What SC unit/units have a 7 year closed lynx season and a 3 year open season? Any sensible reason to do that?

I suppose they open it somewhere in the top half of the upcycle?
Wouldnt make any sense at all here with registered lines.Might be a way to try to manage in open areas with competition type trapping.Likely a holdover from when Lynxpelts were high.

They open it on the highs and close it on the lows, not a set # of years. I think they call it the lynx tracking model or something. A past BOG relinquished their oversight to ADFG to track the cycles and set the seasons. I really have no complaints with the system it seems to make sense but I am open to hearing why it might not.

Call Howard Golden if he is still alive.

Might be more effective to close HARE season during the low cycle.
(I jest, of course).

What unit Drasselt? What metric do they use to open and
Close?

Seems to me that Gulo provided a good discussion of this subject several years ago.

I also think Zarnke gave some input at one point in time. Could be wrong there.
You might contact him Mike to see what he has to say.

AN EXPERT -SYSTEM MODEL FOR LYNX MANAGEMENT IN ALASKA
HOWARD N. GOLDEN, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 333 Raspberry Rd. Anchorage, AK
99518, USA
Abstract: Lynx populations in Alaska and northern Canada f1uctuate greatly over a 9-11­
year period in response to the abundance of snowshoe hares. Alaska adopted a tracking
harvest strategy in 1988 to provide more responsive management options during the lynx
cycle. This strategy applies to the road-connected areas of Southcentral and Interior
Alaska. It modifies season lengths as lynx and prey populations vary to ensure that
sustainable harvest limits are not exceeded. To standardize the decision-making process
of the lynx tracking harvest strategy, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G)
staff are developing an interactive model called "LynxTrak". This model uses a "rulebased expert-system" approach to determine the most appropriate management action to
take. The "experts" are ADF&G biologists, biologists from other agencies, trappers, and
literature sources. We have used the collective research findings, harvest data, population
trend counts, and experiences and observations of the experts to build this management
model. The "rules" used in the model consist of "IF" scenarios followed by "THEN"
responses. The rules culminate in a "CHOICE" the experts believe is the best action to
take. "LynxTrak" is a tool to help managers make informed, logical, and consistent
decisions using the guidance of other experts in considering all pertinent factors. It is not
a substitute for the decision-making process, but it should increase accountability for lynx
management decisions. If managers reject the choice made by the model's "experts", it is
their responsibility to justify a different course of action. No model is perfect, and there
may be certain factors missing that a manager considers to be important. I will
demonstrate "LynxTrak" to encourage "expert" input and make a run-time version of the
model available to interested conference participants.

Unit 7, Kenai. I don't know how they survey or whatever but they opened the season again last year. I hadn't seen much sign to indicate much of a comeback the prior year. Heard pretty much the same thing from some other trappers. They thought maybe F&G was jumping the gun and so did I. Then the season opened and sure enough there were cats where they hadn't been the year before and plenty of kittens. Talked to another guy who said there were plenty of kittens on his line too. So their game plan seems to be working.

Is unit 7 considered “south central”? Is the state opening/closing, or is it the refuge?

Yes the Kenai Peninsula is considered southcentral and its the state doing the opening/closing, not the refuge.

As I recall the working theory regarding cat management is/was that in low hare years small numbers of cats here and there are able to survive and that is the breeding base for the rebound so if you keep chipping away at that base then they can't bounce back as well when the bunnies pop.

I guess we've known for a long time that lynx can travel long distance but I think some fairly recent collaring studies have shown that they can regularly travel great distances, or at least a good many of them do. Basically Fairbanks cats are Brooks Range cats, AK cats are Yukon cats are NWT cats and so on. When the hares crash they don't just curl up eat their litter and die, they move and a long long way if necessary. I'm sure some or even a lot don't make it but the point is I believe a Kenai cat may well have been a Tok or Kluane or Fairbanks cat a season or 2 prior.

All this is to say there may be a lot more resiliency in the population than we realise which may lend support to your question if closing seasons in off years make much sense.
I dont know if it does or not.

