A mere 30 years or so ago, there were still thousands of the distinctive cats roaming southern Spain and Portugal. They have the tufted ears common to the lynx family and bushy side-whiskers. They are about twice the size of the common domestic cat, but about half the size of the more common and widespread Eurasian lynx found throughout many parts of Eastern Europe. Within a handful of decades ending in the late 1990s, however, numbers of the Iberian lynx had been decimated to a barely sustainable 150 at most. They had been the victims of many of the usual modern-day depredations: fatal diseases were decimating the rabbit population (their principal quarry); forest fires; farmers’ traps; electric fences; urban development; road building and – amongst the most common of all – careless drivers simply running them over.

At the very eleventh hour of the impending final disappearance of the lynx, it was spared by both national and regional authorities in Spain and by vigorous campaigning on the part of such organisations as the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WFN) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), together with a heightened public awareness of what everyone stood to lose forever.
Not only were the very few and tiny breeding colonies in the wild preserved, but a captive breeding project was also launched during the course of 2004. The project is located at El Acebuche deep inside the Parque Nacional de Doñana, in Andalusia. The park is one of Europe’s most important wetland reserves and together with the surrounding parque natural or Entorno de Doñana (effectively a conservation buffer zone) covers a huge area of some 1,300 sq km straddling the provinces of Huelva, Sevilla and Cádiz. It is an environment of land and water entirely suited to wildlife and, indeed, is an area used as early as the thirteenth Century by the kings of Castile as a royal hunting estate.

What makes the breeding centre at El Acebuche quite remarkable, however, is the enormous success of the project. It had a very modest and on the face of it highly unlikely beginning – three females and one male, who were so weak and timid they would not have survived in the wild. In four years, that tiny, ill-prepared family has swollen to a total of 56 lynxes that have free rein of an enclosed but specious area of scrubland practically identical to their natural habitat.

In fact, it is only the quest for that natural habitat that is preventing the captive breeding centre from notching up its efforts to the next and final stage of actually releasing lynxes back into the wild. It is certainly ready for that next step, with the first of the captive-bred lynxes available for release into the wild next year and between an estimated 20 and 40 young animals for release each year from 2011.

The “only” barrier to such exciting plans is the absence of the wild habitat necessary. According to experts at El Acebuche, some 10,000 hectares of typically Mediterranean scrubland is needed, far away from major roads and large towns, and of course with a plentiful supply of healthy, wild rabbits. At the moment, no such site has been identified, but the search continues.

In the meantime, captive breeding presents the next best alternative and also gives the scientists a golden opportunity to study the habits of the lynx. The mating season, for example, appears to last between January and February, although mature animals are sexually active from January until June. Puberty is reached at the age of two years and full sexual maturity at three years of age. Gestation of the cubs takes 63 to 66 days and they are then suckled for between three and a half and four months.

The experts at El Acebuche have discovered that one of the most critical periods is reached when the cubs are just seven weeks old. This is when the strongest become most aggressive and competitive and fight each other, often to the death. This is one of the reasons why, out of a usual litter of three to four cubs, only the strongest two generally survive. Because the litters born in captivity have been equally well-fed, it is clear that the cubs are not fighting over scarce food resources or, it was discovered, over a dwindling volume of the mother’s milk as part of the natural weaning process. Instead, it was a socialisation process, with fighting designed to establish a form of hierarchy and dominance by the fittest. It is a process also observed in entirely wild specimens of lynx. From the age of about 80 to 180 days, the young animals start learning to chase and hunt live prey, with the dominant animals learning to hunt the soonest.

The task of conservation, of course, is never fully done. But the last surviving populations of the Iberian lynx seem to have been snatched back from the brink of extinction and given at least a second chance.