Saving the missing Iberian lynx
Ten years ago, there were barely 100 Iberian lynx left. But an innovative Spanish conservation programme is rescuing them from the edge of extinction It took a very short time for Dactil the Iberian lynx to prepare his dinner. The four-year-old male clamped his jaws on a rabbit’s throat, there were a few twitches of his prey’s legs and it was all over. Within minutes, the rabbit had been consumed. Then Dactil wandered off to rejoin his mate, Castanuela, inside their enclosure at the Olivilla breeding centre, near Santa Elena in Andalucía. Such behaviour is difficult to observe in the wild. For a start, Lynx pardinus is a reclusive hunter that leads its life as far as possible from humans. The lynx, with its distinctive large, tufted ears and woolly side whiskers that grow thicker with age, is also extremely rare. Its territory across Spain and Portugal had already started shrinking in the 19th century, before numbers plunged drastically in the 20th. Habitat destruction, loss of prey and indiscriminate trapping by landowners brought this beautiful predator to the brink of extinction. Ten years ago, there were only around a 100 of them, making the Iberian lynx the world’s most endangered species of cat. But at Olivilla, an ambitious attempt is being made to transform the animal’s fortunes. Here 32 lynxes – a substantial percentage of their total population – are provided with shelter with each cat’s behaviour being monitored by more than 100 cameras dotted round the centre’s 20 enclosures. These images are studied by staff working in a control room that has enough TV monitors to do justice to a particle accelerator. “We can see everything they do, which is crucial when the lynx reaches its breeding season in March,” says Olivilla’s director, María José Pérez. “We can help if a mother gets into trouble, for example.” The high-tech surveillance and assiduous zoological care performed at Olivilla are critical to the work of the Lynx Life project, which was launched in 2003 and has since raised the animal’s population, through carefully orchestrated reintroductions, to more than 300. Zoologists are even talking of moving Lynx
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Saving the missing Iberian lynx
Ten years ago, there were barely 100 Iberian lynx left. But an innovative Spanish conservation programme is rescuing them from the edge of extinction It took a very short time for Dactil the Iberian lynx to prepare his dinner. The four-year-old male clamped his jaws on a rabbit’s throat, there were a few twitches of his prey’s legs and it was all over. Within minutes, the rabbit had been consumed. Then Dactil wandered off to rejoin his mate, Castanuela, inside their enclosure at the Olivilla breeding centre, near Santa Elena in Andalucía. Such behaviour is difficult to observe in the wild. For a start, Lynx pardinus is a reclusive hunter that leads its life as far as possible from humans. The lynx, with its distinctive large, tufted ears and woolly side whiskers that grow thicker with age, is also extremely rare. Its territory across Spain and Portugal had already started shrinking in the 19th century, before numbers plunged drastically in the 20th. Habitat destruction, loss of prey and indiscriminate trapping by landowners brought this beautiful predator to the brink of extinction. Ten years ago, there were only around a 100 of them, making the Iberian lynx the world’s most endangered species of cat. But at Olivilla, an ambitious attempt is being made to transform the animal’s fortunes. Here 32 lynxes – a substantial percentage of their total population – are provided with shelter with each cat’s behaviour being monitored by more than 100 cameras dotted round the centre’s 20 enclosures. These images are studied by staff working in a control room that has enough TV monitors to do justice to a particle accelerator. “We can see everything they do, which is crucial when the lynx reaches its breeding season in March,” says Olivilla’s director, María José Pérez. “We can help if a mother gets into trouble, for example.” The high-tech surveillance and assiduous zoological care performed at Olivilla are critical to the work of the Lynx Life project, which was launched in 2003 and has since raised the animal’s population, through carefully orchestrated reintroductions, to more than 300. Zoologists are even talking of moving Lynx
Posted by
on March 19, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.