Lots of folks know about the continuing success of Colorado's lynx recovery effort . . . every year, we learn that more lynx are roaming our high mountain forests and more wild lynx babies are being born.  However, we haven't heard much about lynx moving across state lines.

We know they are crossing into New Mexico (relying heavily on an area that will be devastated if the proposed 10,000 person city is constructed near Wolf Creek Pass), we know at least one pair denned in southern Wyoming, and we periodically learn of individual lynx traveling long distances into other nearby states.  Earlier this week we got one such report:  two individual lynx found in Utah, trapped, and sent back home to Colorado.  One was found at the north end of the Book Cliffs in eastern Utah, and the other not too far north of Cedar City (in the Mineral Mountains near Beaver, Utah), way over the in western part of the state.

As we near the end of 2006, Colorado's lynx recovery effort remains one of our most exciting successes.  To date, the Colorado Division of Wildlife has released 218 lynx into southwestern Colorado since the state kicked off the program in 1999 with more than 100 lynx kittens born in the wild.  Even more exciting, this year we witnessed the birth of the first second generation wild lynx since the program began.  In other words, some of the lynx reintroduced into Colorado gave birth to kittens that grew up and just had their own kittens.  This is an incredibly important milestone in the recovery program.

The only major missing piece is habitat protection.  The state has been lukewarm to the idea, often not even mentioning that habitat protection is critical to the long-term recovery of the lynx.  The federal government has been even less friendly to the idea, entirely excluding the Southern Rockies region from its proposed critical habitat designation, refusing to finalize a regional lynx conservation plan, and continuing to approve extremely destructive projects in key lynx habitat.  The feds have even so far refused to adopt a recovery plan for the lynx, so we still don't have a road map to recovery (a problem even the state legislature weighed in on).  We are on the right track, and the Colorado Division of Wildlife has done a terrific job, but if we want our grandkids to enjoy sharing our mountains with a recovered lynx population, the feds and the state need to step up and make habitat protection a priority.