- The recovery of the Iberian lynx is one of the world’s greatest conservation comebacks. In October 2023, The European Nature Trust’s Jacob Dykes staff member visited eco-partners at CBD-Habitat Foundation, an organisation that has played a key role in Spain’s Iberian lynx preservation
The European Nature Trust / Staff / London (UK)
Images courtesy of: Fundación CBD-Hábitat, Finca El Encinarejo
Under an azure sky in the Toledo district, just 30-minutes trainride from Madrid, the scent of petrichor from the Mediterranean forest hits the nose. As red kites leap from oak to oak, Samuel Pla, senior technician at CBD-Habitat foundation, slows the car engine to a halt and winds down the window. He strains to hear the sharp, piercing sound of a magpie’s call – ‘it’s an alarm sound, you hear it?’ he says. ‘We’re close now to the lynx’.
For an hour this afternoon, we had been tracking wild Iberian lynx using a telemetry antenna which picks up the location and distance of radio-collared lynxes – an activity that CBD-Habitat use to monitor the growth and distribution of Spain’s recovering population. The blue flash of the magpie’s wings drops past an oak tree on the Mediterranean savanna, and for a brief moment, it cuts past the silhouette of a cat-like shape, hard to pick out as night creeps forth. ‘Tres linces!’ whispers Nuria El Khadir, director of CBD-Habitat. With all this tracking equipment, it was the humble magpie, nature’s sentry, that pointed out the lynx to us. And not just one, but three – a mother with two cubs.
Pla pulls a thermal imaging scope from his bag and hands it to me. I can just make out three surprisingly large, spotted figures with the naked eye. With the imaging scope, they illuminate into a burning white, seen tracking a big group of rabbits a few hundred meters ahead.
It has been a difficult history for the iconic, endemic species: in the early 20th century, lynxes were intensely persecuted for hunting sport and the trade in its exotic fur. In the 1950s, a drastic decline in the abundance of wild rabbit – lynx’s main prey – brought about by an outbreak of myxomatosis, saw lynx numbers drop intensely. By the 1990s, the rabbit disease had swept across Europe, and when a new variant of Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease (RHD) emerged, lynx numbers spiralled to just 94 individuals isolated in two populations in Andújar and Doñana.
In 2023 alone, CBD-Hábitat have made significant achievements
- 150 lynx monitored, 61 of them radio collared
- 30 territorial females monitored, minimum of 72 cubs detected
- 39 roads evaluated for lynx safety
- More than 200 rabbits relocated from dangerous roadside areas
- More than 500 samples of Iberian lynx genetic data for genetic analysis
