Imagine a forest walk, a few decades hence. Your guide leads you between tall, twisty pine trees along a waymarked trail. The trees open up to grazing moorland and you follow your guide to a small, unobtrusive hide. You get settled in, prop your elbows on the shelf and rest your binoculars in your hands, and wait as the light slowly fades across your view of forest edge, rough tufty grassland and boulder-strewn slope. Excited, looking from rocks to rushes and back again, you imagine movement everywhere. A hunched shape that shifts minutely. A glimpse of a striped flank. The flick of a banded tail. Then you see real and definite movement – a tawny, striped animal appears in the mouth of a dark space between the stacked boulders way ahead. You hold your breath as you watch it stretch, fore and aft, and amble down towards you. Then, on its heels, two miniature versions of itself come skipping behind. The wildcat family heads off towards the forest edge and you watch them go, feeling astonished, overwhelmed and grateful.
That’s the dream, and if the ongoing conservation plans achieve their goals, that’s the reality in store for our future selves and future wildcats. The alternative – the worst-case scenario – is that we reach a point where we have to confirm that nothing that can be called a Scottish wildcat survives any more, only ferals and obvious hybrids, with each new generation of hybrids carrying a little less Scottish wildcat than the last. The Scottish wildcat as a living, complete entity would have ceased to be; it would exist only as a dispersed scattering of genes hiding in the cells of a dwindling number of slightly wildcat-like feral cats.
Right now, we’re a long way from either of these possibilities, but without current conservation efforts we’d already be well on our way to that worst-case scenario. And it wouldn’t take too much of a crisis to put us back on that path again, so we cannot afford to be complacent. Conservation work is costly and often the first thing to go when budgeting belts are tightened. You only need to look to other countries with less in the coffers than we have here in order to see that the will to save a species isn’t always enough – if the funding can’t be found, the work can’t be done and the species can’t be saved.
Let’s revisit our list of all 40 wildcat species in the world – this time with their IUCN conservation status. The threat levels that the IUCN uses for species that are extant in the wild are, in escalating order of seriousness, as follows: Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered. Only Least Concern is ‘safe’; all the other categories reflect a real risk of extinction in the not-too-distant future, the level of risk being assessed according to a range of factors. These include their estimated population size at present, the extent of habitat available to them, the type and seriousness of the threats they face, and whether they are currently declining (and if so, how rapidly).
Lion Panthera leo: Vulnerable
Jaguar Panthera onca: Near Threatened
Leopard Panthera pardus: Vulnerable
Tiger Panthera tigris: Endangered
Snow leopard Panthera uncia: Vulnerable
Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi: Vulnerable
Clouded leopard Neofelis nebulosi: Vulnerable
African golden cat Caracal aurata: Vulnerable
Caracal Caracal caracal: Least Concern
Serval Leptailurus serval: Least Concern
Pampas cat Leopardus colocola: Near Threatened
Geoffroy’s cat Leopardus geoffroyi: Least Concern
Güiña Leopardus guigna: Vulnerable
Southern tiger cat Leopardus guttulus: Vulnerable
Andean mountain cat Leopardus jacobita: Endangered
Ocelot Leopardus pardalis: Least Concern
Northern tiger cat Leopardus tigrinus: Vulnerable
Margay Leopardus wiedii: Near Threatened
Borneo bay cat Catopuma badia: Endangered
Asiatic golden cat Catopuma temminckii: Near Threatened
Marbled cat Pardofelis marmorata: Near Threatened
Canada lynx Lynx canadensis: Least Concern
Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx: Least Concern
Iberian lynx Lynx pardinus: Endangered
Bobcat Lynx rufus: Least Concern
Puma Puma concolor: Least Concern
Cheetah Acinonyx jubatus: Vulnerable
Jaguarundi Herpailurus yagouaroundi: Least Concern
Leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis: Least Concern
Sunda leopard cat Prionailurus javanensis: Least Concern
Flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps: Endangered
Rusty-spotted cat Prionailurus rubiginosus: Near Threatened
Fishing cat Prionailurus viverrinus: Vulnerable
Pallas’s cat Otocolobus manul: Near Threatened
Chinese mountain cat Felis bieti: Vulnerable
Jungle cat Felis chaus: Least Concern
African wildcat Felis lybica, including the domestic cat F. l. catus: Least Concern
Sand cat Felis margarita: Least Concern
Black-footed cat Felis nigripes: Vulnerable
European wildcat Felis silvestris, including the Scottish wildcat F. s. grampia: Least Concern
(IUCN 2018. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2018-2. www.iucnredlist.org.)
