David Hetherington

Author of The Lynx and Us

The UK’s leading expert on lynx, ecologist David is based in the Cairngorms National Park. His photo-illustrated book The Lynx and Us describes the cat’s lifeways and explores what it might be like for us to live alongside one another again.

“There are understandable gaps in people’s knowledge, because this animal hasn’t lived among us for centuries. People may not know that they are solitary, highly territorial and therefore very low density – far lower density than any other predators we’ve currently got in the landscape such as pine martens or foxes. Lynx are very shy, very wary of people. There’s no recorded attack of a healthy lynx on a human.

“Their main food is roe deer, which they kill from an ambush position, stalking one or two animals under cover of standing or fallen timber or understorey vegetation. That’s exactly how roe deer tend to occur in the landscape. I often hear people say, ‘why would a lynx chase a fast deer when it can go after a slow sheep?’. The lynx needs cover to launch a surprise

attack. A flock of sheep in an open field have many more eyes, noses and ears on the lookout for predators. So a lynx knows that it’s highly likely to be detected. It won’t chase a flock of animals around a field like a dog or wolf pack might.

“If you put sheep into a woodland, it’s much harder for them to act as a flock. They tend to occur singly or in small groups, replicating roe deer behaviour and the one place in Europe where there is a much bigger issue with sheep predation is Norway, where they graze sheep in woodlands. But scientists in Norway demonstrated that even if you have a lot of sheep in the woodland, if the roe deer density is relatively high (four per sq km), then the lynx are just not interested in killing sheep. We’ve got 10-50 deer per sq km.

“When a lynx kills a deer, it will eat its fill then leave the carcass on the forest floor and a whole variety of other organisms, from blowfly to eagles, will have a go at it. What isn’t scavenged by vertebrates or invertebrates will decompose and feed the soil.

“Lynx can kill wildcat and capercaillie but they are far more likely to kill foxes so could, arguably, benefit a couple of species that we’re particularly concerned about in Scotland, such as capercaillie. Problematic issues can arise, whether it is livestock predation, which does happen, or lynx competing with human hunters for the same deer. In a landscape with a dense road network you could end up with lynx getting killed on the road.

“I think the lynx is, for many people, the epitome of wild beauty, and increasingly people want to experience wild nature, so if the landscape has lynx living in it, it almost enhances the perception of the landscape as wild and beautiful.”