Lynx habitat at risk as clear-cutting fades
By Murray Carpenter, The Boston Globe, April 27, 2009 [here]
The good news is that Canada lynx are thriving in Maine. Hundreds of the leggy, snow-loving cats are breeding in the state’s vast north woods, perhaps a historic high.
The bad news is that the population is heading for a crash, and logging industry clear-cut practices seem to be the reason.
Strangely, it’s not an excess of clear-cutting that is the problem; this time, it’s a lack of clear-cutting that is creating environmental worries.
Environmentalists may hate clear-cutting, but lynx love it - because when trees are cleared away, a dense spruce-fir thicket often crops up in their place, and those thickets attract snowshoe hares, the lynx’s primary prey.
Biologists say lynx are thriving in Maine because massive industrial clear-cuts following a spruce budworm epidemic 30 years ago have grown into hare-rich thickets. But regulations reducing the size of clear-cuts in the Maine woods - products of state legislation passed in 1989 and amended after a divisive environmental campaign in the late 1990s - are now eliminating those thickets, and eventually, the hares that live in them.
Over the next decade, the unintended chain reaction is expected to dramatically reduce the number of Maine lynx - the only lynx in the Eastern states, and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
“The prognosis for future habitat for lynx is not terribly good,” said Mark McCullough, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.
William Krohn, a University of Maine professor who has been studying the state’s wildlife for decades, said that with recent reductions in clear-cutting, “We’ve created something that isn’t the optimum for lynx habitat.” … [more]