Lynx offspring in the Northern Vosges

This is the first documented reproduction of the species in the Northern Vosges since its extinction in the 17th century.

Lycka was released on 20 March 2020 in Germany in the Palatinate Forest together with «Tarda», another female: they are the last two lynx to be relocated as part of the European LIFE reintroduction project. Lycka comes from Switzerland, was born in 2011 and lived in the canton of Neuchatel before being brought to the Palatinate Forest. At the time of release she weighed a good 20 kg: she is a strong and experienced wild animal.

A successful cross-border collaboration

Lycka wore a GPS collar transmitter so that her movements could be tracked by the cooperating German-French team. Thanks to this monitoring, we know that Lycka roamed through the contiguous forest area of the Palatinate Forest-Northern Vosges Biosphere Reserve and set foot on French soil at the end of March 2020. She then established a territory in the Northern Vosges. The restriction of her range at the beginning of June indicated a birth. The litter could be located and verified by the environmental inspectors of the Office for Biodiversity (OFB). Two healthy young animals of about three weeks old could be observed at the entrance of the den, with the mother nearby. This event was made possible by the LIFE programme, coordinated by the German partner, the Foundation for Nature and Environment Rhineland-Palatinate.

Two paths, one goal: what became of Lycka and Tarda

In 2021, the conservation status of the lynx in the Vosges was still highly precarious: only a dozen animals were counted across the entire massif, and Lycka was the only known female. Just how great the threat was became clear from the case of the illegal killing of an animal in the Vosges in early 2020, as well as the traffic accidents involving the lynxes Lucky and Labka in the Palatinate Forest.

Lycka remained faithful to her territory in the Northern Vosges and gave birth to a second litter in 2022, confirmed by the Bas-Rhin prefecture. Tarda, on the other hand, settled permanently in the German Palatinate Forest, in the district of Bad Dürkheim, and to this day is one of only five of the originally twenty released animals verifiably still living there. She too raised young, most recently in 2024 and again in 2025. No damage attributable to Tarda or her young is known.

From these initial individual animals, a small, cross-border network has since developed: by 2024, seven to eight lynxes from the reintroduction project had settled across the entire Vosges massif, at least four of them also in the central Vosges and the High Vosges. In the Palatinate Forest itself, the population is now estimated at around thirty animals.

October 2024: a tragic setback

How fragile the success remains became apparent in October 2024: in Niederbronn-les-Bains, in the heart of the Northern Vosges, a young lynx fled into a chicken coop and was beaten to death with a spade by the owner, who mistook it for a wildcat. A Strasbourg court sentenced the perpetrator to a suspended prison term and ordered compensation of over 30,000 euros to animal welfare organisations. More on this in the article «Erschlagener Luchs im Elsass: Frankreich bestraft hart, die Schweiz schweigt fast Lynx beaten to death in Alsace: France punishes harshly, Switzerland stays almost silent».

Nationwide, collisions with vehicles and illegal killings remain responsible for over 80 per cent of lynx mortality. Just how critical the population remains overall we set out in the article «France: lynxes close to extinction». In 2025, observers even recorded a decline in population dynamics in the Northern Vosges, with a lack of genetic diversity remaining the central problem. One conservationist put it in a nutshell: without measures, there would be no lynx left in the Vosges within thirty years.

2026: first active release as a change of course

The National Action Plan (PNA) 2022-2026 previously only provided for population reinforcements in consensus with hobby hunters and livestock keepers, and the national hunting association long rejected active reintroductions. In June 2026 there was a remarkable change of course: an orphaned young female lynx, which had been found helpless in the northern Vosges in September 2025, was nursed back to health by the GORNA care centre, named «Maguy» and, fitted with a GPS collar, released back into the wild in the central Vosges on 10 June 2026. It is the first release of a previously human-reared lynx in the entire Vosges massif.

The PNA expires at the end of 2026, and a mid-term review has not yet been made public. Conservation organisations such as FERUS and Centre Athénas are calling for genuine reintroduction programmes instead of further studies. Whether «Maguy's» release will actually lead to a new strategy or whether it remains an isolated case is likely to become clear in the coming years.