Lynx in Switzerland

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Lynx in Switzerland

CAT NEWS
Issue 5, Autumn 1986

Lynx, which became extinct in Switzerland at the turn of the century, have been reintroduced in recent years, and there are now about 50 in the country. The public has not totally accepted the lynx, and hunters complain of competition for deer and other game.

Drs Urs Breitenmoser and Heinrich Haller of the University of Bern, Switzerland, who have been studying spatial organisation and feeding habits of lynx in the Swiss Alps, report that ungulates gradually adapt to the presence of lynx, but their space requirements increase.

At present the lynx in the northern Alps occurs mainly in large forest areas of over 500 km², where the population density is estimated at about one adult to 85 km².

Home ranges of four lynx in the northern Alps, where the lynx was first established, varied from 450 km² to 275 km² for males and 135 km² to 96 km² for females. In the Valais (Central Alps) an adult female was tracked over 46 km². The home range of one female was almost completely overlapped by that of a male.

Occasionally lynx roamed outside their home ranges, especially males during the mating season, and one male ranged over 1,860 km². A young female, which dispersed and lived with a range of only 5 km² in a valley not used by lynx before, probably captured prey more easily because it was a new area.

Breitenmoser and Haller found that lynx in the study area fed mainly on the two smaller ungulates. Eighty-eight prey items included 48 roe deer, 30 chamois, five hares, two domestic sheep, two marmots and one red squirrel. Analyses of faeces showed that neither small rodents nor birds were of any importance as lynx prey. A male and a female hunting in the same area showed different preference in killing roe deer and chamois (12:14 and 21:7 respectively). Distances between consecutive kills varied from five to ten kms. Exploitation of killed ungulates in undisturbed sites was 88%, close to civilisation 62%. Adult lynx killed one ungulate every 6.6 days, a female with two cubs of 10 months one every 2.7 days.

The yearly consumption of one lynx was estimated at 60 roe deer or chamois, and the total consumption in the study area was 3%-9% of the ungulate population. It is considered that feeding strategy i.e. surprise attack, is one of the main reasons for the large home ranges and the low population density of lynx in the northern Alps.

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