So that makes 15 species that are of Least Concern – the biggest single grouping. However, with seven Near Threatened species, 13 Vulnerable and five Endangered, there are 25 altogether that face some degree of threat. That’s nearly two-thirds of all the world’s cat species looking down the barrel of extinction, including all of the big cats. There’s another statistic to consider alongside this, too: the population trend. And if you thought the IUCN categories made for depressing reading, you may want to look away now. Of all these species, only one is increasing: the Iberian lynx, which has been pulled out of its previous Critically Endangered category thanks to concerted conservation efforts, including captive-breeding projects. Of the rest, six have a stable population (Geoffroy’s cat, serval, Canada lynx, Eurasian lynx, bobcat and leopard cat), and for two more (caracal and sand cat) the population trend is not known. The other 31 are all declining, which means they’re on their way to a higher-threat category if things don’t change for them.
Those five Endangered species are in trouble for a variety of reasons. The tiger – flagship animal of conservation as a whole – is most threatened by deliberate hunting to satisfy an enthusiastic black market for its body parts with their rumoured medicinal benefits. It’s hard to get your head around this but, as the wild tiger population has dwindled, this demand has only increased and the financial rewards for poachers are tremendous. Tigers are also fighting it out for space with growing human populations, and where people and tigers live in close proximity, tigers will kill livestock (and occasionally people), for which they are then killed in retaliation.
The rare and little-known Andean mountain cat is found in the high mountainous regions of the central Andes – the sort of terrain that should, in theory, keep it somewhat safe from human disturbance, but sadly this cat is targeted disproportionately by local hunters. It is considered too much of a threat to poultry and other small livestock, and it is also used for medicine and in ceremonies and festivals. The fact that it is legally protected in all of the countries where it occurs has, to date, not done much to diminish the problem. Heavy hunting of its preferred prey species is another of the factors that have brought its estimated wild population down to fewer than 1,400 individuals.
The Borneo bay cat lives only on the island of Borneo. A red- or grey-furred, long-bodied and puma-like animal, though only the size of a domestic cat, it occurs in dense forest, and dense forest is a fast-dwindling habitat on its home island. It is vanishingly rare, almost never seen in the wild, and (so far) does not thrive in captivity, so captive breeding may not be a valid way to increase its numbers (no more than 2,200, by the IUCN’s assessment).
I remember reading of the flat-headed cat in one of my favourite childhood books, a field guide to the world’s felines (I was a very geeky child). Its picture fascinated me – its small and low-set ears, coupled with bulging dark-amber eyes, gave it an almost lemur-like appearance. This weird little cat occurs on Borneo, Sumatra and the Malaysian Peninsula, and lives in swampy forests. It is very rare, its habitat is dreadfully pressured, and there are probably fewer than 2,500 left now. It has legal protection, but actual proactive conservation efforts are all but non-existent.
The only Endangered species – in fact, the only wild cat species – that is actually doing well at this moment in time is the Iberian lynx, and the success of its conservation scheme has both inspired and informed those working on Scottish wildcat conservation. This is a beautiful lynx, smaller and sleeker and more gracile than the Eurasian lynx, with particularly extravagant cheek frills and ear tufts. It formerly ranged across Spain and Portugal but today occurs in just two widely separated locations in southern Spain. I went to one of them, the Sierra de Andújar national park, in January 2013 in the hope of seeing it – and also perhaps seeing European wildcats, which also occur there.