I started this thread in response to an article in "The Trapper" magazine. Author is Lucas Byker. Good article but he says season is 7 off 3 on. I wasn't familiar with that. Apparently it's not that simple?
How long has it been that way? Can it be documented that the recovery is quicker, longer, etc under this on/off management? How does the harvest during the time this type of management has been in effect compare to other parts of the state where it isn't done?
I remember Howard Golden. Not sure if I ever met him. Must be retired?

I think Howard Golden is retired.

Tracking Lynx Across Alaska: What have we learned?

Posted: September 7, 2020 by Chessie Sharp
By Mark Bertram, Supervisory Wildlife Biologist, Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge



In recent years, you may have seen a Canada lynx, heard of a lynx sighting from a friend or read about one in your local newspaper. Lynx populations have been high in much of Alaska, so they have been out and about. That population high is fueled by snowshoe hares, the primary prey for lynx. Every decade or so, hare populations skyrocket and then crash. Lynx populations follow the same cycle as hares but lag by one or two years. Interestingly, this predator-prey cycle occurs in sync across boreal Alaska.

Dr. Knut Kielland, with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, has studied this intimate predator-prey relationship since the 1990s. In 2014, he teamed up with Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge to examine a long-standing scientific theory that the peak of the 10-year hare cycle acts in a synchronous “traveling wave” across the Alaskan and Canadian boreal forest, similar to a rippling wave in a pond.

But just what is it that sets the wave in motion and carries it over thousands of miles through the boreal biome? Weather patterns have been suggested, perhaps related to cyclical sunspot activity, but these patterns are inconsistent. The most likely explanation is long distance movements by predators. Both lynx and great horned owls disperse over 700 miles in search of food. Predators moving great distances from food-poor to food-rich areas could explain these 10-year patterns across the landscape.

Kanuti, Koyukuk, and Yukon Flats Refuges and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve have since partnered with Dr. Kielland and Tetlin Refuge to collectively examine lynx movements across the northwestern reaches of North America’s expansive boreal forest. Our goal is to identify which habitat characteristics are critical as dispersal corridors so land managers can maintain viable lynx populations across Alaska conservation units. To follow lynx movement, we capture lynx in walk-in live traps and attach a radio collar that records location every 4 hours. Every few days, the collars upload stored locations to a satellite, from which we can subsequently download data.

In the past four years, 163 lynx were captured and fitted with radio collars near Tok, Fort Yukon, Bettles, Galena and Wiseman, providing hundreds of thousands of locations. Some lynx stay close to home while others disperse in all directions over great distances (Figure 1). For instance, Tetlin Refuge biologists collared an adult male near Tok in 2017 that took a year-long sojourn through the Yukon and Northwest Territories, eventually settling west of Great Slave Lake, 2,100 miles away! In February 2019, another adult male was collared near Bettles. That April, he headed northwest 550 miles through the Brooks Range to the Chukchi Sea coast near Icy Cape. In May, he beachcombed south for 200 miles, double-backed along the North Slope for 500 miles to the Dalton Highway at the Sagavanirktok River, and then meandered southwest through the Brooks Range. Since October 2019, he has taken a respite in a secluded stretch of the Killik River headwaters.




Movements of 163 telemetered Canada lynx across Alaska and northwestern Canada, 2018-2020


We have recorded long distance dispersals for both young and old, male and female, with daily travel averaging 10 miles and up to 27 miles per day! There appear to be no natural barriers to movement as lynx have trekked across the Brooks and Alaska ranges, and the Wrangell, Cassier and Mackenzie mountains while crossing the formidable waters of the Yukon, Tanana, Porcupine, Copper, Kuskokwim and Mackenzie rivers. Collectively, this collared sample of Alaska lynx from four refuges and one park have traveled from the Chukchi Sea to British Columbia to the North Slope to the Yukon Delta, traversing through 20 conservation areas thus far.

Hare populations are now decreasing across Alaska. In response, we expect more collared lynx will disperse in search of food across the landscape. As more than 1,000 lynx locations are downloaded daily, university, refuge and park biologists will look closely at these dispersal movement patterns in search of terrain that dispersing lynx prefer. Identifying landscape corridors that link conservation units in Alaska and Canada will prove valuable in future land use planning.

