After forty years of absence, the lynx has returned to Madrid.
Scientists have confirmed through DNA that the endangered Iberian lynx have returned to the Sierra de Guadarrama valley near the Spanish capital.
Last spring there were several sightings, but researchers from Madrid’s Complutense University have been able to find and analyse faeces which they confirmed as belonging to lynx.
"By examining the reported sightings of lynx it was possible to draw up a likely map of its territory and then we went to work collecting samples," explained Germán Alonso Campos, an ecology professor at the UCM.
It was thought that a male lynx released late last year in Toledo province through a World Wildlife Fund captive breeding programme may have gone to the Guadarrama valley region in search of new territory.
"We can’t say exactly how many but there are likely to be three or four individual animals," Alonso said.
He noted that to protect the animal the precise location of their habitat would not be announced publicly.
The Iberian lynx population was brought to the brink of extermination by the end of the 1900s. Illegal hunting, habitat loss, and disease which killed off many of their prey of rabbits all conspired to reduce the lynx population to only 94 in just two small areas of Andalusia.
Breeding programmes in Spain and Portugal leading to the release of lynx back into the wild have helped boost their numbers in liberation to 327 by the end of last year.
Their categorisation was dropped this summer from “critically endangered” to “endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Although efforts have been made to protect natural habitats, motor vehicles remain a threat. Last year, 22 lynx in Spain were killed on the roads.
The World Wide Fund for Nature earlier this year said that cars are "the greatest threat for the future of the lynx".
