Luis Palma will never forget the first time he saw a lynx. It was 1978, he was a young biology student and had been living in the mountains in northern Portugal for two years, trying to track down these elusive cats. Although ostensibly for his research thesis, ”in fact”, he says, ”it was a labour of love”.
By day, he tramped through the scrub, searching for signs such as droppings and tracks, by night he slept in an abandoned shepherd’s hut, shining spotlights into the bushes to see what animals were attracted to the glare. Although he found lots of lynx footprints, for two years he never set eyes on one. Then, one night he saw two large eyes shining in the dark. ”They were brighter and larger than those I was used to seeing. As large as deer’s eyes, but greenish. I rushed towards them, but lost them in the scrub.”
He searched around and finally saw the eyes again, only this time he also picked out the profile that he had been longing to see – that of a large cat with ears that tapered to knife-like points, sitting quietly, looking at him. ”As soon as he moved a bit, I would lose him right away, unless he looked back in my direction. I never saw it move. I saw it appear and disappear. There was something magical about this.”
Now a middle-aged biologist at Faro University, Palma has to face the fact that the beautiful animal with which he fell in love 25 years ago may soon disappear from the world. The Iberian lynx, which is a completely separate species from the other lynx in the world – distinct from the Eurasian lynx and its smaller cousin, the bobcat, which prowls north America – lives only in Spain and Portugal, and has become the most endangered big cat in the world.
The figures are stark. The first study that tried to put a figure on the total number of Iberian lynx was published in 1988; even then there were little more than a thousand of them. By the mid-1990s, the figure had dropped to 650; by 2000 it was 300. It is now estimated that fewer than 200 remain. If that graph continues its apparently inexorable curve downwards, in a few years it will be grinding towards zero.
The Iberian lynx is leaving this world with surprisingly few friends to speak up for it. If there were 150 cheetahs or leopards left in the wild, we would have heard an awful lot about them. But the lynx is an elusive animal. ”One of the things that perhaps hasn’t been in its favour,” says Beatrix Richards, of the World Wide Fund For Nature, ”is that it lives such a solitary life, so it’s hard to know what is going on with it. It really is the Kipling cat, the one who walks by himself.”
It is even debated whether any lynx at all are left in Portugal. The most recent scientific survey found sure evidence of its presence – photographs or droppings that contained lynx DNA – only in Spain, not Portugal. Yet Portuguese lynx lovers insist that they are still hanging on. Palma told me that he had seen one, five years ago, near Odemira. ”He crossed the road with two or three powerful jumps and climbed the opposite slope as light as a ghost,” he said. I talked to someone whose friend had seen one running away from a forest fire in August; someone else had heard one yowling in the night in the spring.
Odd though it may seem, there was no scientific work carried out on the Iberian lynx until the 1970s, when in Spain and Portugal individual biologists woke up to the existence of this secretive mammal. Even now that it is so critically endangered, few in Britain have heard of it, and it has nothing like the pull that the cats of Asia or Africa have for us.
The most recent lynx sightings in Portugal were in the mountains above the Algarve, where well-watered golf courses and sprawling hotels sit oddly with the image of a big cat prowling through the night. It seems that a lion in the savanna holds more romance for us than a lynx near a seaside resort. Although many westerners can tell a panther from a cheetah, the Iberian lynx’s particular beauty – the exaggerated points of its ears, the stubby tail and drooping whiskers that give it an oddly aged look – is unfamiliar to most of us.
For centuries, this lack of interest didn’t matter, because the lynx could simply live by and for itself. It cohabited perfectly easily with the people of southern Portugal and Spain; indeed, its behaviour evolved to fit the way the people farmed. But now everything has changed. It is being threatened in the most dramatic way by human behaviour and land use. It is in Spain and Portugal that we can see one of the clearest confrontations between conservationists and everyday modern life.
Portugal does not have anything comparable to the popular environmental movements of Britain or the US, but one Portuguese man brought up in England is trying to import that confrontational style. Eduardo Gonçalves is in his 30s, and moved from south London to southern Portugal five years ago to run a farm in the Algarve mountains. Sitting on the terrace of his ramshackle house, his 14 skinny tabby cats winding themselves around his legs, he says, ”I had never heard of the lynx until I came here. I wasn’t looking for a crusade. I’d be just as happy digging my garden.”
At first, he and his wife believed that this place contained everything they were longing for as an antidote to urban England. Indeed, the people make up a tightly knit community and the landscape seems gorgeously rich and wild. But they soon realised that both the community and the environment they had chosen were under threat. ”For me, the lynx isn’t just a wildlife issue, though of course it is that. It is about the defence of the countryside, which also means the rural poor,” says Gonçalves. He identifies completely with the traditions of the area, perhaps even more so because his parents left Portugal in their youth and he has had to rediscover their land.
