This is 'Guadiato' a male lynx known from the Cordoba area - he wandered c.70km to get to Puerto Bajo!
ADDING IBERIAN LYNX TO MY COLLECTION OF 'TEA CARD STYLE' PHOTOS wasn’t something I’d imagined would ever be possible. Thanks to my friends at Wildwatching Spain I was able to rattle off hundreds of frames of this beautiful creature from a photo hide on the pretty Puerto Bajo estate in the Sierra de Andújar of Andalucia. I was lucky to have five sightings in three days, four from the hide, three of them very good indeed (a male and a female) and another male along the well-known public road south of the Embasle de Jandular. The first was so good that my shutter finger was still shaking after it! It takes a lot to get me that excited these days! The Sierra de Andújar is another lovely corner of Spain, just northeast of Cordoba, with a rolling landscape covered in Mediterranean scrub and Cork Oak/Strawberry Tree woodland. There is also a good population of rabbits here, the favourite prey of the lynx, thanks to a massive conservation effort, which now seems to be paying dividends in bringing this wonderful creature back from the brink of extinction. As everywhere in rural Spain, the food here is fantastic as well. It’s simple but I love waking up to a breakfast with toast, olive oil, the best in the world, pressed in the last month, fresh tomato spread and this year’s freshly squeezed orange juice. Shhhh it’s almost as good as the lynx! Thanks to Iñaki Reyero, Juan Carlos Poveda Vera and Fernando Prieto.
Guadiato takes a look at the photo hide, wondering what all the shutter noise is?
He pauses to look back over his shoulder as he crosses a country road.
In lovely early morning light the next day.
Iberian Lynxes are truly magnificent animals!
This is the adult female of the estate, 'Gema', only a little more slightly built than Guadiato.
She is also hunting for rabbits.
Gema checks out a rabbity old log.