**1. Introduction**

The impacts of large carnivore predation on wild ungulate populations has received much research focus and considerable effort has been spent on quantifying predation rates as a function of prey density (i.e., functional responses, [1]) as these are regarded as key parameters to model predator impacts [2,3]. While functional responses may be crucial for some solitary species feeding on small prey and for social carnivores where group size allows rapid consumption of even large prey, there may be some predator–prey systems where other predation parameters are equally important. For example, large solitary felids routinely kill large ungulate prey equal to, or several times heavier than, their body weight that can potentially provide food for multiple days [4–7]. For such species handling and consumption time are likely to exceed search and killing time [8,9]. Any factor affecting their ability to consume a kill completely could result in an increased kill rate.

An ungulate carcass represents a very attractive resource to a range of vertebrate and invertebrate scavengers [10–15]. The effect of such scavenging and kleptoparasitic loss of kills is believed to be an important driver of kill rates [16], energetics [17,18], and potentially even sociality [19]. The issue has been widely explored for group hunting canid species, and has been reported for solitary felid species such as cheetah (*Acinonyx jubatus*) [20] and mountain lion (*Puma concolor*) [21]. Solitary felids are believed to use a range of behaviors, including covering the kill with snow and/or vegetation as an anti-scavenging/anti-kleptoparasitic caching strategy [22,23]. In the Bavarian forest (Germany), invertebrates were the most important scavengers of simulated kills in both summer and winter [13].

Eurasian lynx (*Lynx lynx*) in Central and Northern Europe, in contrast to their congeneric species and Eurasian lynx in Turkey, feeding mostly on smaller prey such as brown hares [24], have the ecology of far larger felids, mainly feeding on roe deer (*Capreolus capreolus*), which are 50–100% heavier than an adult lynx [6]. They normally feed on roe deer kills for periods of 2–7 days [8]. Vegetation and snow are used to cover kills during this period. We aimed to quantify the anti-scavenging effect of this covering behavior through three approaches. Firstly, we present observational data based on investigations of lynx-killed roe deer. Secondly, we present results from deer carcasses that were experimentally placed in the forest and video-monitored to determine the discovery time by vertebrate scavengers. Thirdly, we present the result of an experiment that recorded the rate at which invertebrate scavengers consumed carcass parts that were not accessible to vertebrate scavengers. In all cases, we compared discovery/consumption rates of carcasses that were covered with vegetation in the manner that lynx use, or left uncovered.
