Roadside compassion saves lynx’s life

Two Yukoners made a once-in-a-lifetime rescue recently, which left local wildlife experts shaking their heads in disbelief.

Two Yukoners made a once-in-a-lifetime rescue recently, which left local wildlife experts shaking their heads in disbelief.

It was around lunchtime on Friday, Nov. 27, and Heather Kaytor was driving down the Alaska Highway north of Whitehorse with her son Aaron.

Just this side of Haeckel Hill, she crested a rise in the road and saw a grey form lying in the centre of the opposite lane. As she drew nearer, she realized it was a lynx which had obviously been struck by a vehicle.

“Cars were swerving into my lane to avoid him, but no one was stopping,” Heather told the Star Monday. “I watched someone nearly run over him.”

Realizing that the lynx was likely to either cause a mishap on the narrow stretch of highway, or be killed, or both, Heather pulled over.

Her first plan was to simply drag the animal to the side of the road and call someone from the Department of Environment. But as she approached the cat, she was surprised to see that he didn’t hiss or display any aggression at all.

“He was trying to get up,” she said, “When I came up to him, he just looked at me and I realized he wasn’t going to lash out.”

Kaytor’s dog was hit by a car recently, and as she walked toward the lynx, she remembered how the dog had reacted when she tried to move him without supporting his injured back end.

So when she scooped the animal up, she made sure his rump was cradled in one of her arms, his two big paws resting on the other.

With her son’s help, she deposited the big cat in the back of her SUV.

“I told Aaron he was my eyes, that he had to watch and tell me if (the lynx) started getting it together. I told him, ‘If I pull over, you bail,’” she recalled.

But the lynx remained still, likely suffering from a major concussion according to Philip Merchant, head of Environment’s wildlife lab.

Merchant was just leaving his office for lunch when one of his co-workers informed him there was a woman in the parking lot who had picked a lynx up off the highway.

“I said, ‘Put it on the floor of the lab and I’ll tag it and freeze it when I get back,’” Merchant recalled with a laugh. “They said, ‘Uh, I think it’s alive.’”

A member of the public showing up at his office with a live lynx in the back of her vehicle was not something Merchant had seen before, and he was more than a bit incredulous.

“I opened the back of the vehicle and he was alive, all right.”

The animal allowed Merchant to pick him up and put him into a dog carrier, so he could be safely transported to the Yukon Wildlife Preserve north of Whitehorse.

“He was wide awake but very docile .... He was still stunned; there was no fight in him at all.”

At the preserve, Merchant and veterinarian Maria Hallock discussed doing an x-ray on the animal, now named Damage by Heather and Aaron, but ultimately decided to let him recover for a few hours.

“We would have had to sedate the animal, which comes with some risk, and even if you found something like a fractured skull, for instance, there wouldn’t be much you could do.”

So they put Damage in the quarantine shed and let nature take her course. When the young lynx was first found two Fridays ago, his eye was badly swollen and bloodied. Yesterday, he was in flawless form, his finely whiskered grey face showing no signs of injury.

He was also back to being a typical lynx.

“They are pretty stoic animals,” Merchant said of the felines. “They’re the owls of the mammal world, they don’t give an outward appearance of stress.”

He did, however, give a couple of warning growls when people got too close to the grill of his kennel.

Damage returned to the wild yesterday, accompanied by Heather, Aaron and a small fleet from the Department of Environment.

But when the door of his kennel was opened to the wilderness of Haeckel Hill, Damage didn’t budge.

For 10 minutes, seven humans stood waiting behind the lynx’s box, waiting for him to emerge, hoping he would do so slowly, maybe even take a moment to pose for the cameras.

Finally Merchant stepped toward the kennel and tipped Damage out. In four silent bounds, each more than three metres long, he was gone into the trees.

Heather comforted a very sad-looking Aaron, and reminded him Damage belong in the wild and it was thanks to him the lynx was still alive.

“We definitely don’t advocate anyone picking up a large- or medium-sized, or any carnivore for that matter,” Merchant said of the rescue.

“But that aside, it’s an example of what empathy people have for animals in distress.”