Thirty-three records since 2000 is the whole of Washington’s Canada lynx file, and 18 of them come from Okanogan County. This is the state’s rarest wild cat, an animal of the high, snowy country along the Canadian border, with the Pasayten Wilderness holding more records than any other named place.
Built for deep snow and snowshoe hares
The lynx is a specialist nearly to a fault: oversized feet that work like snowshoes, long legs for moving over drifts, and a diet dominated by snowshoe hares. That package ties it to cold, high-elevation lodgepole and spruce-fir forest where snow lies deep for months, the kind of country the Pasayten and the Glacier Peak Wilderness still hold and almost nowhere else in the state does.
A winter signature in the snow
Records crest in December and drop to zero in June, not because the cats come and go but because winter is when a lynx advertises itself. Tracks read plainly on fresh snow, and an animal that is a ghost in July becomes a line of prints in January. Even so, almost no one sees a lynx in Washington; most of what is known of them here comes from tracks, cameras, and winter survey work.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the Canada lynx S1, Critically Imperiled, in Washington, and the species is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act across the contiguous United States. It is native to the state, with its Washington stronghold in the Okanogan highlands and the North Cascades.
Full species profile