I knew from my explorations of dense forests in northern Europe how small the chances are of bumping into a Eurasian lynx. It seemed intuitively right that to see the far rarer Iberian lynx would be even more difficult, and as I stood on a roadside, surveying a huge sweeping valley of rocky scrubland, my natural optimism did founder a little. But then I turned away from the vista to glance back down the way we had come, and my eyes met those of a real, live, perfect Iberian lynx, casually crossing the road a few metres away. It paused to scrutinise me coolly, then turned back the way it was going, reached the edge of the road and headed away downhill, quickly vanishing among the bushes and boulders.
Somehow I’d had the presence of mind to take a couple of pictures, even though the lynx was far too close to me to fit in the camera frame. They are among the closest-range photos I’ve ever taken of any wild mammal. I couldn’t quite believe my luck, but within the hour I had seen and photographed another two lynxes, from the same spot. Those three cats represented nearly 2 per cent of the world’s entire population of Iberian lynx at the time, estimated at just 156 individuals in 2012 by the IUCN (although that number is a threefold increase from the population in 2002).
This cat’s decline has a key cause that’s different again to the other four Endangered species: a catastrophic decline in its key prey species. Iberian lynxes eat rabbits – almost to the exclusion of anything else. Rabbits are native to Iberia and north Africa, and while their various introduced populations around the world are mostly thriving, here on their actual home turf they have suffered huge losses due to overhunting, habitat loss, and most importantly the impact of myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. Loss of rabbits meant loss of lynxes (inevitably lynxes were also persecuted, but it was the decline in the rabbit population that really did for them). Lynx conservation schemes, therefore, have had to also be rabbit conservation schemes, focusing on increasing rabbit numbers through reintroductions and habitat improvements. By imposing traffic calming measures, the project has also helped reduce the number of lynxes killed on the roads, and conservationists have also used captive breeding, reintroduction and relocation (between the two core sites). All of this work has helped the Iberian lynx recover its numbers enough to be pulled out of the Critically Endangered category into merely Endangered – there are more than 400 living wild today. But you don’t have to be any kind of biologist to know that a few hundred individuals is still a perilously tiny population. It will take many more years of concerted effort before the Iberian lynx’s future can be regarded as anything like secure.
So the Scottish wildcat is far from alone in being a cat on the edge, but its situation is probably even worse than any of the above species’. The IUCN doesn’t routinely assess subspecies, so it has no individual entry for the Scottish wildcat. However, at the time of writing, its account for Felis silvestris does mention wildcats in Scotland as follows:
Recent estimates have varied between 1,000 and 4,000 (compared to 1.2 million feral cats in Britain), but as few as 400 cats which meet morphological and genetic criteria for being the furthest from the domestic group may survive (Macdonald et al. 2004, Battersby 2005, Kitchener et al. 2005, Macdonald et al. 2010). If so, this population would be Critically Endangered (Kitchener et al. 2005).
The dangers facing the Scottish wildcat are well understood and, although they are difficult problems to tackle, there is a plan going forward that should work. The main worry and debate is really whether it is already too late, with the grampia genome perhaps already too diluted by domestic cat genes. This is almost more of a philosophical debate than a practical one. That even the ‘best’ wildcats carry some domestic genes seems beyond dispute now, so it’s our decision to make as to how much wildcat DNA is needed to deem a cat a real or even just a ‘good enough’ wildcat. Scottish Wildcat Action sets a high bar when selecting cats for their captive-breeding project. In their paper ‘Wildcat Hybrid Scoring For Conservation Breeding under the Scottish Wildcat Conservation Action Plan’, the organisation explains their decision-making on this as follows:
Any programme to bring ‘wildcats’ into a conservation breeding programme will have to set a threshold (based on judgement rather than a clear biological distinction) that balances the wish to preserve the genetic diversity encapsulated in the apparently non-pure wildcats from Scotland as part of a Scottish Wildcat Conservation Breeding Programme, versus the desire not to be too inclusive of domestic cat genes (and associated traits). Set the purity bar too high and the risk is that good wildcat genes are excluded, ‘good-ish’ cats are excluded as hybrids, and the population accepted into captivity is so small that it will experience a high level of inbreeding. Set the bar too low and we end up breeding something that is only slightly better than the situation in the wild.
