Aura is dead. The female lynx was twenty years and six months old. Aura is thus the longest living Iberian lynx. When she was born in 2002, she was in “critical” condition. She weighed less than a kilogram when she arrived at Jerez de la Frontera Zoo. From there she moved with her sister and another lynx to the new “Centro de Cría del lince ibérico El Acebuche”, the new breeding center of El Acebuche in the Doñana National Park, to whose founding generation she belonged. In 2005 there were youngsters for the first time.
After the turn of the millennium, fewer than a hundred Iberian lynx lived in the wild. In Spain and Portugal they were threatened with extinction. Hunting and a virus decimating the rabbits on which the big cats feed had taken their toll on the population. Thanks to the rearing program in which Aura played an important role, according to the most recent census there are now 1365 so-called Iberian lynxes, the smallest of the four lynx species in the world. In captivity, the short-tailed cats reproduced rapidly. Their offspring have been released into the wild since 2011.
Aura had cubs for the first time in five years: Domo, Duna and Drago. She had 14 children in total, and her genes were passed down through five generations – to more than 917 specimens in captivity and in the wild, as Acebuche was proudly and wistfully told. “She was a magnificent animal, with a peculiar character. She did what she wanted. It was very easy to work with her,” said Antonio Rivas, the center’s coordinator for El País newspaper.
Most recently, there has been a veritable baby boom on the Iberian Peninsula among the Iberian lynxes with their brush-eared animals. In 2020, 414 young animals were counted, which are spreading more and more. Almost 90 percent live in south-west Spain, most of them in Andalusia, where the Doñana National Park with the first breeding center is also located. Other animals have settled in Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura, where the Spanish government has another breeding centre. In neighboring Portugal, more than 140 animals live in the Guadiana Valley. Breeding is also done there.
Since Aura could no longer have offspring, she spent her twilight years in an outdoor enclosure. As “ambassadors of their kind”, they were able to observe visitors there, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who accompanied Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez there four years ago. In the end, the decrepit Aura had to be put to sleep. In the wild, their conspecifics live an average of 15 years.