Newly born lynx cubs at the captive breeding center of the Donana National Park, southern Spain

Road signs throughout the vast Donana National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southwestern Spain, warn drivers to watch out for lynxes.

Less than 50 of the creatures are believed to roam the park’s 335 square kilometers of scrubland, forests and marshes, one of the two remaining pockets of Spain where the Iberian lynx is known to survive in the wild.

At the start of the 20th century there were around 100,000 in Spain and Portugal.

But urban development, hunting and, most of all, a dramatic decline due to disease in the number of wild rabbits, the lynx’s main prey, meant that barely 150 remained in the wild in 2002.

And the spotted cats, which can grow to about one meter long and weigh about 15 kilograms, were in danger of being the first feline species to become extinct since the saber-toothed tiger 10,000 years ago.

In a compound within the park, veterinarian Astrid Vargas has been running a captive breeding program for the past five and a half years to bring the Iberian lynx back from the brink of extinction - and with remarkable success.

Vargas, an American from Puerto Rico, began the program in December 2003 with five adults in Donana, four females and a male.

Last month, a total of 17 surviving cubs were born in captivity in Donana and in another breeding center in La Olivilla, in Jaen Province in south-central Spain, the most since the program began.

There are now 77 lynxes in captivity at the two centers run by Vargas and in the zoo in the southwestern city of Jerez.

Vargas, who also holds a PhD in conservation biology, said she has now reached her goal of 30 adult males and 30 adult females necessary to begin reintroducing the species to the wild.

“We are now two years ahead of schedule of the growth projections for the captive breeding program. The next big challenge is to prepare the captive-born animals for their survival in the wild,” she said.

The plan is to begin releasing a few animals next year into areas where they were at one time abundant.

In addition, in a separate but overlapping program, some of the lynxes in the wild are to be translocated to new areas later this year.

“The idea is to form a sort of rosary of sites where the animals have corridors that allow exchanges between populations,” said Vargas, while admitting this was near impossible due to urban development.

One species can help a whole ecosystem

Two more breeding centers are also planned, in southern Portugal and in western Spain’s Extremadura region, to cope with the growing numbers.

In Donana, the captive animals live in a fenced compound with 20 separate enclosures, where they are fed mostly rabbits, including live ones so the cubs can learn to hunt.

“We try to intervene as little as possible, except when they fight,” she said, noting that one of the first surviving set of cubs was killed in a fight with a sibling in 2005.

All the animals have names, the first letters of which correspond to the year in which they were born, from Adela and Aliaga in 2004 to Fresno and Fernandina this year. Their different personalities, from aggressive to calm, are also recorded on a chart on the wall.

The captive breeding program is just the start of a process that could take another 16 years and in which the Iberian lynx must pass from

being “critically endangered” - the highest category of risk for a wild animal under the International Union for Conservation of Nature - to “endangered” to “threatened.”

And Vargas explained that this is also just part of a wider project.

“Our ultimate very important goal is that we are not working on one single species, we are working on the protection of an endangered habitat, which is the Mediterranean forest and scrubland, and we are using the lynx as the ambassador.

“So we are investing in one animal for the well-being of a very important ecosystem that has been hammered for 20 years. It’s what is called an umbrella species, because by protecting one species we are protecting a whole area.”

Source: AFP