Where The Wild Things Are

For his doctoral thesis, Delibes analyzed no fewer than 1,500 samples of lynx excrement over two years, finding that rabbits make up 80% their diet. But it was a frustrating six months before he saw one. "I was climbing a cork tree to inspect an eagle's nest when I was stunned to see a lynx asleep on a branch," he recalls. "I held my breath and backed down, stopping to watch about 6 m away, slowly raising my binoculars. Now and then the animal flicked its ears to shoo flies. Later it woke, urinated on the branch, rather clumsily descended. When it saw me it immediately transformed itself from somnolent cat into wild animal, agile, strong, capable of disappearing in three spectacular leaps."

Decades later in 2003, Delibes head-hunted Astrid Vargas as the one person who might save the lynx. "Imagine Europe, which goes on about protecting the Amazon or the Philippines forests, having just one native feline and it being the only one to become extinct in 5,000 years."

From Seville to the Atlantic and Doñana there are two routes. The slow way is by boat down the Guadalquivir, or Big River in the language of the Arabs who ruled this part of the world for centuries. Having less time than the conquistadores, I took the A4 motorway, which conquers the distance in 1½ hours, leaving it to arrive at the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the opposite bank to the national park. On the way the A4 skirts Jerez de la Frontera, a city with two apparently incompatible claims to fame: it's the home of sherry, and of a motorcycle grand prix circuit that draws more than 125,000 leatherjackets on race days.

The legal visitor must cross from Sanlúcar on a barge, and wait for Robles to arrive on the beach in one of the dark green four-wheel drives of the Doñana Biological Station. He enjoys showing off the park his family has loved for four generations. "We almost think it's ours," he grins. After stopping to deflate the tires so we have more traction, we cross high dunes that blow back over low pines, which with time magically re-establish once the dunes shift. Around the park's many lagoons, flamingos feed; wild boars snuffle among deer, horses and cows. Endangered horses and cows, of course. The stocky Retuertas horses are much like the quarter-milers that race in the U.S. — not surprisingly, because their forebears traveled with the conquistadores. The 100 or so Mostrenca cattle had a similar export effect, their huge headgear showing they parented the longhorns driven across the American West.

Above all, however, Doñana means birds. From the loud Atlantic to the silent lowlands that fan to the horizon, wings are beating, voices call and sing. The names to scan the sky for are as endless as they are poetic: red-throated divers, great crested grebes, fulmars, petrels, snipe, avocets, curlew, 12 types of tern, seven magnificent owls, 22 varieties of warblers, 10 of larks, their only competitors in song the ruiseñores, or nightingales. Bitterns, herons, egrets, ibis, spoonbills — the Spanish call them espátulas — lesser yellowlegs, crates, coots, cranes … The prettiest and most plentiful we see are the abejarucos, or European bee-eaters, their turquoise, beige, bluish wings aglint in the light bouncing off the pale ground. Overlording it all, eagles cruise on currents, their eyesight around four times as sharp as ours.

At Doña Ana Palace, the deputy director of the biological station, José Juan Chans, welcomes us. The palace is not really palatial, just a huge, handsome building, part still privately owned, part used by the biological station. Its courtyard is filled with palms, plus tubs of bonsai grown by former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González, who came here to escape politics most years during his nearly 14 in power up to 1996. In the entrance hall is the mounted head of a gamo, a beautiful species of deer. Legend has it that Valverde shot it. When he went to recover the animal he heard its death cries, and never hunted again.

Over lunch in the palace dining room, during which he takes a mobile call to discuss dung beetles, Chans explains that the park has somehow survived endless attacks on its integrity. Apart from centuries of wetland drainage by encroaching farmers, proposed schemes for a road along the Atlantic coast, or the Aznalcóllar catastrophe, the government of dictator Francisco Franco once decided to expropriate 16,000 hectares and plant eucalyptus. The plan fizzled, although some giant gums stand over the palace entrance. "We can't cut those ones down," says Chans. "An endangered species of bat has decided to live in them."

Chans short-circuits media minders and rings Astrid Vargas, smooth talking her into meeting us in the beach town of Matalascañas, encircled by the park. She arrives on her bicycle, which has a seat where she puts her 2-year-old son when she's not species saving. Before coming to Doñana, Vargas, 40, Puerto Rican-born, with U.S. and Spanish passports, already had a feather in her cap. Or rather a ferret. In Wyoming she helped save the native black-footed ferret when some 10 of them remained. Thousands have since been bred in captivity.

WAYNE CHASAN / GETTY IMAGES FOR TIME

BUENA VISTA TIME's Usher takes in the view

To take on the lynx, she negotiated the right to choose her five-member team, a €360,000 budget over two years (including state-of- the-art camera surveillance), and annual running costs of €105,000. Within the 550-sq-m fenced area, with its own pond, she placed three males and three females. The team has a clever system to weigh the females using scales buried in a narrow corridor they walk. A borrowed X-ray machine was hidden at the same spot. Eventually it confirmed that Saliega, who had mated with one Garfio, was in the family way.

Lynx typically have up to four cubs. Vargas explains there is a 70% likelihood cubs No. 3 and 4 will die. Her idea is to take some of these vulnerable ones from the wild. "The target is to create a genetically healthy breeding stock of 60 animals and by 2010 have an annual surplus of 13-15 to release into the wild." Assuming there is a wild for them, meaning that enough rabbits survive myxomatosis and viral hemorrhagic disease; and that governments, farmers, hunters, motorists (two lynx have been killed by cars so far this year) and society in general assume the challenge of the project.

Vargas says there is a 50% chance a captive first-time feline mother will eat or abandon her litter. "It's very much stress-related," she says. The team kept its distance, asking the park guards to silence any unusual noise when Saliega looked to be due. Sixty-four days after conception, she delivered. "You could tell she was a perfect mom from the beginning," says Vargas. "She was cleaning the first cub even as she was birthing the second."

Only keeper Juana Bergara was allowed near the enclosure to begin with, and Vargas waited 22 days to sex the cubs. The team members were clearly still euphoric when we visited their headquarters and watched on the closed-circuit system the three cubs roughhousing inside the den, Saliega looking on like any tired mother. It was only two days later that this cat play got out of hand and led to the death of Brezina and bruises on her brother Brezo. Depression and nerves all round.

In the Palace of Doña Ana at night, birds talk late in the trees; deer, hares or boars lurch out of the scrub if spooked. One likes to think the park's venomous vipers are curled in sleep. In the downstairs kitchen, Diana, a university student from Portugal, is playing jigs on her violin for Jörg, a German scholar who's about to leave the park. Another German and an Italian join biological station staff in beer and applause. When the last of them finally go to bed, a nightingale takes over in the tall trees outside the austere but comfortable bedroom. Lying awake listening to it thread its song, you imagine the two Doña Anas, royal and commoner, had their ears similarly regaled more than 400 years ago. Toward dawn it's necessary to turn on the light, stand on the bed to aim, and hurl the pillow at the high ceiling. Whump! One mosquito less. Sorry, Tono.

As the sun is breasting the horizon, we are 32 m and 96 dew-slippery steps up the fire spotter's tower a short walk from the palace. Doñana is wreathed in mist, a few early eagles, cranes and storks getting their day under way, deer delicately breakfasting in the shrouded bushes. The space, silence and unmolested creatures bring to mind a line from Miguel Delibes Sr. In his prologue to a 1977 book on Doñana by Seville-born poet and essayist Aquilino Duque, Delibes wrote: "Doñana is the only place in Spain where one enters in the knowledge that here there is nothing to buy."

Some things remain priceless. Some priceless things remain.

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