Colorado lynx numbers unknown as feds launch first review

Fifteen years after granting lynx endangered species protection, federal wildlife officials are launching a first review to find out how these elusive, quick-pawed predators are faring. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists say they'll rely on insights from Colorado, where state crews transplanted 218 lynx from Canada into the Rocky Mountains. But Colorado stopped monitoring lynx after 2010 and today cannot say whether they are thriving or on the slide. Colorado Parks and Wildlife "hasn't done any monitoring that would provide information one way or another on how lynx are doing," agency spokesman Joe Lewandow ski said in response to Denver Post queries. "There's no way to make an estimate. Radio collars, which gave biologists a way to monitor individual animals, died long ago." Colorado biologists do believe, however, that the mountains here can sustain a lynx population, he said...more