They were on the verge of disappearing 20 years ago, but today, the Iberian lynx is no longer considered critically endangered. However, much remains to be done to save the species.
00:00The conservation work really started in 2000, what we were doing at the beginning was a census because we really did not know how many there were or where,
00:27and we were very scared because we found less than 100 individuals throughout the Iberian Peninsula,
00:33divided into two populations, the one that everyone knew and that is still the reference of the INCE, which is Doñana,
00:41but nevertheless there were only 30 individuals and then in the AndĂșjar mountains, also in Andalusia, another population that was around 70.
00:50And there, of course, there was an international alarm, the INCE was in critical danger of extinction.
00:55Critical danger is that the species disappears.
01:19Then what we did was in the populations that were there, the first step was to reinforce the rabbit populations around so that there was more room for them to settle in females.
01:29With this first phase of repopulating rabbits around where the INCE was already, we managed to stop the decline, so that it did not disappear, and increase the populations a little.
01:41At the same time, another of the things we did was, especially in the Doñana area, around the populations, based on being in the field,
01:49talking to the people in the field, to avoid all these problems of furtivism.
01:54Most of them were accidental, they put on ties to hunt foxes or rabbits, and the INCE also ended up dying in those ties.
02:05Thanks to that, right now, I think there are around 30-80 individuals in Doñana.
02:35The worrying thing about all this is not only that it is practically the same mortality rate, and that it is also malicious,
02:50because the run-in, in the end, was an accident, and the other is a bad practice and a bad intention of someone.
03:05The INCE is an icon, an icon of the Mediterranean mountains on the one hand, and for WWF it is an icon of conservation.
03:29The whole process of conservation is a case of worldwide success.
03:35It is one of the few species that the WICN has lowered its category of threat due to the conservation effort that has been made.
03:44We are learning a lot, and I think we can export a lot of what we have done here to other places.
