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Lynx life near the Haul Road

Located 60 miles above the Arctic Circle, Coldfoot is a busy truck stop on Alaska’s Dalton Highway. Step off the gravel pad, which underlies a year-round population of 34, and you’ll head into several hundred miles of dense boreal forest and the mountain tundra of the Brooks Range.

It’s midsummer and peak travel time on the Dalton, Alaska’s only road to the Arctic Ocean. Large trucks of many types haul freight, fuel, machinery and other supplies to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, and passenger vehicles haul tourists hoping for muskoxen.

From the edge of the Coldfoot truck stop, a pair of yellow eyes in a softly severe, silver face looks out from dense willows and alders. They curiously and calmly take in the people coming and going from their vehicles, tapping on phones, ripping open candy bars, taking selfies.

The eyes belong to Alaska’s only native wild cat, the Canada lynx. She quietly turns away from the parking lot, exposing a leather collar with a GPS transmitter. Her kittens are not quite old enough to accompany her on hunting trips, so she heads back alone towards her den in the hills, a shallow scrape of dirt under a willow bush. The collar identifies her as F700529, but she has a nickname — Lucy.

Lucy is one of more than 50 lynx tracked by Knut Kielland, a professor at the University of Alaska �Ļ�ӰԺ’ Institute of Arctic Biology. Together with his graduate student Emily Wieser, UAF wildlife biologist Ophelie Couriot and collaborators at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he hopes to answer questions about lynx resiliency to human disturbance along the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk and Dietrich rivers, which flow near the Dalton.

Understanding how lynx respond to Dalton traffic is now of particular interest. Trucks servicing ConocoPhillips’ Nuna and Willow oil development projects will use the highway year-round as their main artery, and if the proposed Ambler Mining Project is approved, vehicles supporting mining operations will also use the Dalton.

Lucy and generations of lynx before her have lived, died and raised families alongside the pipeline’s “Haul Road.” After workers built 390 miles of highway between April and September 1974, others began constructing the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline. At its peak in 1977, the Coldfoot-Wiseman stretch of highway felt the passage of more than 450 large trucks each day. After a sharp decline in the 1980s, truck traffic has remained steady over the past 40 years, though passenger vehicle traffic has steadily increased since the highway opened to the public in 1994.

How have lynx like Lucy responded to road construction and use? Until recently, it’s been difficult to measure. In environmental impact statements they prepared for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., contractors focused on how large mammals — caribou, moose, bears — might be impacted by the pipeline. Lynx were not a focus of environmental assessment during litigation and construction, so little pre-pipeline information is available.

Enter Kielland and GPS collars, which he started buckling onto Coldfoot-Wiseman lynx in 2017. Kielland’s collars capture location six times a day, which gives an unprecedented picture of lynx behavior and movement in the area.

The lynx resiliency project is only a year old — too early for conclusions. However, based on recent research led by former UAF graduate students Akashia Martinez-Dragomir and Matt Kynoch, Kielland predicts that lynx, whose personalities differ just like yours and mine, will respond in various ways to the expected increase in traffic volume. 

Martinez-Dragomir found that female lynx’s response will be mostly influenced by whether or not they raise kittens — denning mothers will stay closer to their dens, while kitten-less females may roam more broadly. Kynoch saw that lynx are most active during twilight, which coincides with but may not be caused by quieter Dalton traffic. Individual differences in lynx behavior may augment or mask any traffic-volume effect, so more GPS data are needed to suss out general patterns.

As Lucy slips back to her shallow den on a quiet hillside, Kielland and his collaborators track her from their �Ļ�ӰԺ offices, watching how this cryptic cat moves as trucks in increasing numbers continue to rumble their way north.

Since the late 1970s, the �Ļ�ӰԺ' Geophysical Institute has provided the Alaska Science Forum column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Sara Wilbur is a communications coordinator for the Geophysical Institute public information office.