The Concord Lynx

September 13.

It is remarkable how slow people are to believe that there are any wild animals in their neighborhood. They who have seen this generally suppose that it got out of a menagerie; others that it strayed down from far north. They call it Canada lynx.

I do not think it necessary even to suppose it a straggler, but only very rare hereabouts. They are nocturnal in their habits, and therefore are the more rarely seen, yet a strange animal is seen in this town by somebody about every year, or its track. I have heard of two or three such within a year, and of half a dozen within fifteen years.

I have seen two lynxes that were killed between here and Salem since '27. Have heard of another killed in or near Andover. Dr. Reynolds tells me of a lynx killed in Andover, in a swamp near Haggerty's Pond, one winter when he kept school in Tewksbury, about 1820. Rice tells of a common wildcat killed in Sudbury some forty years ago, resting on some ice as it was crossing the Sudbury meadows amid ice and water. Boutivell of Groton tells me that a lynx was killed in Dunstable within two or three years.

This makes five that I have heard of (and seen three) killed within some fifteen or eighteen miles of Concord within thirty years past.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 13, 1860

They call it Canada lynx. See February 15, 1858 ("Saw, at a menagerie, a Canada lynx, said to have been taken at the White Mountains."); October 17, 1860 ("While the man that killed my lynx (and many others) thinks it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the Canada lynx, and at the White Mountains they call it the Siberian lynx, - in each case forgetting, or ignoring ,that it belongs here, - I call it the Concord lynx.")

On March 24, 2000, the contiguous United States population of the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.