Riga Zoo will celebrate its sixth anniversary

By age, lynxes born on May 27 have reached the age of 16 and are beginning to prepare for adult life. It has been at least a month since the taste of mother’s milk has been forgotten and parents now categorically do not want to get involved in games with young people, who are no longer different from their mother in height, said Lielkalns.

In nature, this is the age when lynxes are already fully helping their mother in the hunt and are going to become independent. At the half-year-old zoo, on the other hand, lynxes have not had enough pleasant meetings with veterinarians to carry out all the necessary chipping and vaccination procedures that are inevitable for European endangered animals to be fully registered in the European Lynx Book (ESB).

The appearance of the notorious lynx in the world this year was a surprise, because the 10-year-old lynx Rubin with the less than 3-year-old lynx Dadzi is a “veteran” of the Riga Zoo. was introduced just last winter.

In many parts of Europe, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and, including the northern lynx of its subspecies in Latvia (Lynx lynx lynx), is seriously endangered in the wild and it is very important to keep it fully captive, so since 2002 all data on lynx in zoos and elsewhere in captivity have been compiled in the European Lynx Pedigree.

The newly established lynx of the Riga Zoo have no relatives in European zoos, which makes the potential offspring of this lynx pair especially valuable within the framework of the European lynx conservation project. In total, after participating in the lynx breeding program for 20 years, lynx born in Riga and the Riga Zoo branch “Cīruļi” have been sent to zoos in Estonia, Lithuania, Scotland, Finland, Spain, Hungary, Ukraine and elsewhere. Conservation of endangered species in captivity is a rather complicated process, the aim of which is to preserve a set of genetically valuable specimens of endangered animal species in captivity.

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