Can Lynx Be Saved in the Balkans?

I am in the back of a crowded jeep in late March. Outside, in the early Albanian spring, fat rain falls hard. A shepherd drives a sea of goats down the narrow road—they part around our car like a river around a stone. My goal is to see a Balkan lynx, but chances are slim.

Lynx, Europe’s iconic medium-sized cat, are famously elusive. They are solitary and silent, traveling and hunting by night through high mountain forests. By the 1950s they were nearly exterminated on the continent. Today, through extensive conservation efforts, lynx are regaining territory. But in the Balkans, that trend is reversing. Only three remnant populations of the Balkan subspecies, Lynx lynx balcanicus, remain. After surviving the last ice age, the mass extirpation of large carnivores and countless wars, they are now critically endangered. Scientists estimate 20 to 39 individuals remain.

In the front of the car, Bledi Hoxha, a biologist for the Tirana-based nonprofit Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, pulls memory cards from his pockets. Biologist Dime Melovski of the nonprofit Macedonian Ecological Society opens his laptop. We spend the day hiking to remote camera traps and gathering them on behalf of the Balkan Lynx Recovery Program, a coalition fighting to protect the critically endangered lynx from extinction.

I watch as the scientists review the memory cards. The first holds nothing: a few blank-eyed roe deer, a blurred boar, cattle, dogs. The next few are the same. Melovski sighs. He inserts the last. Shepherds, more deer and then: “A lynx!” Hoxha cries. The lynx is caught mid-stride, tawny coat and black spots illuminated by the flash. It looks affronted, like a startled house cat. Lynx have unique spot patterns, allowing the scientists to identify individuals. The scientists think this might be a new one, a sign of hope for the species in a region marked by devastating habitat loss.

The missing lynx

In 1988, the Environment Conservation and Management Division of the Council of Europe commissioned the first-ever comprehensive assessment of the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), which includes the Balkan subspecies. The cats were a topic of fervent discussion in countries like Switzerland, Germany and France, where, by the 1970s, they had gone extinct. Some biologists were eager to begin reintroduction efforts, but this required looking to places where lynx had not yet disappeared. How many were left? And where?

Swiss biologists and husband-and-wife team Christine and Urs Breitenmoser rose to the task of compiling all known information about lynx in Europe. “It was clear, then, that the Balkan subspecies was highly threatened,” Urs says. But information was scarce. The subspecies was only mentioned by two scientists. The first, Ivan Buresh, “the patriarch of Bulgarian biology,” christened the subspecies Lyx lyx [sic] balcanicus in an obscure 1941 museum folio. He was basing his classification in part on a living individual obtained by the Imperial Zoological Garden in Sofia, Bulgaria, from what is today neighboring North Macedonia. Later, in the 1970s, a Serbian mammologist named Đorđe Mirić conducted a more thorough analysis of lynx skull specimens collected around the Balkans. Mirić’s efforts, published in German, introduced the isolated cat to the wider scientific community.

But by the time the Breitenmosers set about compiling their report, the two men were gone, as were the high days of Yugoslavian science. Based on questionnaires the Breitenmosers mailed to biologists across the Eurasian lynx range, Urs concluded the Balkan subspecies were likely isolated in the mountainous borders of then-Yugoslavia and Albania, northwest of Greece. But a formal study was needed. Basic questions about the Balkan cats remained unknown: Were they indeed a separate subspecies? Where, exactly, were they? How many remained? Did they hunt livestock? Answering these would require field studies and international cooperation.

Unfortunately, this was the 1980s, and Albania had long been sealed from the world under communist dictator Enver Hoxha, whose death in 1985 would lead to a democratic transition early the following decade. “There was no way to get information in or out. No phone lines, not even mail,” says Urs. The Breitenmosers’ data for Albania was provided by an Albanian biologist who had escaped to Romania. But he was not a cat specialist and admitted his knowledge was neither accurate nor current. When Albania opened in 1991, the dissolution of neighboring Yugoslavia was well underway. Violence and ethnic tension, particularly in the mountainous border regions where the lynx were rumored to live, made fieldwork impossible. In 1998, the war in Kosovo erupted, and then an armed conflict in North Macedonia. Finally, in 2005, stakeholders met. The Balkan Lynx Recovery Program was born.

Today, program partners include environmental nonprofits from each of the Balkan lynx range countries, including those represented by Bledi Hoxha and Dime Melovski. The team has isolated three lynx population hot spots: Munellë and the Valamara region, both in Albania, and Mavrovo National Park in North Macedonia. Since the recovery program began, Melovski and his team have been studying the lynx population in Mavrovo National Park intensely, conducting surveys, erecting camera traps and, most recently, capturing live lynx to track their movements with radio telemetry collars. Their methods have taken a few seasons to refine.

“I would receive [an automatic] call at 2 a.m. and race to the trap,” Melovski says, a smile playing at the edge of his lips, “only to find a very scared dog.”

The team in North Macedonia partnered with local engineering students to improve their traps. Each year they tinker with the design a little, in response to the season’s trials.

Hunters and poachers

Gauging public attitudes toward carnivores is crucial for their conservation. Rural residents, hunters and livestock breeders are often the first to be affected when predator territory expands. Public perceptions of carnivores have been extensively studied around the world, with conservationists trialing different ways to mitigate conflicts with stakeholders—from paying ranchers for animals lost to predation to using specialized guard dogs to protect herds.

