Spain's Donana National Park shelters one of the world's most endangered cats.
For the past thirteen years, Spanish field zoologist Francisco Palomares has been studying the lynx in Donana National Park, a reserve of Mediterranean forests, scrub, and wetlands near Spain's Atlantic coast. Using radiotelemetry, he has been tracking the daily movements of about ten individuals since 1992. His is the most comprehensive study of the Iberian lynx, the area's top predator, since his countryman Miguel Delibes's groundbreaking research almost three decades ago.
"The Iberian lynx," Palomares says, "is one of the most endangered wildcats in the world--its continued existence is much more precarious than the tiger's." Found only on the Iberian Peninsula, this lynx's total population is down to about five or six hundred, or half of what it was only six years ago. "The prospect is bastante mala," Palomares sighs. "Pretty bad."
Following the signals from his radio antenna, he locates Gloria, a radio-collared female hiding about fifty feet from where we stand. This year she has had kittens, so we cautiously approach the clump of bushes to peek at the new family. From below the taraje--a kind of tamarisk tree with scalelike foliage--Gloria utters a throaty and menacing growl. Soon she slinks out from the cover and exits behind the tree through tall, dry grass. One kitten bounds ahead of her. Gloria slowly pads along behind, her white rump flashing in the low autumn sun. Her short, erect tail looks cropped, like that of a bobcat. A quick leap and she is gone.
Following Gloria with telemetry, we find her beneath a nearby bush, where she is nursing her two kittens. After a moment, she emerges, keeping a watchful eye on us and on the cavorting youngsters. Her reddish fur, spotted with black, glows like pounded copper in the October afternoon sunlight. A full ruff ornaments her cheeks and chin like Victorian muttonchops. Tufts of fur on her pointed ears--an earmark, as it were, of lynx--wave in the evening wind. As she rests in the grass, her young romp around and over her, giving vent to their playful exuberance.
The lynx once roamed throughout Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Until recently, the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) was considered a subspecies of the Eurasian lynx (L. lynx). Recent studies of its morphology and paleontology, however, have established its unique status. Males are typically 24 to 44 percent smaller than their northern cousins. The Iberian lynx is stockier, and its fur is not as thick as that of the Eurasian variety, nor do its paws have quite the same resemblance to outsized snowshoes--probably an adaptation to southern Europe's warm climate. Recent genetic studies also confirm that the Iberian lynx is a distinct species. Even where the ranges of two types of lynx overlap, interbreeding was rare.
As recently as the last century, the Iberian lynx ranged throughout Spain and Portugal. It was routinely hunted, with as many as 300 skins a year arriving in Madrid from all parts of the peninsula. By the early twentieth century, the lynx had disappeared from northern Spain, and by the 1950s, it was confined to small populations in the central and southwestern parts of the country. The animals have now disappeared from 80 percent of the habitat they occupied in 1960 and are found in only nine isolated populations, only two of which are considered genetically viable.
Gloria lives in what might be called the epicenter for lynx in Spain--the heart of the Coto del Rey, a small part of Donana that lies between the marshes and Mediterranean scrub and that was once the favorite hunting grounds of Spanish nobles and kings. Now totaling about 125,000 acres, Donana was set aside thirty years ago as a national park on the southern coast of Spain, just east of its border with Portugal. Protecting the estuary of the Guadalquivir River, Donana is an austere flatland of marshes and brush, of sandy soil and dry scrublands; its highest peaks are sand dunes along the Atlantic coast. The park provides a protected habitat for a huge number of nesting and migrating bird species. With such residents as flamingos and mongooses, it seems like a chunk of Africa tucked away just across the Strait of Gibraltar. In Donana, the noon sun is searing, and the sunsets are spectacular.
The park lynx are divided into two groups, totaling about fifty animals. One group lives in the Coto del Rey scrub, and the other, smaller one inhabits the marshes nearer the sea. Lynx avoid the pine and eucalyptus plantations outside the park, except when they must travel through them to reach more suitable habitat. I had always associated lynx with snowy boreal forests and had never pictured them living in an arid, Mediterranean climate that swelters in the summer and floods during winter rains. Yet the lynx in Donana prosper in the Coto del Rey scrub, where the extensive cover includes dense bushes, shrubs, taraje trees, and a kind of tree called lentiscus; both trees provide favored lynx hiding places. The most common bush is the jaguarzo, or Halimium, which sports pale leaves and huge yellow flowers. Among the taller trees are the frasino, a type of ash; and the alcornoque, or cork oak, whose bark is used to cork the fine wines of Andalusia.
While Coto del Rey makes up only about 230 square miles of parkland, the Iberian lynx probably reaches its greatest concentration here. When I visited during the fall, the area contained about seventeen animals--three pairs of breeding adults, the year's young, and some born the year before. It is possible to encounter lynx frequently here, fostering the false, if delightful, illusion that these rare animals are common.
Female lynx divide their habitat into territories that may remain stable for years. Palomares has painstakingly mapped the feline geography of Donana and found that the average female lynx's territory is about 3.5 square miles. Both males and females are usually solitary and maintain their separate territories, which overlap and connect in complex ways. A female will mate with whichever male has won the adjacent territory, and a male will mate with as many females as he can. In Donana, since each male's range overlaps with that of only one female, the mating system appears to be monogamous. Pairs typically come together briefly to mate, usually in January. After a gestation period of sixty to seventy days, the female finds a hollowed-out tree trunk--cork oaks are favorites--in which to have her cubs. They remain there for some weeks in the early stages, but as the cubs get older, the mother moves them frequently.
Three pairs of lynx have contiguous territories in Donana. Gloria has occupied the middle territory since her arrival there in 1992. Escarlata occupies the easternmost territory and has produced a litter every year--the only female in the Coto del Rey to have done so. Nuria, who occupied the territory to the west, died in 1997, at nine years of age. Her territory is up for grabs. When the females have young, their ranges shrink considerably, perhaps to one square mile or less, because mothers do not go far from their kittens.
Male lynx typically have larger territories than females do; each male that Palomares studies claims about seven square miles. Gloria's mate, Barro, established his territory at the beginning of 1996. Escarlata's previous mate died in 1997, leaving his territory open. Males fight for territory, and females probably do so as well. Nuria's mate, Borja, died in 1996 at the age of ten. His torn body bore witness to a battle with another male.
Visiting for just over a week, I got to know the daily patterns of a male that was new to the area and had not yet been radio-collared or named. Every evening at about 7:00 P.M., he would emerge from the brush to sit on the dirt road that serves as the boundary between Gloria's territory and that of Escarlata. Palomares thinks the male established himself in the area because he was Escarlata's new mate. He was a striking creature, bold and confident, with a penetrating gaze. Rows of dots stretching into lines on his tawny fur flowed from his shoulders to his rump. He would saunter into the nearby fields about sundown to begin his nightly hunt.
