One of a kind? Or are more cubs out there? Panajot Chorovski

A first cub photo in over a decade of Europe’s largest and rarest cat, a wild Balkan lynx, raises hopes for the survival of this critically endangered animal.

With less than 50 cats remaining in the wild in the mountains of the Western Balkans, this subspecies of the eurasian lynx is close to extinction.

The lynx faces habitat loss, illegal hunting, and revenge killing by farmers whose domestic animals they sometimes attack.


Just two years ago a cub was stoned by a local shepherd on Munella mountain in Albania — the only recent evidence of this subspecies rearing young.

Fight for survival

The biggest challenge is the population’s small size and low survival of cubs, says Mareike Brix from EuroNatur, who have been working on the protection of Balkan lynx for a decade with their partners. “Only 25 per cent of all kittens born reach adulthood,“ says Brix.

But now, a picture of a new live cub has been captured in a second location, the Mavrovo National Park in neighbouring Macedonia, suggesting there is a healthy reproducing population there.

Fluffy hope Panajot Chorovski

The photo was made possible only after the team managed to put a GPS collar around a female called Maya, in February this year — the first Balkan lynx female to wear GPS collar.

This led them to Maya’s cub, and they hope to put a GPS collar on it, too, when it is old enough to go its own way, at around 10 months of age, says Dime Melovski at Macedonian Ecological Society.

Melovski thinks the cub is a good sign for the subspecies – and he’s not alone.

Good news

This is good news because it confirms that there are still reproducing animals in this population, says John Durrus Linnell at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, which cooperates with the Macedonian Ecological Society on the Balkan Lynx Recovery Programme that started in 2006.

“When this project started almost 10 years ago there was no real proof that the population even existed,” he says. “Since then, the team have collected hundreds of camera trap pictures of lynx in both Macedonia and Albania, including evidence of reproduction.”

This means that there is still a nucleus of a population to form the basis for recovery, says Linnell.

Reproduction in a critically endangered population is always good news, agrees Ilse Storch at the University of Freiburg. “The extinction of a top predator is – ecologically speaking – always a loss, because in a complete, functioning ecosystems, top carnivores have a significant function,” she says.

Just one cub

But a single cub may not make much of a difference to the survival chances of the population, he adds.

Brix and Melovski both worry that the cub might not survive to adulthood. Disease, malnourishment and road accidents are all real threats the young lynx may have to face.

And more widely, the outlook is not great for the lynx. Others have failed to capture pictures of cubs in its natural habitat, which would provide evidence that the population is reproducing.

Aleksandar Petrovic from the Center for the Protection and Research of Birds from Podgorica in nearby Montenegro says that in the last four years they have used camera traps without success in the region where the lynx was present until at least 2002 when the last specimen was recorded after being shot.

Illegal hunting

He thinks overhunting of the lynx prey – rabbits, roe deer, chamois – only add to the threat from illegal hunting the animal directly.

Protection efforts, experts think, should focus on Mavrovo National Park, the only area now known to have reproducing lynx.

“This area on the border between Macedonia and Albania is incredibly beautiful and hosts some amazing biodiversity, including charismatic wildlife like lynx, bears, wolves, chamois etc,” says Linnell. “But it is facing massive threats from poor regulations governing development of transport infrastructure, hydropower plants, construction, tourism, forestry and so on.”

What’s needed to protect lynx, says Manuela von Arx from Carnivore Ecology and Wildlife Management (KORA) in Switzerland, another organisation collaborating on the recovery project, is law enforcement and sustainable wildlife management, as well as habitat protection when infrastructure projects run though it.

Also, she says, raising awareness and working with rural populations – and ensuring they benefit from having lynx around, perhaps through income from ecotourism, for example.

“There is a long way to go before the future of these landscapes and their biodiversity are secure,” says Linnell. “But images like these remind us that as long as there is life, there is hope – and that is what keeps conservationists’ motivation up.”

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