 Lynx are representative of wilderness, of wild values, of the natural world. They're one of those species that's sort of an indicator for wildness. You think of those places you think of, places that are hard to get to, you think of places that are rugged, that are tough to survive in. There's this sort of mystical suite of species that live out there that are rare and kind of reclusive. When I get out there and I see these tracks or I hear this sound, that's an indicator to me that I'm off the grid. The thrill of having Lynx out there is more vicarious in that we all know there's Lynx out there and that makes the system better, but we rarely get to see them. We don't really know what caused the extirpation of Lynx in Colorado. Lynx are vulnerable to trapping and their fur has always been very, very valuable. The boom of mining and the alteration in the streams, some of the archaic, I'll call it, forest management practices, clear cuts that occurred were bad. Many of these causes were human induced. We also have the ability to reverse some of those. Aldo Leopold said, you need to keep all the cogs in the wheel to have a properly functioning ecosystem. We are responsible for conservation and management of all the native species in Colorado. Part of our job, part of our mission as an agency, is to take care of the native species in this state and Lynx are one of them. I started working on the Lynx project in 1997. To restore a species into its native habitat is a unique thrill. No other states or provinces or anybody had ever done a successful Lynx reintroduction. So we were pioneering how to do it. We initially were working with British Columbia and Alaska. Their populations were high, they were actively trapping them. They were as thrilled to be involved in a reintroduction in Colorado as I was. The first release was such a spectacle. We had been working towards this for three years. The act of opening the door and the Lynx takes a tentative step out, looks around and then starts to trot off. It was magical to think, wow, I had been part of this and now that beautiful critter is back on the landscape. What happened was surprising to everybody. Within about three weeks we saw the first starvation and that was catastrophic to us. In retrospect they were already starting to starve and they came to us in marginal condition. We reconfigured the whole program so that we were going to hold them for a minimum of three weeks and feed them well. Following that protocol the starvations stopped. In 2010 we said the reintroduction phase was successful and was now complete. At that point the attention turned to help sustain Lynx's presence forever. We know from the research we've done here about three quarters of what they eat in terms of their diet is snowshoe hairs. Bottom line of Lynx conservation and keeping Lynx on the landscape comes down to management of snowshoe hairs and snowshoe hairs are heavily influenced by forest management. Our relationship with the Forest Service is pretty important. Our agency is the agency that put these animals back. We're in charge of management of that species and monitoring of that species. But that species lives in the National Forest System. So they're the ones that really provide the habitat for Lynx and for snowshoe hairs. Forest management is a pretty complex endeavor from a Parks and Wildlife standpoint. We want to make sure that we have big chunks of good Lynx habitat and good hair habitat. From a Forest Service standpoint they have a mandate to provide forest products for the public in addition to providing habitat for wildlife and the series of other things that they need to pay attention to. From an operator's standpoint they need to be able to get the product off of the land and turn a profit off of that. And so the name of the game there is to get all those folks together and figure out how to compromise so that we can all get what we need. One of the really valuable things that we do with our Forest Service partners are these field trips. There's no substitute for being out on the ground to see the kinds of things that they're implementing to try to understand their world and make sure that they understand our world in terms of Lynx and hair biology and ecology. Some of the things that we noted when we saw data of where Lynx from the first three introductions were hanging out is a lot of those coincided to areas that we've managed pretty heavily in the past. Those actions actually thinned the overstory and initiated new undergrowth so that created the conditions favorable for hair which then supported Lynx in those areas. Good hair habitat generally comes down to what we call dense horizontal cover. When you look sort of sideways through the forest from two meters on down toward the ground you know how much of that is actually covered up. That is really key for snowshoe hairs. These little trees like this stuff here, those saplings provide both cover, hiding cover for hairs and also the needles are what they eat, that's what sustains them all through the winter. That's the important thing to look for when walking through a forest and trying to figure out if it's good for hairs or not. One of the forest-wide objectives is to provide a sustainable supply of timber to the local and regional timber economies. America needs wood. We have changed forest conditions now with wide-scale beetle kill. Big outbreaks like we've experienced here don't really mesh well with that objective. The purpose of a lot of our salvages is really just aimed at recovering the economic value of these dead trees. Efforts that we can take now really to protect a regeneration are good for a timber management approach and they also benefit wildlife so there's a mutual benefit between the resources there. This is a big sale that they've been working on for several years, just finished it up a couple months ago. Got a lot of volume of timber out of this as you can see. I mean that's just the slash pile of stuff that wasn't usable material. The cool part though is this stand had a lot of green in it, a lot of subalpine fir component and they did a nice job of leaving as much of that as they could. And so there's a lot of patches that look just like this where there's a nice wall of green. You got a lot of nice dense horizontal cover. A lot of good places for hairs to hang out and eat and good habitat for them to survive the winter. This is a good example of a nice compromise in terms of timber management. They got a lot of volume but at the same time left a good portion of it for hairs and for links and did a nice job here. Monitoring hair populations is obviously incredibly important to intelligent management. We accomplished that in a variety of ways. We can go out into the woods and set a bunch of traps and