It’s summer, and the Spanish sun bears down on miles of scrubland where the beaten yellows and shrubby greens seem to blend and warp and simmer in the midday heat. It seems that, at first glance, the broad shoulders of foothills are featureless, combed by a stale breeze, but then you spy movement on one slope. Angling your binoculars, you catch the brass-limned outline of a feline overlooking a meandering rill at the valley bottom.
Stalking low and flashing amber eyes, the iberian lynx (lynx pardinus) sports a tawny yellow coat. A specialist predator, he camouflages with the pale scrubland. Agile and stubby tailed, you can see he moves with a stolid candour, wide eyes almost too big for his feminine visage, and a two- pronged “beard” of whitish ochre, almost lending him a wise character. The Spanish/Portuguese variety of lynx stands out because of its spots, long tapered black tipped ears and typically rusty bronze, tanned fir. He studies the backcountry for his staple meal and specialist prey – wild rabbit, its characteristic large ears a giveaway on the gently rolling pasturelands that stretch on to meet the faded green extremity of Portugal’s border.
The warmer climate of southern Spain offers a range of wildlife adapted to the conditions of the Iberian Peninsula. The lynx, teetering on the edge of vulnerability stalks and saunters with deliberate ease, a mid-sized wild cat and one of the four species of lynx on earth. But with some vigorous protection measures including The Habitats Directive, the lynx has sprung up from just less than a hundred in the early years of this century – 62 mature individuals in 2002 – to over 2000 young and mature cats where the figure currently sits at the outset of 2025; it’s been relisted from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’. Numbers will need to reach, according to the WWF, 3,000 – 3,500 individuals including around 750 reproductive females, to be considered as in a ‘favourable State of Conservation’ according to European regulations.
Historically, the iberian lynx occupied a wider range before the 20th century but with human encroachment and destruction of habitat, it carves out a living mainly to the south where as of 2014, its range includes the Sierra Morena and Montes de Toledo of Castilla-La Mancha and the Matachel Valley of Extremadura, as well as the Guadiana Valley in Portugal. Reintroduction plans have been in effect with one study insisting that suitable areas for the lynx fall mostly in the south-western quadrant of the country. But researchers expect challenges to their recovery, from insistent illegal poaching to disease – the latter, a complex result of a damaged ecosystem – and the ability for the lynx to thrive in Spain and Portugal’s mountains and foothills will fall to us and how we treat their ecosystem.
Along with roadkill and poaching as strong factors in lynx deaths, disease remains a potent threat, with the arrival of myxomatosis affecting wild rabbit populations, causing mortality rates of ≈90%, and considering they make up to 85% of the lynx’s diet, meals will be hard to come by. Other potential diseases include the Bluetongue virus which according to one study on 340 cats, finds that the species is susceptible, at least as a spillover host, to two serotypes of the virus, likely ingested by local infected ruminants like grazing cattle. While researchers are unsure of the long term effects on the lynx’s health, it’s likely to have some impact on the local iberian wildlife, especially considering the lynx occupies a shared ecosystem with sympatric carnivores with a high diversity of disease agents increasing risks of cross-infection.
An abundance of challenges with an overarching emphasis on humans’ willingness to take environmental responsibility, conservationists recognise the social factors that impact wildlife survival rates. Media and public engagement especially play a hand in the formation of conservation policies not only in cities and urban populations but, as one social study puts soberly: “the connection of rural residents with the natural world is also changing. From residents’ narratives, the trend is one of less direct experience of wild animals and more familiarity through the media.”
So, it’s clear that how the media depicts the species in question, is going to have a causal link to public attitudes towards lynxes, especially as a huge chunk of the public’s only exposure to the wild cat is likely to be through media.
However, the impact of long-term public attitudes as they evolve towards predators during and after reintroduction needs more study, as one paper concludes, “to assess whether local people’s expectations as regards reintroductions (i.e., benefits and costs) are accomplished”. This, combined with more research on public media literacy has a markedly greater impact for informing future policies as far as human attitudes evolving with reintroduction plans, is concerned.
Conservation of wildlife from a public policy standpoint – a nitty-gritty exercise of tackling the politicisation of wild animals – is always going to be the usual rampant succession of townhall head-butting, signature collecting and shows of placard wielding, replete with civil liberty-infringing semantics whatever side of the political aisle you stand on; conservation efforts will take time to bring about species-saving outcomes. But we know from the data that we have to find some common ground, some basis of acceptance that we have a public service to strive for a better understanding of these animals and their place next to us in the world.
To exercise a healthy dose of epistemic humility, scientists, policy makers and the public have a joint responsibility to stretch our unique specialties and skill sets, to think and act collaboratively, for the sake of keeping these beautiful cats and their ecosystem – for which they depend – on the landscape. Conservation has become less about publishing papers for fellow academics and conservationists to read and more about wider accessibility and intersectionality – something everyone has a right to participate in.
But for now, the iberian lynx, unperturbed of his future here, stretches from his nap and distends his claws on the rugged selvedge of yellowed bunchgrass and yawns, flashing canines, eyes squinting to the Spanish sun before turning, stubby tail raised, gone amongst the chalky outcropping and brushwood where he camouflages to hunt. Perhaps a more familiar inhabitant to the Spanish landscape and beyond, for the decades to come.