Co-authors: Irina Rotenko and Vintses’ Sidorovich
Yesterday we found another lynx lair situated once again in a treefall beneath the crowns of several large fallen spruces.
The treefall occurred about ten years ago and covers roughly one hundred metres in diameter. For the last four years, this treefall has served as the main housing area of the adult male lynx we call Pliamkach (meaning the spotted one). Remarkably, Pliamkach has repeatedly tolerated adult females with kittens in this same treefall even during the denning period — something we have registered twice before.
As we entered the treefall, we began inspecting the uprooted trees, checking both the root plates and the crowns. Along the way we found six recent lynx lairs used as couch sites. We were somewhat surprised that four of them were double lairs, as shown in the photograph below.
While moving like this, walking along the trunk of a huge fallen spruce, a lynx suddenly jumped onto the trunk and branches just two metres in front of us. It made two short leaps forward, stopped for a few seconds, and then began escaping again. We clearly saw the testes and the well‑developed whiskers: it was a large adult male definitely. Moreover, we recognised him as Pliamkach.
Under the fallen spruce where Pliamkach appeared, we found a lair containing two kittens approximately three weeks old (see photograph below).
This means that the adult male lynx Pliamkach had been sitting in the lair with the small kittens, while the mother was absent. Perhaps she escaped before Pliamkach, and we simply did not notice her.
The four double couch lairs we found suggest that Pliamkach has been present at the lair quite often. One possible reason is the presence of a pair of wolves with pups only about two kilometres away. We detected fresh wolf stretch‑marks very close to the lynx lair, indicating that wolves had recently visited the vicinity.
This case once again suggests that lynx sociality is markedly higher than is commonly acknowledged in scientific publications on lynx behaviour. On the contrary, our materials (Sidorovich & Rotenko, 2022; materials in this blog), including this new case, indicate a rather developed sociality in Eurasian lynx, rather than the strictly solitary lifestyle often described by colleagues.
Zoology by Vadim Sidorovich 