A nine-month-old female lynx born at Newquay Zoo has become the UK’s first zoo-bred cat to be selected as a potential candidate for Europe’s prestigious Linking Lynx rewilding programme, marking a significant milestone in international wildlife conservation efforts.
The Carpathian lynx kitten, born on 29 May 2024, will begin her preparation journey for release into the wild in the coming weeks, pending successful completion of health checks and behavioural test. She is part of an ambitious project to strengthen wild populations across Europe’s mountain ranges from the Carpathians to the Alps.
The journey ahead is both ambitious and carefully planned. Within the next few weeks, if she passes all necessary examinations, she will be relocated to a specialised habituation facility in Germany, where she’ll spend a few months in a semi-wild environment. This crucial transitional period will allow her to develop the skills necessary for survival in the wild, while still under expert observation – a process made possible when the European Endangered Species Programmes (EEP) linked John Meek at Newquay Zoo with the Linking Lynx project and its European conservation partners, including Zoo Karlsruhe in Germany. If she does well during this preparation period, she will be released into the wild.
Dr Kathy Baker, Research Officer for Wild Planet Trust, commented: “This initiative not only demonstrates the vital role that forward thinking zoos can play in wildlife conservation, but also how important our visitors and local community are in supporting us. We are a charity, and every person who visits our zoos is directly contributing towards programmes like this that could help restore wildlife populations around the world. Our organisational mission is to help halt species decline, and this is fantastic example of the work we are doing to enable us to achieve this goal”
Posted On: 11/03/2025
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