The Canada lynx is an extraordinarily elusive creature. So elusive that it’s earned a nickname: the gray ghost. Most people will never see one in the wild, so when someone not only saw one in the wild but saw a black one in the wild… well, that’s just nuts.
Years ago, in a different life it seems, I was working in the absolute middle of nowhere in northern Alberta, Canada. I was sitting in the truck in the dead of winter, engine running and heat cranked, happily eating some kind of awful camp-food breakfast wrap as my fingers thawed. My gloves were on the dashboard, steaming the windshield as they warmed. The temperature outside hovered around -30ºC (about-22ºF), and the sun was still early in the sky. When the air is that cold and the sun’s out, you get this incredible phenomenon where the tiny amount of moisture in the air freezes and floats around on the wind, grabbing the sunlight as it goes. Diamond dust, I’ve heard it called. The snow on the ground was untracked, aside from the right-of-way I was sitting on, and I was semi-dozing off with food still in my mouth. It wasn’t rare to see animals out there — caribou, moose, etcetera — so when something moved out of the corner of my eye, I didn’t think much of it.
Then, slowly, slinkily, a little cat walked out in front of the truck, eyeing both ways, shoulders rolling, those telltale little tufts of fur standing on perked up ears and bushy black tail flicking back and forth like a snake’s tongue, as though it was tasting the air. I leaned forward to wipe the condensation off the windshield, and I swear to God, the lynx simply vanished into thin air. It was there one second and gone the next, but I’m very glad that I got to lay eyes on a real lynx doing its thing on that freezing, beautiful morning. That lynx, as they generally are, was a boring ol’ grey.
Black is not a good color for a lynx. They spend a lot of time in snowy zones and have evolved a few specialized attributes that help it do its things. In the spring and summer, they’re a reddish-brown, but in the winter, they turn into that silvery gray. It helps them blend into their background, which is usually snow. The black lynx was spotted in a residential area in Whitehorse, Yukon, up in Northern Canada, and although it was thought at first that it might be a bobcat, researchers have looked at the footage and confirmed it is indeed the first black lynx ever caught on camera.
Filmed on August 29, 2020, the footage was taken by Thomas Jung, a researcher at the University of Alberta. Weirdly, the animal doesn’t seem to be disturbed by Jung, or a dog barking nearby.
Coat color variations are of enduring interest to researchers. The changes can be either adaptive or maladaptive, and coat color in lynx is generally pretty stable. There is little variation within the species, although there have been a few examples of partial albinism — which could be seen as an adaptive variation. Although the melanistic lynx in the clip was spotted in the summer, it’s likely that its color variation won’t be of much help.
“It had a black coat containing whitish gray guard hairs throughout, as well as whitish gray hairs in the facial ruff and the rostrum and dorsal regions,” Jung wrote in the journal Mammalia. “There are only a small number of records of coat color polymorphisms in the genus Lynx. The adaptive significance of melanism in lynx is unknown, but the loss of camouflage when hunting during winter is likely maladaptive.”
