Spain released its final 62 lynx into the wild, hoping to rescue a species once on the brink of extinction. The animals vanished from the country decades ago, and these releases marked the last chance to rebuild a wild population from nothing.
By the early 2000s, the scrublands of southern Spain had lost a critical part of their ecological structure. Two viral outbreaks, spread largely through human activity, had nearly eliminated the European rabbit from the Iberian Peninsula. That loss had severe consequences for the region’s wildlife, particularly for the Iberian lynx, a predator that depends almost entirely on rabbits for food.The I…