Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE MISSING LYNX
Magnificent relics from the distant past still roam continental Europe – but for some survival is still in the balance
How Europe’s Iberian lynx, facing extinction 20 years ago, is making a comeback
Against the dramatic backdrop of the Rock of Gibraltar, on the roof of a perilously swinging cable car, a kidnap drama is playing out. A baby’s life is in danger… and its desperate mother will do anything to save her child.
The scenario sounds like the climax of a Hollywood thriller, but it’s a real-life crisis captured by a team filming the complex social lives of Barbary macaques. These yellow monkeys live in one of the world’s most spectacular tourist spots, on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean.
Macaque troops have strict hierarchies, and director Kiri Cashell and her crew trained their lenses on the lowestranking female in a troop of 60, who had just given birth. But infant macaques face a bizarre risk – other adults try to snatch them and present them to higher-ranked macaques as a gift. Sometimes they take a baby just because they want to.
As the cameras rolled, another female grabbed the week-old infant and bolted. ‘She seemed to want to play at being a mother,’ says Kiri. ‘The baby started to cry, but the lowranking mother could only look on and watch what was happening – we think the captor was of a higher social status.’ The mother had a clever trick up her sleeve, though. As the thief hauled her hostage up a pylon, the mum approached an alpha male on the roof of a cable car and began to groom him. Jealous, the kidnapper bounded over to join in… and the mother rescued her baby. Life can be dangerous for all animal babies, however grown-up they might think they are. On the border of Finland and Russia, the team filmed brown bear cubs showing off their climbing skills. ‘One day,’ says director Charlotte Bostock, ‘a cub climbed too high and seemed to get vertigo. He froze at the top of a tree that must have been 30m high. He was quivering with fright, while his mother was below. She must have been there for a good hour, and eventually coaxed him down.’
In the mountains of the Sierra de Andujar in Andalucia, Spain, Charlotte set up camera traps to film Iberian lynx. These spotted cats with their magnificent whiskers, like Victorian gentlemen, were virtually extinct 20 years ago. But a dedicated conservation programme has rescued them, and some 200 kittens were born last year. Still, they remain some of the most elusive animals in Europe. ‘Filming the lynx was like finding a needle in a haystack,’ says Charlotte.
The team was particularly astonished by the behaviour of pelicans in the Danube delta. They wait for cormorants to dive down and seize a fish, then grab them by the neck. Choked and frightened, the cormorants cough up their catch… straight into the gullet of the pelican.