We have starvation migrations through our non-boreal forest. If they stay, they probably die. This ain't Lynx country. Maybe they make it to White17 country? I'm not sure if that is Lynx country?

Says they're good swimmers and swim the Tanana in November at 10 below, even dozens of times!

https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=807

A surprising twist to the story is that a second collared lynx was snared by a trapper about 20 miles away from Kenny Lake near Copper Center, at almost the same time the Kenny Lake lynx was live trapped. That lynx was collared by the same Canadian researchers near Kluane Lake last winter. Hatcher described both lynx as big males.

Cat travels
Allyson Menzies helped collar both the lynx – two of 15 lynx she and her colleagues captured in the Yukon last winter as part of an ongoing study of long-range lynx movements. Menzies is a graduate student studying lynx at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is one of five graduate students working with researchers at four different Canadian universities studying lynx.

She said lynx live in a highly variable, changing environment, with dramatic changes in temperature (day to night and month to month) and food availability (the hare cycle). The researchers are hoping to gain a better understanding of how lynx adjust to these changes, whether that entails movement (such as dispersal and home range size) or fine-scale adjustments of behavior and energy use. They are also looking at how lynx behavior might affect the hare cycle itself.

caption follows
The travels of the "Kenny Lake" lynx between January and March, 2016. His home range is bisected by the Alaska Highway, the yellow line running (about 15 miles) from the right corner to the edge of Kluane Lake on the left. The GPS device in his collar tagged a point every 30 minutes. He spent most of the winter in an area about three miles by one and a half miles - the green scribbles - then headed east - the straight green line. Courtesy Allyson Menzies
Menzies work is focused in a study area along a 50-kilometer stretch of the Alaska Highway between Haines Junction and Kluane Lake, specifically an area known as the Shakwak Trench between Kloo Lake and Kluane Lake, just outside Kluane National Park and Preserve.

The Kenny Lake lynx was captured and collared in January 2016 right near the Alaska Highway, 13 miles east of Kluane Lake. The GPS device in the collar recorded a location every 30 minutes.

The lynx spent the first couple months right in that area. A Google Earth map of his points shows a home range roughly three miles long and a mile and a half wide, bisected by the highway, crisscrossed by a dense scribble of lines representing his movements between those 30-minute location points.

The other collared lynx show very similar home ranges – areas between eight and 35 square kilometers, overlapping and/or adjacent to each other.

For some reason in late March he took off. He headed west to Kluane Lake, and then followed the lake shoreline about 16 miles north. He turned west again and crossed the frozen lake, continuing west about 80 miles, crossing several large glaciers and numerous rivers. This first 120 miles or so of travel during April shows no discernable dawdling, unlike his movements during late April and May right along the Alaska-Canada border where he backtracks, circles and spends days in the same small area. His route roughly parallels the Alaska Highway between Kluane Lake and the Alaska border just north of the Wrangell Mountains.

Menzies said that on May 26 the batteries in his collar died. The route that took him another 150 miles or so around (or over and through) the Wrangell Mountains and then south to Kenny Lake is unknown – as are his motives.

Menzies wrote: “There have been reports of lynx moving great distances but it is usually in response to declining hare populations in their area (i.e., they disperse to places with more hares available) but the hare numbers are high here. He was not a juvenile, so wasn’t a dispersing juvenile either. So, we are currently unsure of why he moved this far but are intrigued and humbled by the fact that we still have so much to learn about these animals!”

The second lynx snared near Copper Center – also collared by Menzies – was a neighbor to the Kenny Lake lynx. Their initial home ranges (January through March near Kluane Lake) were very close together. The batteries in his collar also died in the spring, so his journey to the Copper River Valley is not documented, but Menzies said it doesn’t appear that they traveled together because they left the area a few weeks apart. He spent time in Kluane National Park near the Kuskawalsh Glacier, returned to his initial home range, then headed west. He may have gone over the Wrangells - Menzies said the highest elevation recorded on his collar was 3,200 meters (10,500 feet), so he was pretty high up in the mountains.

