Lynx

Brush ears and a stumpy tail lend the lynx an unmistakable look. Light-sensitive eyes and a fine sense of hearing enable hunting even at dusk and at night. The lynx recognises a hare at a distance of about 300 metres and a deer at a distance of about 500 metres. With its large, snowshoe-like paws, it hardly sinks into the ground, even when the snow cover is thick. Roe deer are the lynx’s main prey, but it rarely kills sheep on pasture land. The daily food requirement is around 1 - 1.5 kilograms of meat. As a solitary animal, this shy forest dweller needs a territory of around 100 square kilometres. Only during the mating season, at the end of February, do the animals come together. Then you can hear the cat’s territorial noises – even in the Alpenzoo. At the beginning of the 20th century, the lynx was completely extinct in the Alpine region. Following reintroduction efforts in Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria from 1970 onwards, around 130 lynxes now live in the Alps again.