A fully grown female lynx transported to southwestern Colorado from her home in Canada died of starvation during the weekend, the Colorado Division of Wildlife reported Wednesday.

It was the second wild cat to starve after biologists released it and four other lynxes in Colorado last month. A male "kitten," just 10 months old, died last week.

State officials trucked 11 of the Canadian cats to the state in early February in the first stage of a three-year, $1.4 million reintroduction project. Canada lynx disappeared from Colorado several decades ago, probably because of poisoning, hunting and habitat changes wrought by people.

The female that died had wandered across at least 6 miles of good habitat with plenty of food — snowshoe hares — on the eastern edge of the Rio Grande National Forest, said Todd Malmsbury, spokesman for the Division of Wildlife.

The lynx may have been too stressed from being trapped, transported and released to hunt, Malmsbury said.

Trackers have confirmed that another adult female cat, currently southeast of the La Garita Mountains, is eating. "She's killed at least a couple snowshoe hares," Malmsbury said.

Rich Reading, chairman of the division's lynx advisory team and director of conservation biology at the Denver Zoo, said the lynx's death was sad but expected.

"What I had hoped for, personally, was zero mortality, but what's realistic is a different thing," he said.

Biologists are considering recapturing another yearling lynx, a female released at the end of February, if they don't soon discover evidence that she has made kills.

"We'd feed her some more and allow her more time for acclimation and then release her again in two to three weeks, right in the middle of ideal habitat," Malmsbury said.

But habitat may not be enough, said Tom Beck, a Division of Wildlife mammal expert who also has served on the lynx advisory team.

"Partly it's learning. The habitat may be fine, but they're learning to find food in a markedly different environment than they're used to," he said.

Beck said that his wife has echoed some of the concerns expressed by animal-rights activists who think that the lynx relocation project is cruel to individual animals.

"She would say that if we don't have lynx here because humans were negligent, they killed them out, then humans were stupid and don't deserve lynx," he said, admitting, "There's some rationale to that. I have a problem with moving an animal around willy-nilly, but if, indeed, we want lynx here, we have to move them around and individuals will die."

Marc Bekoff, an animal-behavior researcher and animal-rights activist at the University of Colorado, has vociferously criticized the Division of Wildlife's lynx reintroduction plan, saying it was too experimental to justify the stress it would place on individual animals. He is organizing a vigil for the two dead lynxes on Saturday.

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