Nine lynx got one last chance at survival—23 years later, the results stunned everyone. In 2007, the species stood on the brink in the Pyrenees, with barely enough animals left to continue.
In 2009, nine Iberian lynx were released from their transport boxes at dawn in a scrubland valley in Spain’s Córdoba province. The animals were bred in captivity, and the release site had not seen the species in decades. Roughly half of similar captive-bred animals died within their first year in the wild, and with fewer than 100 lynx remaining, mistakes were costly. Spain had already invested mor…