Apple is a creature of habit and, if past is prologue, the company likely will soon seed OS X 10.9 Lynx for developer beta testing. How do we know? Well, in addition to the fact that the first OS X Lion (2011) and Mountain Lion (2012) betas shipped to devs in February, recent days have seen an uptick in OS X 10.9 sightings in at least one website’s stat logs.

The company that Steve Jobs built, and Tim Cook now runs, is infamous for secrecy and often the best way to get an idea of what’s coming next involves studying lines of code deep inside products and, as in this case, esoteric website statistics.

AppleInsider is reporting that the number of people visiting their site and running OS X 10.9 have shot up in recent weeks.

“Traffic logs for AppleInsider show that visits from machines claiming to be running an unannounced OS X 10.9 spiked in the month of January,” writes correspondent Neil Hughes.

Yes, machines claiming — it’s fairly easy to fake — to be powered by OS X 10.9 have been showing up in website stat logs since October 2012, traffic is definitely on the rise.

Tapscape first reported whispers of OS X 10.9 back in November. It is believed that it will marketed as OS X 10.9 Lynx (kitteh!).

Looking forward to Apple’s next big cat? What features would you like to see?