The female's gestations period is approximately 9 weeks and the litters may produce 1-5 kittens. In leaner years young females will not breed until the second year and will have smaller litters. The kittens are altricial, born with their eyes closed and covered with a fluffy natal coat for their first eight weeks. Kittens remain with their mother through the first winter as she teaches the needed hunting skills through elaborate games of stalk and pounce. Although lynx prefer the climax boreal forest with dense undercover thickets, during times of starvation they will venture onto the tundra and beyond treeline in search of food such as mice, birds, squirrels and even Dall sheep and caribou in extreme situations.
Lynx can actually swim quite well but they eat very little fish, except for the occasional salmon.
They remain active all winter except during the severest weather when they simply bed down in the snow and take advantage of the insulation. Perhaps because of the cold taiga they inhabit, lynx have a poor sense of smell. At deeply cold temperatures little scent is transmitted, so the adaptive necessity for a highly developed sense of smell did not prevail. With the abundance of hare this past winter, the woods and willow patches were a busy stage as the lynx and snowshoe hare played out their intricately interwoven lives. As the hare population heads towards a crash the lynx will turn to other sources for survival, but a decline in their population also is inevitable.