The quest to catch Cairngorms’ mysterious lynx

This curious tale began on Wednesday night.

Police Scotland posted on social media a warning that two lynx had been spotted near Kingussie, a town of roughly 1,400 people, south of Aviemore.

The public were asked not to approach the animals if they encountered them.

A search was launched involving Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) keepers from the nearby Highland Wildlife Park.

They were faced with a few challenges.

The Cairngorms National Park is the UK’s biggest national park, sprawling across 1,748 sq miles and includes parts of five local authorities – Aberdeenshire, Angus, Highland, Moray and Perth and Kinross.

To put that in perspective, the Lake District National Park is about 912 sq miles, while the country of Luxembourg is less than 1,000.

It is a place of farms, crofts, forests and rugged hills, vast upland moors and mountains but few people. About 18,000 in total call the park home.

The cats were spotted near RSPB Scotland’s Insh Marshes reserve, an area of wetlands and woods on the fringes of some of the Cairngorms’ highest mountains.

It is also the depth of winter and it has been snowing – a lot – in the Scottish Highlands these past few weeks.

Then there are lynx themselves.

WWF describes them as solitary, elusive and nocturnal, external and rarely spotted by humans.