It's “a fine balance” and a task of great responsibility, which never stops, but just speak for a few minutes with a worker from the National Center for the Reproduction of the Iberian Lynx (CNRLI) to understand the pride and passion he feels for contributing to the rescue of a species.
After all, the CNRLI is a special place. This is one of the poles of a cross-border network that is working to recover the Iberian lynx, a feline species that was very close to extinction and which is still severely threatened.
In Portugal, the faces of this lynx recovery program are the approximately two dozen people who work at the center located in the parish of São Bartolomeu de Messines, in the municipality of Silves, the only one of its kind in Portugal and under the management of the Instituto de Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
“As a rule, we have 16 to 18 people working here, including employees and volunteers. If we include the guards who are there at the door, who carry out a very important work, there are four more people», he told the Sul Informação Rodrigo Serra, director of the CNRLI, who in its ten years of existence has made a very important contribution to the recovery of the iberian lynx.
Rodrigo Serra heads this center and is one of the team of veterinarians working there. The other “pillars” of the work to recover this species carried out in the Algarve are the ethologists and keepers.
The ethology team, the study of animal behavior, is «composed of professional ethologists and volunteers, to whom we give access, so that they can learn from what is done here. As you know, this is a center that does not allow visitation, due to the nature of the work we do. The only window we have to train people and show them what we do is through these volunteer programs, which are European in scope.”
At this moment, the CNRLI is, moreover, to accept applications who want to work as a volunteer at the center.
“We also have a veterinary team, which takes care of everything that concerns the health and feeding of the lynx. And then there is the team of handlers, who do all the management and handling of the animals down there in the enclosures, from environmental enrichment, to cleaning, training and release», added Rodrigo Serra.
Each of the teams has “different tasks, although they all touch each other”.
"The keeper cannot be down there doing management without the ethologists seeing here on the monitors [of the internal video system] and telling them that the animals are here or there, in this enclosure or outside it, so that they know if they can enter or not. Nor would he know if the animal had already eaten or not, if ethology didn't tell him. The veterinarian, on the other hand, would not realize that there is a health problem if the keepers do not notice anything strange or the ethologists do not detect something through the cameras», summarized the director of the center.
In other words, “all the work has contact points and these three pillars guarantee the center's operation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”. Or 366 days, in leap years, like the current one in 2020.
One of the ethologists at the CNRLI, who has worked there for over eight years, since 2011, is Andreia Grancho. “Our role is to observe lynxes, through video surveillance. They are under 24-hour behavioral observation and under management here at the center. We assess what is happening with each of the animals, at different levels».
As explained to the Sul Informação the CNRLI official, the relationship of ethologists with lynx “is very indirect. They don't know who we are [laughs] and we rarely see them [with the naked eye]. But that is not the objective either, they are wild animals».
“There is an advantage of spending eight hours a day looking at them and at every little step they take. We get to know each other's personalities and temperaments more and more. They are all very different from each other, despite being all of the same species», added Andreia Grancho.
The young employee of the Algarve's Iberian Lynx Reproduction Center has been working with animals for a long time, but her training is in another area. «Ethology, the study of animal behavior, has always been an area that interested me a lot. I am a psychologist, but my path was in this direction precisely because I liked it a lot. So, I started volunteering in the area. I went through other projects, with other species. Opportunities arose and everything fell into place. Now, I've been working for eight years here at CNRLI», he said.
Vanessa Requeijão has also been an employee at the center since 2011 and works as a caretaker.
«We are the ones who deal with animals every day. There are six of us and we run the work for everyone. We work in shifts, 365 days a year. Unlike ethologists, we are with the animals. They spend 24 hours watching them and see pure behavior with no human presence. We are the ones that differentiate ourselves a bit. We are the ones who feed, clean, etc.», he explained to Sul Informação.
The keepers are also the ones who handle the animals, in case of need. “If we or they [the ethologists] detect a problem, we talk to the veterinarians and, from there, we act as a group, the whole center. We talked and tried to find the best solution».
“There are two types of animals. On the one hand, we have the breeders, which are the ones who will stay in captivity for life, so they have to get used to us. Also because, if they are afraid of us, this can create a situation of stress prolonged period, which is harmful to animals and to reproduction, which is one of the main objectives of the program», added Vanessa Requeijão.
Then there are the offspring for reintroduction. “Those yes, they must have as little contact with us as possible. It is obvious that it is impossible for them not to see us. Once a week we have to go in there to clean. We also scare them. In this case, they are fed in such a way that they do not see us directly».
As can be seen, within this center, where 29 lynxes currently live, there are very different realities. In fact, falling into routine will hardly be one of the occupational risks in this area of work.
«Working in a center of this type does not have a very consistent routine, as it follows the Iberian lynx breeding calendar. Every three months, the function of the CNRLI specializes in a certain area and the routine changes depending on the phase we are going through», illustrated Rodrigo Serra.
Currently, the breeding season is in progress. In November, the focus was on re-introduction training for the offspring, which are expected to be released into the wild between February and early March.
"Here we privilege tranquility and non-contact with humans of the lynxes to be reinstated and the work of behavioral assessment of these animals, to understand whether or not they are fit to be released," said the director of the center.
However, in December, the pairing was done, with a view to the new breeding season. The breeding animals were anesthetized and captured, as "every three years we have to pick them up for health control". At the end of the month, copulations began and the new breeding calendar began.
All this work has to be done carefully. “It's a fine balance. On the one hand, we don't want to lose natural behaviors, everything that allows the offspring to learn from their parents, in order to survive in the wild. In other words, we cannot intervene too much. But, at the same time, we have animals with natural behavior problems that result from their being kept in captivity, which is not a natural state for the Iberian lynx», summarized Rodrigo Serra.
The head of the CNRLI stressed that, when the lynx recovery project, which involves Portugal and Spain, began, “there were no lynxes in captivity in any zoo. Those were the ones who were used to found the program and they remain very wild».
«We have here Artemisa and Madagascar, to give two examples, which were born in the wild and were incorporated in order to bring their genetics to the program. In other words, their behavior is still very wild», he recalled.
This, on the one hand, «is good and to maintain», but, on the other, it requires special attention. «When we confine an animal like this to a thousand square meters, behavioral problems arise that need to be addressed, through environmental enrichment work and so on».
«But this is one of the great riches that this program has: they are animals that are original, in behavioral terms, and I believe that this is one of the main roots of the project's success», concluded Rodrigo Serra.
The CNRLI is managed by ICNF and is financed, to a large extent, by the company Águas do Algarve, which, in addition to having built the centre, ten years ago, as a compensation measure for the construction of the Odelouca dam – following strong pressure from environmental protection associations – contributes 300 thousand euros a year to the operation of the centre. The rest of the necessary funding is guaranteed by ICNF, a public institute, and European Union Funds.
Photos: Hugo Rodrigues|Sul Informação and CNRLI/ICNF
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