capture and recapture hairs. You can get density, you can put collars on these animals and figure out where they're going and what types of habitats they're using and resource selection. And that's super helpful, that's also expensive and time consuming. At the other end of the spectrum you can do sort of non-invasive stuff. You can sample hundreds and hundreds of plots and count the number of hair pellets in those plots and that's a good index for hair density as well. We have the site maps of the area, all of the black dots are these random sampling points. We put stakes in the ground that we need to revisit and count and clear the pellets and so we split all those things up but they're random points so they're kind of all over the place and we got to make sure that we get them all and we don't duplicate stuff so we first and draw out a plan in the order of where they're going to go. I was in the office one day making these and my daughter happened to be in there. She was like six maybe and thought these were all like connect the dot things and started like just drawing lines like one, two, three, four and I'm like no they're not connect the dot but then it dawned on me. That's actually a very good idea. The amount of pellets in a stand has a pretty good correlation to the number of hairs and then that's compared to the number of links. There's different stands they're called with different forest treatments and there's 50 stakes that have just been kind of randomly put out within the stand. This site is a control site. The Forest Service hasn't come in and done any thinning or anything like that. It's just all natural. The control site just kind of gives us a base of if nothing had been done that's how many hairs would be in the area. Working on a project that has to do with link success sometimes it's kind of hard like I forget while I'm out here just counting rabbit poop all the time. I kind of have to stop and remind myself that it's important data because it's keeping tabs on what the links are doing and how they're surviving up here. They've got an incredible background in Colorado. The links are kind of a little shimmer of hope because they've done so well. I knew it. GPS has done me wrong. Defining success with a reintroduction is kind of a difficult thing to do. We want to make sure that they're here decade after decade after decade. And so the way to do that is to implement some sort of a long-term monitoring program. Jake started to design a protocol of how to monitor this population of links that were spread out throughout the San Juan's low density and rarely observed. It's hard to get a handle on them. You can't just go out into an area and count the number of links. You can't just go out there and observe them and say, yep, they're still here. So what we're left with is going into these units and trying to find evidence that they're here. We have grids set up on the landscape, which represents an animal's home range during the wintertime. Within those grids, the ideal way would be to go out after a fresh snow, look for links to tracks. There are some areas we just can't get to, or it's just not safe to get to during the wintertime. And those areas what we'll do is we'll put game cameras up. When we set the cameras up in this fall, leave them out during the wintertime and then we'll pick them up into the spring or summer. Links are a cat. Their behavior is a lot like a house cat. To catch attention from far away, it's visual, trying to get that visual stimulus in the cat. And then once they come in to use a scent mirror to help bring the animal in front of the camera and we can get that picture of them. Even though I'm out there in the woods and I don't see any links, just to know that they're there and then to actually get confirmation. To me that's pretty exciting. Tracking is much more efficient in that typically on a snowmobile, two to five miles and you'll cross a track. The issue with tracks is under certain conditions, it's easy to confuse one species with another. Tracks may be several weeks old, they may be melted out, they may have fresh snow on top of them. We drive around until we find tracks that look right in terms of the size of the individual prints, the gate and the stride length and those sorts of things. But we investigate further. This track had kind of the pattern or the spacing that I've seen often before. Since it's underneath a lot of fresh snow, I'm going to dig up around one of the divots and try to get underneath the compaction zone where the foot of the links actually pushes into the snow. So I'm just kind of tossing all the fragile snow. You can see the track inside and then you can see the classic shape here and because of that it's starting to look pretty good as the links track. So now Doug has dug up this compression signature, we're pretty sure this is a set of links tracks that we're on. So the next thing is we want to get an EDNA sample. In the EDNA, it stands for environmental DNA, as it walks through the snow, there are skin cells that it left in the prints as it was walking. And so what we want to try to do is collect some of those skin cells so that we can send them off to the lab and confirm that this is in fact a links track and that there's links here still in this sample unit. We need to dig down through the fresh snow to get down to the point here where the foot actually was touching the snow and that's where we want to sample and fill up our sampling bags. EDNA is a new technology, it's been around for a handful of years, only been two or three years I think they've been using it in snow. It's pretty cool technology but it only gets us down to the level of species. So there isn't a lot of genetic material to work with just like I say a few skin cells that are sloughed off in each print. But it can tell us if this is a links or not, confirm that it is. We started on the project in 2004 so it's been kind of nice to continue to see links tracks at this very moment. It's exciting to be part of this still and exciting that the links are here. Conservation of a species like links is pretty complicated. There's a lot of moving parts. How you manage the forest influences what happens with the hair world and what happens in the hair world then influences what happens with links. It's such a cool species to work with. Canada links is something you see on National Geographic so when you actually get the opportunity to work on a project like that it's pretty cool to play any kind of a role especially when it turns out to be a successful program to reestablish a species where it was extirpated and to do it in a way that I think most of the folks in our agency and the general public in Colorado is sort of proud of the fact that links are back here on the landscape.