A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
lynx
A lynx is a medium-sized wild cat with a short tail, tufted ears, a ruff of fur along the jaw, and very large feet. The Canada lynx is the specialist: Its feet are enormous for its weight and spread like snowshoes, and it lives almost entirely on snowshoe hare, to the point that its population rises and falls on a roughly ten-year cycle tracking the hare’s. Four species range across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Etymology
The word is Greek and Latin and is generally taken to be built on a root meaning light or brightness, referring to the animal’s eyes. The Greeks credited the lynx with exceptionally sharp sight, which is where lynx-eyed comes from, and the Academy of the Lynxes, founded in Rome in 1603 and the first scientific society of its kind, took the animal as its emblem for exactly that reason. Galileo was a member.
Notes
The hare-and-lynx cycle is one of the classic datasets in ecology, reconstructed from nearly two centuries of Hudson’s Bay Company fur records, and it appears in every textbook as the standard example of a predator and prey oscillating together. The ear tufts, as with the caracal, remain unexplained, and the same proposals apply.