This year our lynxes have outdone themselves!
For the fifth season, we have the pleasure of observing young lynxes in the wild. However, our discoveries this year exceed our wildest expectations.
A barely one-year-old female has become a mother!
Agnes is the daughter of Azjatka, born in the wild at the end of June last year. In March of this year, she was fitted with a collar that allows us to track her fate in the wild. Still in the same month, she began living independently in the wild. She had no trouble finding food. Agnes is a very secretive lynx, and direct observations of her are practically impossible. Even setting up camera traps rarely yields the desired effect. We only managed to record her with a prey once. However, analyzing the telemetry data, we noticed unusual behavior from this young lynx, as she returned to one location for 5 weeks. It looked as if she had offspring, but she had barely turned one year old. We were sure it was impossible and, curious, we set out into the field. The place she was returning to was a beech tree windthrow, potentially an ideal spot for giving birth, but during this visit, we did not manage to encounter Agnes. However, not giving up, we checked Agnes’s last location, and it turned out to be a bullseye. Thanks to the VHF transmitter in the telemetry collar, we were sure she was circling us in tall grass, but she was completely invisible to us. Thanks to our persistence, we managed to find a kitten nearby, which was very cleverly hidden among the windthrows. We had already begun to suspect the lynxes of laying cuckoo eggs, but we are certain that Agnes has started breeding as a barely one-year-old female! This is astonishing, as the biology of this species clearly indicates that females breed in their second year of life, but as nature itself confirms, there are exceptions to every rule 😊
To be continued 😊
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