Drusillas Park announce names of endangered Lynxes at zoo

The pair of Eurasian lynx brothers arrived at their new home at Drusillas Park following a £250,000 enclosure built to recreate their natural habitat in late May.

The zoo said the transfer of the pair followed a year of careful planning, including a quarter million pound construction project of a custom-built, naturalistic enclosure designed to recreate their native European woodland habitat.

Following the arrival the zoo called on the public to help come up with names for the animals.

After a couple of weeks of settling in to their new surroundings Drusillas announced that the animal’s new names are ‘Ash’ and ‘Friston’.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Drusillas said: “We had hundreds of naming suggestions, but these stuck out for us as a lovely nod to our local Sussex forests - those that these magnificent animals’ ancestors may have once lived in.

“Ash and Friston have really started to relax into their new home and are now becoming curious and coming to see what we’re all about. They really are breathtaking, as you can see by these photos they let us take.

The Eurasian lynx is a highly endangered species, protected under national laws and the EU Habitat Directive. They were once quite common in most of Europe, but populations became extinct, or their abundance has been dramatically reduced in the last two centuries due to hunting, landscape changes, and habitat fragmentation that hinder migration. In many areas, lynx were intentionally eradicated by humans.