Blog Stew with Lynx*

 • Here is a short video about lynx in Colorado.**

• Is your toothache really Lyme disease?

• The history of outdoor life in the Nordics is long and really incorporated with the culture, since we have a lot of land and a small population." Emphasis addded. Anyhow, they have a word for it. We don't, but we have the concept.

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* If I remember right, the first text-only hyperlink browser I ever used was called Lynx (get it?).  Wikipedia says it was launched in 1992 and is still being maintained.

** I think that biologist at the beginning is married to my cousin. I have a lot of cousins — can't keep track.

No Farms at Chaco Canyon, Off-Road Vehicles, Lynx Surprise

A "great kiva," restored but roofless, at Chaco Canyon

¶ All boats, snowmobiles, and ATV's in Colorado have to be state-registered. Proof of ownership is required, but the state is fairly flexible about documentation.

¶ Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico is the site of a collection of ancient "great houses," multi-room dwellings. They were not built simultaneously, and it is unclear how many people actually lived there. And apparently they did not grow their own food, so apparently it was backpacked in by the Anasazi equivalent of serfs.  Or maybe they were willing pilgrims.

¶ With typical feline nonchalance, a lynx surprises skiers at the Purgatory ski area in southwestern Colorado. 

UPDATE, Jauary 10, 2017: A sad ending to the lynx story.

Sigh, I Won't Get These on my Scout Cameras

Lynx . . . somewhere (Colorado Parks and Willdlife).

Colorado Parks and Wildlife releases some photos of lynxes taken with scout cameras.

After reintroduction in the early 2000s, biologists believed that there was a vialble population by 2010.

The current estimate is 200–300 lynx.

If you see one, there is an online lynx-sighting form.

They are not in the montane forest where I do most of my "camera-trapping," however, but mostly three or four thousand feet higher up.

Solving a Cryptozoological Puzzle

The "Edwardian lynx" in the Bristol Museum

This is not a southern Rockies post, just so you will know. We have lynx (re-introduced), and we like them.

Science writer Darren Naish shows how the puzzle of a lynx(?) shot in southwestern England in about 1903 can be solved using modern technology.

I have been in that museum, but I do not remember the stuffed lynx. What I do remember from the wildlife collection is staring for a while at this.

Naish's piece, however, is an elegant summary of what can be done with older taxidermy specimens.

Blog Stew with Lynx

¶ A Colorado lynx apparently walked to Yellowstone. (Hat tip: The Goat.) Or maybe you thought I was referring to an early Web browser.

¶ The Evening Grosbeak is back. No, not the bird, the bar in Cañon City. In the 1980s, we called its similar previous incarnation a "fern bar." Now it is a "martini bar." Social historians, please note. Whatever it is, Cañon finally has one, again.

¶ Conclusion: it was a Northern pygmy-owl. (Apparently it rates a hyphen, for some dark reason known only to the American Ornithologists' Union.)

¶ Another visitor today was a Clark's nutcracker. It was a little out of place too, but only by altitude. I have never seen one down this low (6,600) feet, but there is no reason it could not come down from the higher ridges, which are 9,000-plus feet in elevation.