He tells me why the environment here is unique. The classic Portuguese farm was small, and consisted of pastures for goats between patches of forest for cork oak and other trees. This mosaic landscape produced a model of biodiversity and it provided the ideal home for the lynx. They relied on the rabbits that lived in the pastures, and could mate, sleep, hide and prowl in the forests.
But such agriculture has fallen into steep decline over the past 50 years. Where it survives, as on Gonçalves’s farm, it looks entirely different from most European farmland. It is messy and crowded and colourful – cork oaks, with their surreally stripped trunks, are interspersed with the silvery leaves of olive trees and luxuriant fig and apple trees; between their trunks is a thick undergrowth of strawberry trees and rock roses. There is a constant rustling and whirring from birds and insects.
Gon̤alves takes me on a drive a few miles up the road. Soon, the messy scrub of similar farms gives way to vast eucalyptus plantations, planted in tidy rows. Under the trees, the light is dim and the air silent. This kind of tidy, dark place is no good for rabbits, because it provides them with no food, and so is also no good for lynx. But over the past few decades, such plantations Рwhich provide pulp for paper for offices throughout western Europe Рhave taken up more than 600,000 hectares in Portugal. They deplete not only the environment but also the communities, since people tend not to stay on their land if it is replanted with eucalyptus. No wonder the lynx has become, for people like Gon̤alves, a symbol of this beautiful land and its threatened traditions.
Gonçalves has thrown himself into the struggle to save it. ”I subscribe to that whole John Stuart Mill principle of active citizenship, that if you want something done you have to do it.” He has set up a campaign group, SOS Lynx, to try to galvanise public opinion and embarrass the government into action. But he seems to be out on a limb. ”He makes people angry,” more than one scientist told me. ”He creates too much conflict.”
Other organisations – both Portuguese and international ones such as WWF – are setting up projects to preserve what is left of the lynx’s habitats, but have made slow progress. There is a curious inertia setting in as the numbers of lynx plummet. Even Palma says he has come to terms with its possible extinction. ”I have seen other animals disappear from this land in my lifetime. I don’t know if one can turn back the tide.”
This fatalism is easy to understand. Is it possible, this late in the day, to hold back the decline of this once rich environment? You could say that it is more extraordinary that the lynx has held on so long in Portugal and Spain than that it should now be dying out. After all, it was a couple of millennia ago that we in Britain managed to finish off the last big cats on our island. Development and urbanisation are completely opposed to the needs of a cat that takes up a territory of around 2,000 hectares and eats a rabbit a day.
The number of rabbits – the lynx’s favourite prey – has been declining in Spain and Portugal for 50 years, mainly because of diseases. Meanwhile, the places where the lynx can live are being fragmented, cut and cut again, into ever smaller habitats. In only two areas are there any reproducing populations – the Doñana National Park on Spain’s southern coast and the Sierra Morena mountains in Andalusia – and both are effectively ghettoes, walled in by motorways, cities and modern farms, with no chance of a lynx crossing from one to another.
This fragmentation seems an inevitable result of the way developed countries use their land. Those eucalyptus plantations in the highlands of Portugal are often growing paper for British offices, while the lowlands are being covered with big farms, many of them full of shiny plastic tunnels in which strawberries are grown to be sold out of season in British supermarkets. Paper for our printers and strawberries for lunch – conveniences for us, but a disaster for the lynx. Other areas where the lynx once lived are being cut and dug for development projects. The Algarve is slashed with motorways, and the mountains are being gouged by dams, such as the Odelouca dam – work on which started in October 2001, just after the European commission concluded that it violated European environmental legislation because it was being built in an area of importance for an endangered species.
The excavations have already cut a gash through hills that have also been devastated by the forest fires of the last hot summer. Another, far larger project, the Alqueva dam, in south-east Portugal, has recently been completed despite protests from environmentalists and locals, flooding an area of 100 sq miles that was once a home for lynx and more than a million trees. Such enormous dams are of questionable economic benefit – they may end up, the conservationists say, merely watering the golf courses of the Algarve. ”The Alqueva dam is a huge white elephant,” says Pedro Beja. ”It was sold as the solution of all the economic problems of the area. And yet no one knows what to do with the water now.”
But even if we in Britain lament the effect of such projects, what right do we have to tell other Europeans that they should not have an environment along the lines of our own, with the beasts banished to zoos and the wilderness confined to small parks? One reason for the apathy about the fate of the Iberian lynx, compared with passion inspired by the (much less critically endangered) giant panda in China or lion in Africa, may be because it is easier to insist that people of the developing world share their land with wild beasts than to boss fellow Europeans around. Can we really say that the Spanish shouldn’t have a new motorway, that the Portuguese shouldn’t have their golf courses?
