Aside from some cool theropods small and larger, the Wildpark Tambach has lots of mammals on show. Not on shows, though. Obviously, typical Central European large ruminants, specifically cervids, supplemented by a species originally restricted to Southern Europe and the Near East by the last ice age, but re-introduced by the Romans. Pics of them to come – but these are not today’s topic. Rather, an avid devourer of avians is.
Good things come to her who waits. Bonnie is a female Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx), and both her and her partner Clyde(yeah, don’t get me started) currently have four young, but I couldn’t get any glimpse of them.
Here, you can see Bonnie fixating the keeper who was giving the short public lecture, as the keeper was feeding the lynxes newborn theropods, a standard dish. Male chicks of egg-laying breeds are not useful to the breeders, as they will never lay eggs but can’t be raised for meat either – wrong breed, after all. So they get sold cheap as chow to zoos.
YUMMY! Bonnie had another chicken. Bonnie happy!
Lynx are surprisingly lightweight. Bonnie weighs, IIRC, some 15 kg, and looks rather starved. But then, that’s how she should look while raising babies and before she has fattened up before winter.
Clyde shows a curious behaviour: instead of killing his young a while after birth, he actually cares for them! That’s unusual among lynxes, who are total loners. For the Wildpark this means less bother, as they do not have to separate him from his mate and the young.
In all, a fascinating animal! Many zoos have lynxes, but most show Canadian or Iberian ones, so I was very glad to see Eurasian ones. And the keeper did a great job of explaining the animals and how they are kept. The only bad thing was an idiot women who let her dog salivate onto our stroller for the second time that day and thought this utterly normal. It’s her fault I didn’t get more photos out of this great opportunity.
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If you ever come to NY, there are Eurasian Lynx at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse. That’s where I found out that they sometimes hunt in a true cooperative manner.
oh I would love to see that! 🙂
“Many zoos have lynxes, but most show Canadian or Iberian ones, so I was very glad to see Eurasian ones.”
You have got to be joking :p the situation is in fact very much the reverse – almost all the lynx kept in European collections belong to the Eurasian species, usually the Northern (L.l.lynx) or Carpathian (L. l.carpathicus) subspecies whenever a pure race is held. In total 388 collections in Europe hold some variety of Lynx lynx.
I believe there are only 6 collections currently holding Canada Lynx (Lynx canadensis), all but one of which are in the Czech Republic, and only a single collection – Jerez in Spain – holds Iberian Lynx (Lynx pardinus)!
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