-July when we inadvertently scared him away while checking the camera trap. We surmised that the young male lynx had adopted his former mother’s lair as his own shelter. Over time, we have come to recognize this behavior as typical among yearling lynxes. Recently, we documented another instance of a yearling returning to its birth den.

Below you will find two footages of the yearling male lynx in the spot.