Journal Staff Report

The Colorado Wildlife Commission decided Thursday that up to 50 more Canada lynx will be released in the south San Juan Mountains this year.

The commission had given preliminary approval to the idea in September.

Although 15 of the 41 shy, bobcat-like predators released last winter are known to be dead and another 11 have not been tracked recently, the reintroduction is considered a success by biologists.

Predator-reintroduction efforts often have high mortalities, and Colorado’s lynx reintroduction has not had an unusual number of deaths by those standards, biologists say.

Lynx, which inhabit snowy, high-elevation forests, have been declining in the lower 48 states for decades. The last one seen in Colorado prior to the 1999 releases was clubbed to death in 1974 at the Vail Ski Area.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently delayed, for a second time, a decision about whether to list the species as threatened or endangered, and a coalition of environmental groups is planning to sue the agency.

The decision had been expected on Jan. 8.

Colorado’s reintroduction effort, which is being led by the Division of Wildlife, was begun as an attempt to forestall possible stringent land-use restrictions that would accompany a federal listing. State officials hoped that, if the state established a thriving lynx population before a federal listing, the Fish and Wildlife Service might declare Colorado’s lynx a biologically distinct population, meaning the state could continue to manage the lynx-recovery effort.

Five of the first lynx released last winter starved to death, but biologists then began keeping the animals in captivity longer to fatten them up, and no others have starved since. The lynx are trapped in Canada and Alaska, where their numbers are expected to start plummeting this year as part of a 10-year cycle tied to the population of snowshoe hares, their favorite prey.