If the worst should happen, the Iberian Lynx will be the first of the big cats to become extinct since the disappearance of the European lion and the sabre-tooth tiger before that.
The last pockets of survival for the last of Europe’s big cats are in two tiny, separate breeding colonies in Andalusia – a rapidly declining community of some 20-25 adults in the Coto Doñana National Park and a further 80 adults or so in Andújar-Cardeña in the Sierra Morena. Possible additions to these known breeding groups exist in still tinier colonies spotted in the Montes de Toledo and across the border of this corner of south-west Spain into Portugal.
The Iberian Lynx is a distinctive cat, about three to four feet long and weighing between 33 and 55 lbs. It is lighter in colour than its closest cousin, the Eurasian Lynx and has more pronounced leopard-like spots. Like all members of the lynx family, it possesses the ruffs on the sides of its face, black ear tufts, a short stubby black tipped tail, and wide feet.
They are naturally solitary, with two animals coming together only to mate. Mating occurs in January, followed by a gestation period of two months. There are usually three cubs born in a litter. They are weaned at five months, and independent between 7-10 months old, but remain in their mother’s territory until they are 20 months old. They may not breed until they are three years old, since a female lynx will not mate until a territory has been established. They are primarily nocturnal except during the winter months, when they have prolonged diurnal activity.
So, what has happened to decimate what was once a large population of Spanish big cats? Many elements of this sorry story will ring all too familiar. Certainly, the Iberian Lynx thrived for many thousands of years. The Iberian tribes worshipped animistic gods and saw lynxes as a beast with supernatural powers and a link to the underworld. The animal’s strength and prowess was also recognised by Rome, which formed a legion exclusively made up of Hispanic soldiers. Their breastplates and standard were emblazed with the image of a lynx.
The same strength and prowess of the animal, though, probably set the scene for what would become a lengthy road to decline. Throughout history, it has been hunted for sport and for its fur. Nevertheless, by 1900 there are estimated to have been some 100,000 of the animals throughout the Iberian peninsula. During the 1960s and 70s, however, its decline was accelerated as Spain began to modernise. This brought a destruction and fragmentation of habitats as a consequence of dam and road-building, together with the intensification of agriculture and a series of wild-fires that laid waste to the habitats most favoured by lynxes. By the 1980s, their numbers were down to around 1,000.
Modernisation, industrialisation and the intensification of agriculture were, of course, all thoroughly bad news for the Iberian Lynx. But probably the single most critical change of fortune – and one that also hastened the decline of the wolf and the bear throughout the peninsula – was the decimation of the rabbit population, first through the spread of myxomatosis during the 1950s and then a second pandemic, a viral infection called VHD, in the 1990s. Together the onslaught of these two diseases reduced the rabbit population by up to 95% in some areas of Spain. And since the rabbit is the most favoured prey of the lynx (at certain times of the year, it makes up 90-100% of its diet), where there is no rabbit, there is no lynx – the species has been slowly starving to death.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the rabbit to the Iberian eco-system. When the Phoenicians first ventured westwards along the Mediterranean in search of trade some 2500 years ago, they came across a land inhabited by tribes which the Greeks would later call the Iberians (after the river Iberus- the Ebro). They also saw (and no doubt roasted) some strange floppy-eared animals which appeared in great numbers everywhere. So they called the land i-shepan-im, or the land or coast of rabbits. To the Romans, it became Hispania, and under the Emperor Hadrian, they even struck a coin in Spain bearing the image of a rabbit.
Then in the Middle Ages the country became España: the land of rabbits. Although they could not know it, they had chosen the name well. The rabbit (as opposed to the hare) is originally from Iberia, and was virtually restricted to the Peninsula until the Phoenicians and then the Romans began to export the animal around the known world (e.g. they arrived in Britain in Roman times).
Naturalists have compared the rabbit to having once been as essential an element to the Spanish Mediterranean ecosystem as an elephant is to the African savannah. Rabbits clean and clear the dense undergrowth opening up their own meadows and forever upturning the soil with their burrowing. Ironically, for an animal that evolved in Spain it is difficult to bring it back. Like the elephant, with its disappearance, the habitat changes and a new dynamic balance is reached from which it is very difficult to return. Warrens cave in, the bush thickens, the land becomes overgrown, and the mosaic habitat they created reverts to a denser more uniform maquis. Moreover, as lynxes are starved out, the population of non-lynx predators (such as foxes and mongooses) rockets, making it even more difficult for the rabbit, even without disease, to gain a suitably dense population for the lynx to live. Whatever the case, it is remarkable when one considers the speed with which rabbits breed and spread in many parts of the world, that here in their ancestral home, they find it so hard to re-establish themselves.
