Lynx kittens spotted in Voyageurs for first time in years

A pair of lynx kittens was spotted in Voyageurs National Park for the first time in years. The two young cats, with gangly legs and oversized padded front paws, were seen on a trail camera bounding down a deer path as their mother sat ahead and waited.

The finding is a hopeful sign that the rare and threatened cats are still finding enough prey and habitat to reproduce in pockets of Minnesota at the southern fringe of their range.

“It’s just not a common thing,” said Tom Gable, a wolf researcher with the University of Minnesota who captured the footage as part of the longstanding Voyageurs Wolf Project. It was taken in September 2025, but only discovered recently as the wolf researchers reviewed months of video from hundreds of trail cameras.

There are only 200 or so lynx estimated to be living in Minnesota. Adult cats are spotted around the park relatively frequently, but they are almost always transitory and alone, likely passing through in search of better prey and breeding grounds.

Kitten sightings are rare and special. They show that those individual lynx, at least, are trying to stay.

Biologists with Voyageurs National Park and the U.S. Forest Service have led several studies since the year 2000 that all failed to find hard evidence of any lynx kittens in or near the park. Those studies all concluded that snowshoe hare, the main prey of lynx, were generally too scarce to support much of a permanent population.

After the latest study in 2015, the park concluded that there were “currently no resident lynx.”

The Voyageurs Wolf Project, which is funded with lottery revenue through the state’s Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, has a network of roughly 400 cameras it uses to track dozens of wolves. Those cameras have also been capturing the behavior of everything from beavers to moose, from the spawning runs of white suckers to the lazy lopes of black bears waking up from hibernation.

Outside the park, lynx numbers in Superior National Forest had been ticking upward for the last several years as part of the species’ natural ebb and flow.

The big cats are built for deep snow, with their wide paws allowing them to glide over it. They’ll eat squirrel or any small mammals they can get a hold of, but the vast majority of their diet is the snowshoe hare.

Snowshoe hare populations, much like ruffed grouse and whitefish, are cyclical and traditionally boom and bust every seven to 10 years. Minnesota’s lynx numbers typically follow, said John Erb, a research biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Over the last couple decades those booms have become far more muted, Erb said. Hare populations haven’t been swinging upward as much.

Lynx populations, too, have become less predictable. That’s often the case for cyclical species at the very edge of their range, Erb said.

As Minnesota’s winters have gotten warmer and milder, the habitat for hare and lynx isn’t as strong as it once was. That has allowed for other predators, including coyotes, foxes, bobcats and fishers, to expand in lynx territory, Erb said.

As the footage shows, lynx are still finding space to exist.