Accordingly, one of the Balkan Lynx Recovery Program’s first tasks was to conduct a baseline survey of locals. The scientists aimed to identify any potential conflicts between humans and lynx that would become an obstacle to their recovery in the region. When Melovski and his team reviewed the results, they encountered widely held fear. A common myth rumored that lynx wait in trees to attack humans from above. Most interviewees could not answer basic facts about the cat’s appearance.

Thousands of acres of lynx habitat are owned and managed by hunting societies and livestock breeders, and this can lead to problems. If hunters don’t know lynx ecology, they are more likely to over-hunt lynx prey, like roe deer, hare and chamois. And if shepherds think lynx are a threat to their livestock, they are liable to kill them despite the moratorium.

Melovski and his team realized protecting lynx in the region would require educating the people living in their habitats. They decided to partner with local hunters to live-trap the cats for telemetry collaring. Their hope is that by collaborating with hunters, they can both educate them on the importance of not over-harvesting and transform their love for wilderness into on-the-ground lynx advocacy. “What better way to cooperate with hunters than to hunt?” says Aleksandar Stojanov, another Macedonian Ecological Society biologist. “Trapping is a form of hunting. They really get into it.”

After the camera survey is complete, I accompany Melovski and Stojanov to disable one of these traps at a hunting society’s compound near Mavrovo.

A member of the hunting group waits beside the trap, rain dripping from his neon orange hat. Melovski works quickly to disable the trap for mating season. The hunter excitedly demonstrates the features of his new cameras to the visiting scientists. When Melovski finishes disconnecting the trap’s trigger, the hunter beckons us to the compound for coffee. Inside the lodge, trophies of wild boar, roe deer, eagles and bears hang from plywood walls. The hunters greet the scientists like old friends, offering seats on antler-legged chairs.

According to a press release from Hoxha’s Albanian nonprofit, 14 cats have been killed since 2006. The poachers, according to the scientists I spoke to, are often city-dwellers who travel to lynx territory for leisure killing and trophy collecting. This differentiates them from local, licensed hunters, who kill deer, boar and other legal prey for meat. Although killing lynx is illegal in every range country, consequences are rare. In 2020, Hoxha’s environmental nonprofit received a tip about a taxidermy lynx displayed in a local restaurant. Pictures of the slain cat on the restaurant’s Facebook page matched the spot pattern of one the team photographed in Munellë. The team fought hard to get a case about the animal heard, but a court dismissed it.

“We have nice laws here, sophisticated laws. But we don’t have justice. And those two things are separate,” says Fatos Lajçi, head of an environmental nonprofit in Kosovo called Environmentally Responsible Action. He routinely catches poachers on his cameras in Bjeshkët e Nemuna National Park and submits them to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he says the cases sit unheard.

The researchers are frustrated by what they consider mismanagement at every level of government. According to Melovski, the governments care about national parks only for their value as tourist draws, not for their biodiversity.

Fragmentation and loss of habitat

Researchers say the flurry of large construction projects in the region, combined with deeply rooted corruption and poor environmental oversight, is catastrophic for the fragile lynx population. “In these post-conflict areas, development overshadows environmental disaster,” Lajçi says. “And we suffer for it.”

The problem is especially acute in Albania. This year, on February 22, the parliament quickly passed an amendment to the protected area law. It opens the door for development in national parks when a project is deemed of strategic importance.

Aleksandër Trajçe, the executive director of Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, looks strained on our short video call. I catch him in between a meeting about an airport the government is building in the Vjosa River delta and a meeting about a proposed solar power plant in lynx territory. “The infrastructure boom that happened elsewhere in Europe after the Second World War has come to the Balkans,” he says. “Everything you can imagine is being built. Power lines, dams, hydropower plants, wind farms, solar, airports, highways, railways … and all of that, of course, will have very serious effects on this already fragile population.”

According to Vox News Albania, Minister of Tourism and Environment Mirela Kumbaro said the changes to the protected area law will only affect specific places designated for “elite tourist activities, ecotourism, agrotourism or high-level tourism, within the very strict criteria approved by the ministry and the National Territorial Council.”

But Hoxha doubts the legitimacy of impact assessments performed by the government. Albania is one of the most corrupt states in Europe, according to Transparency International, and locals feel it. When not planned carefully, development creates many problems for wildlife. Access roads cut for construction allow poachers who target lynx prey and loggers who destroy the cat’s habitat to penetrate deeper into previously remote terrain. They also sever bio-corridors between populations, and lynx are trapped in smaller and smaller pockets of functional ecosystems.

Given their low population numbers, lynx are already in trouble genetically. Melovski suspects inbreeding among the small population, which has been suggested by recent studies. Gene flow among their three remaining hot spots is crucial for survival of the species, but it is increasingly dangerous for the cats to travel between mountain ranges. Lajçi believes one lynx, found dead in Kosovo in 2017, likely perished due to an arduous journey through prey-less, developed terrain while searching for a mate. He and his team are lobbying for better environmental protection, but progress is slow.

Later in the evening I accompany Melovski and Stojanov to dinner with an Albanian hunting society. Ethnic Albanians in North Macedonia are a historically marginalized minority. Melovski and Stojanov don’t speak Albanian. The hunters don’t speak Macedonian. Nevertheless, the dinner lasts three hours, the men exchanging phones like proud fathers, comparing lynx photos. The hunters and the scientists have managed to find common ground in their love for this unique and threatened cat, a notoriously difficult task even without the additional gulf of ancient ethnic tension.

“It’s remarkable, the changes emanating from this partnership,” Melovski says. “On the local level, huge changes are occurring. Corruption hampers everything we try to achieve nationally, but the bottom-up approach gives us hope.”