Lohse speculated on several routes the Kenny Lake cat might have taken, but assumed the cat had made the trip in the winter when the rivers were frozen. He said the route he thought most probable required crossing the Copper River, which he didn’t think was likely for a lynx, and suggested the lynx may have followed the highway from Tok and crossed rivers at highway bridges. He was surprised to learn that lynx can be excellent swimmers.

Swimming lynx
Knut Kielland and his colleagues are studying snowshoe hares in Interior Alaska, and their work has led to some in-depth studies of lynx as well. They are looking at conditions that affect hares’ vulnerability to specific predators. They captured and radio-tagged 288 snowshoe hares in an area just south of Fairbanks, and found that lynx and goshawks were primary hare predators, followed by great horned owls and coyotes.

caption follows
The Kenny Lake lynx as he is released with his new collar, 49 miles south of his capture site in the chicken coop at Kenny Lake and halfway to Valdez. Photo by Dash Feierabend.
Kielland is on the faculty of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He’s collaborated with the Canadian lynx researchers as well as the USFWS researchers in Tetlin. His hare research led to studies of lynx dispersal and long-range movements, and he and his colleagues collared 23 lynx between 2008 and 2012.

They were surprised to learn that several of the animals repeatedly swam across the Tanana River in October and November, when it was unfrozen or partially frozen. The Tanana is a large, swift, glacial river; it is the largest tributary of the Yukon River and more than a mile wide in places, although there are numerous braids and sandbars. Air temperature was below freezing. One male crossed the main channel of the river six times in November. Another male made 14 crossings of the Tanana between September and November, and swam across sloughs and channels of the river (15 to 50 meters wide) an additional 20 times. A female made 11 crossings and swam across smaller braids, channels and sloughs 40 times.

“Some crossings were made in the dark at night,” he said. “There would have been ice in the river, and it was 10 below zero some of those times.”

Kielland offered some insights into more typical lynx behavior as well.

He said male lynx typically have somewhat "loose" territories excluding other males, but which overlap the home ranges of several females. The size of the home ranges in Interior Alaska and the Yukon vary in relation to prey abundance but typically are between 10-50 square miles.

Males typically tend to disperse farther than females, who, based on Yukon studies, may set up shop adjacent or within their mother's home range. He wrote that, “there are a few documented cases of really long dispersals of lynx, greater than 300 miles, but the Kenny Lake lynx is the first, I think, which was released with a new collar (as opposed to having its hide stretched on a cottonwood board).”

Kielland said that with new tracking technology, researchers are poised to learn a good deal about lynx dispersal behavior.

There are a few around here almost every year..........but never a lot.

On my trapline ........which is south of here.........I have taken one lynx since 1981. Never even a hint of their existence in that area. Obviously it is not lynx habitat. There are hares there but not a lot. The riparian corridor is narrow and gives way to tundra or thick trees within a hundred yards or so. The area populated by willow is very narrow and I suspect that willow is crucial to hares.


We had a lot of bunnies here early in the winter but once those rains hit in December I haven't seen a track


There does seem to be a "sustainable" (hate that word) population of cats just where you come out of the Alaska Range on the west side. BIG BIG river bars with the opportunity for willow growth. But also very windy country. A decent population of coyotes in that area as well.

Not sure Mike. I thought it was based on some type of surveys not just by the calendar.

This is going to sound weird, but I believe the hares( in groups) migrate miles here.

I believe you.

In 1988-9 I was camped at a lake SE of here. There were no hares anywhere that I could see a sign of. Then after a particularly severe snow storm in December........they were everywhere. Over night ! I put on the snowshoes and started backtracking them.

They had all migrated downslope for at least a couple miles to arrive at the lake elevation

“Every decade or so, hare populations skyrocket and then crash. Lynx populations follow the same cycle as hares but lag by one or two years. Interestingly, this predator-prey cycle occurs in sync across boreal Alaska.“

The statement above by Sharp and Bertram doesn’t seem entirely true as the last Kenai cat cycle was from 2008 - 2014. It is now building. The Kenai seems to be somewhat offset to the interior. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong.

Something else I have noticed this year and last. Kenai cats typically have cast bellies. I have been catching a lot of cats with a much clearer belly. Not just kittens, but average size adults. Perhaps those are migrated cats.