Such uncertainty means that the conservationists in Spain and Portugal have been isolated. Far from finding that their neighbours are behind their drive to protect one of the last bastions of wildlife in Europe, they have found that EU money has often been used to support road and water projects, while farmers have been encouraged to ”improve” their farms with EU subsidies for, say, clearing forest undergrowth. Even where development schemes contradict European environmental legislation, as in Odelouca or the A2 motorway in the Algarve, the government is able to press ahead regardless.
Without strong outside pressure or a massive grassroots campaign, politicians have had no particular incentive to respond to the conservationists’ demands for the lynx. These include zoos as well as forests. Given its vulnerability, the lynx needs the back-up of a captive population. In 1988, when it was discovered that there were only about 1,000 left in the wild, scientists were unanimous in their demands for a captive breeding project. But the resulting breeding centre set up in the Doñana National Park has yet to produce a single lynx kitten. In fact, although it holds four females, it has no male of breeding age. This is not because the lynx itself is fussy about breeding in captivity – other lynx species have managed perfectly well – but because of political infighting. Central government and the local government of Andalusia are often at loggerheads, and since the breeding centre belongs to central government and the permits for catching the lynx in the wild can only be given by the local government, the result is stalemate – one day, when a passing male lynx of breeding age jumped into the captive enclosure, he had to be released because the requisite permit could not be obtained.
There is one place that is bringing people and lynx back in harmony. The Sierra Morena mountains, north of Cordoba are home to the largest remaining lynx community, of more than 100 individuals. Here, conservationists are running a successful project under the auspices of the local government. They keep tabs on every lynx, restocking the land with rabbits and preserving traditional habitats. Given that all the land is privately owned – mainly by landowners who use it for hunting – conservationists have set up dozens of individual agreements with the hunters.
Rafael Cadenas, the project’s leading light, is a biologist whose mild manners hide a single-minded zeal. I tell him that the idea of hunters being the solution to conservation is a bit hard to swallow. But he remembers going hunting in these mountains as a child with his father, and his vision of the relationship of the hunter to the land echoes Gonçalves’s vision of the relationship of the small farmer to the land – an almost mythical respect between man, beast and environment. ”For the hunter, the lynx is a friend. Because it is in the lynx’s interests to keep up the numbers of rabbits, so he will keep away the other predators like wolves and foxes. And then the rabbits flourish and the hunters flourish and the lynx does, too.”
This project is working. The lynx aren’t dying out in the Sierra Morena. But even if it goes on working, such a small area will never be a complete solution to the problems of an entire species, and even here the habitat is under threat – the World Wide Fund For Nature is currently campaigning against the the government plans to apply for EU funding to extend a dam, La Breña, in the heart of the Sierra Morena.
Cadenas takes me to the meeting that the field workers hold every month. They divide the area between them, carefully track the lynx in their sections and photograph and video them wherever possible. A dozen young men in ponytails and combat trousers sit around a table with their laptops, comparing their most recent data. One, José Maria Gil, tries to tell me about his work. His English isn’t very good, but his passion is obvious. ”When I see a lynx in the field, I don’t know why, my heart goes boom, boom.” Cadenas cuts in to explain: ”You see, when they identify each lynx as a kitten, they give it a name. When she dies, it is not just a lynx, it is a relationship with an animal and not with a species. So here there are 110 lynxes with names, and when each one dies it is like a death in the family.”
What is all this energy to preserve the lynx really expended for? Is it about the lynx, or is it about our romantic feelings about the wild?
On my last day in Spain I come face to face with the animal that inspires such devotion. The zoo in Jerez de la Frontera is home to one of the few lynx in captivity. One-year-old Cromo was captured with injuries four months ago and may soon be moved to the breeding centre in Doñana – significantly, he is a male. Iñigo Sanchez, the zoo’s director, takes me past cages of kangaroos and deer to a blacked-out enclosure. He unlocks one gate after another until we are in the lynx’s cage. Cromo has been put with a bobcat, so he will play with another cat rather than his keepers. The two animals are of a similar age, but Cromo is far heavier and stronger, a little tiger rather than the overgrown cat I was expecting. He stands foursquare and checks me out with unblinking round eyes, then swerves to leap at the bobcat as he runs by. There is a strange, heart-pulling mixture of the fierceness of a wild beast and the charm of a pet as he moves, so playful and yet so assured. After a while, bored by his human visitors, he wanders towards the door of his cage, looking out into the yard. It is a bizarre kind of dependency for an animal that once needed nobody.
”It is a pity to keep him here, but it is necessary,” says Sanchez. ”You do feel for him, he still wants the wild.” It is hard to believe that Cromo is a member of such an endangered tribe, he is so gloriously unselfconscious. I comment on how fearless he is. ”Oh, a lynx will never run away from you,” says Sanchez. ”You see, they still believe they are the lords of the forest.” — Guardian Unlimited