Missing Lynx

• Share

After a narrow escape from death, the future looked bright for Baba, a young Iberian lynx in the Coto Doñana National Park in southwest Spain. Last April, he was rescued from an illegal poacher's trap and nursed back to health, despite badly injured feet and legs. Then in July, he was released into the wild, outfitted with a radio collar to monitor his movements. But just weeks later, the radio signals stopped. A local park warden believes that Baba was killed, probably by a hunter keen for such a rare trophy.

For centuries, the Iberian lynx has been an exotic part of the region's ecosystem. But now a deadly combination of habitat destruction and lack of food threatens the big cats' survival. Earlier this month, the World Conservation Union (I.U.C.N.) upgraded the lynx's status to critically endangered on its

G O O D   N E W S NOT DEAD YET From the gloom of this year's I.U.C.N. Red List of Threatened Species emerges one point of light: the Bavarian pine vole. Previously declared to be extinct, this humble rodent is in fact alive and well and living — not in Bavaria as you'd expect, but in Northern Tyrol. (The Lord Howe Island stick insect, last seen on its Australian island home in 1920, is the only other species to have been rediscovered after being classified as extinct.) The pine vole hadn't been spotted since 1962 but two years ago, a group of the rodents popped up across the border in Austria. Aside from the resurgent vole, there is little other happy news in the report — no other species has recovered sufficiently in Europe to be reclassified as less endangered, although some local recovery programs are having an effect. In the U.K., otters — once plentiful before being driven into smaller remote coastal areas — are returning to former habitats in greater numbers, thanks in part to cleaner rivers and the reduced use of pesticides. With so much dire environmental news these days, such glimmers of hope are worth celebrating — Hugh Porter

Red List of Threatened Species. With only an estimated 130 lynx left in Spain — about 30 in Doñana National Park, the rest in the mountains around Andujar — Miguel Delibes, head of the Doñana Biological Research Station in Seville, fears the yellow-eyed predator could be the first big cat to face extinction in more than 2,000 years.

Species on the brink of obliteration are so common that it is easy to be numb to such news. Indeed, the I.U.C.N. threatened-species list contains more than 11,000 endangered animals, birds and insects, 121 of which are new to the list since 2000. But not all the news is bad. In the last two years scientists have discovered at least two creatures once thought to be extinct that are now making a comeback. But the challenges facing the Iberian lynx are particularly dire.

One reason for the lynx's dramatic decline is starvation — the unintended consequence of a failed ecological intervention. Since the 1950s, Europe's rabbit population — the lynx's main food source — has twice been hit by debilitating diseases. Myxomatosis decimated the rabbits after a French doctor introduced it in the 1950s to prevent the animals from eating his crops; and viral hemorrhagic pneumonia did the same in the early 1980s when it arrived from Asia, probably via shipments of contaminated meat and infected live rabbits. Not much can be done to fend off such viruses; conservationists just have to wait until the rabbits develop immunity, as they did against myxomatosis. Now the lynx's habitat is becoming almost as scarce as its food supply. Over the past 50 years, Spain's areas of wood and scrubland have shrunk dramatically as a result of farming and development.

To give the lynx a fighting chance at survival, wardens at the Doñana National Park are mending fences to prevent the animals from venturing near roads and other inhabited areas where they might be shot or run over by cars — dozens of lynx are killed every year in road accidents. Park officials are also building tunnels so that the lynx don't have to cross roads to get from one area of the park to another. There are also plans to release more rabbits into the wild, to replenish the animals' food supply.

The best hope for the lynx is a captive breeding program, one of which may start soon in Doñana, where three female lynx await a suitable male. But these haven't proved successful in the past. "A national park is not a zoo," Delibes says. "The lynx are still wild animals who have to fend for themselves." To survive, though, they might need a little help from their friends.