Bubbly threat to Spain's rare lynxes
Date: 30-Dec-02
Country: UK
Lynxes in Spain and Portugal are becoming critically endangered as their cork-forest habitat dwindles.
With demand waning for traditional corks in favour of synthetic stoppers in wine and champagne, farmers are felling the cork forests to make way for more profitable crops and the pointy-eared Iberian lynx could become one of the casualties.
"Clever propaganda by the manufacturers of screw tops and plastic corks has led many people to think that cork stoppers are bad for the environment when exactly the opposite is true," Beatrix Richards of the London-based Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF) said in a statement.
"Something radical must happen to save the lynx or it will be gone within the decade, making it the first feline species extinction since the sabre-tooth tiger," said Eduardo Goncalves, author of "The Algarve Tiger", a book about the Iberian lynx.
The nocturnal cat has a yellow coat dotted with deep brown spots and can grow to the size of a house dog, some 13 kg (28 lb).
Until recently, it was believed that some 1,000 Iberian lynxes - distant cousins of the American bobcat - prowled the grasslands of southern and central Spain and Portugal. But in the past year has that figure been revised down to below 200.
The WWF says only 30 breeding females are left and rare species of deer and eagle could also suffer from the destruction of the cork forests, which have long been a commercial mainstay of the region, producing 15 billion corks per year.