The captive-breeding project is well established and running smoothly, and the stock of high-scoring cats grows each year – at the time of writing, there are about 80 of them. They are kept in such a way that natural behaviour is supported and encouraged as far as feasible. So how far away are we from a situation where it will be possible to start introducing some of these animals into the wild? A little way off yet, it turns out. There is more to do, and a lot of it starts with ordinary people who happen to live in wildcat country. Many more feral cats need to be neutered in the core wildcat areas, and more people need to be reached through educational programmes that encourage neutering and vaccination of pet cats.
The public’s involvement in documenting observations of free-living cats of all kinds is also invaluable. Scottish Wildcat Action’s new #GenerationWildcat campaign, initiated in 2017, is key to this. It calls on the public – including outdoor enthusiasts, farmers and gamekeepers – to join the fight to bring the Scottish wildcat back from the edge of extinction. Dr Roo Campbell, SWA Project Manager, says: ‘The time to save the Scottish wildcat is now. We are almost certainly the last generation who has a realistic chance of saving this iconic species from extinction in Scotland. Wildcats here face three key threats: hybridisation with feral domestic cats, disease and accidental killing.’ The project encourages everyone living in the areas where wildcats occur to:
1 report sightings of wildcats, living or dead (these can be logged through Scottish Wildcat Action’s website or via the downloadable ‘Mammal Tracker’ app – dead wildcats should be photographed carefully from all angles so that a full pelage score can be made)
2 report sightings of feral cats
3 make sure their own cats are neutered – this is particularly crucial in the priority areas of Morvern, Strathpeffer, Strathbogie, northern Strathspey and the Angus Glens.
It also asks that farmers keep their farm cats healthy and neutered, and that gamekeepers use cage traps instead of lamping/snaring to control feral cats, so that any wildcats caught in error can be saved. Perhaps the most user-friendly element of their advice, though, is a comprehensive guide on how to set up one’s own trail cameras to look for wildcats across Scotland.
Surveys of habitat quality, prey abundance and threat level must also be carried out to identify the places where wildcats are most likely to survive and thrive. The captive wildcats are precious – none of them should be sent out into the wild until we are reasonably certain that they have a good chance of surviving and breeding. When release does happen, there will need to be ways to monitor the cats as they make their way in the wild. Satellite tagging works beautifully to track individual wild animals in some circumstances, but because the batteries that power these devices are solar-charged and wildcats are mainly nocturnal, other ways may be better for them.
Another part of the process is habitat creation and enhancement. Scottish Wildcat Action has placed tracking collars on a few free-living wildcats over the last few years to discover how they use their habitats, and this has helped identify ways of making wild places more hospitable to wildcats. Sometimes this means clearing patches of forest, in order to encourage the mosaic of tree cover and open ground that wildcats prefer. It also means creating artificial denning sites as the lack of a good den can render otherwise perfect habitat no good for wildcats.
It’s exciting to read about the future plans for Scottish wildcat conservation – once you have made the mental leap that they all involve wildcats that are not quite pure. But, to glance backwards for a moment, the pure Scottish wildcat was probably doomed from the moment the first domestic cats set paw on our soil, long before our own wildcats were actually (just) Scottish. This begs the following question: what about wildcats elsewhere in Britain? Might we some day seek to return wildcats to England and Wales and even Ireland? And, if so, should they be Scottish wildcats or European wildcats? Derek Gow – an expert on mammal reintroductions and a key figure in the projects to return European beavers to our waterways – is in favour of introducing European wildcats to parts of Britain, highlighting that they could help control grey squirrel numbers and should have no negative impact on any native species. However, they would be vulnerable – just as Scottish wildcats are today – to hybridisation with domestic cats, and this risk would have to be mitigated. The question of what would happen if reintroduced European wildcats (subspecies silvestris) met native Scottish wildcats (subspecies grampia) is also a vexed one.
Reintroduction of the Eurasian lynx could happen within the next few years. This, too, could impact Scottish wildcats through competition rather than hybridisation – research on mainland Europe shows that European wildcats don’t fare so well in areas that hold lynxes. However, contact between the two is an unlikely scenario in Britain (at least, not for many generations) as lynxes will not be released in key wildcat areas.
The general principle of ‘rewilding’ has gathered great momentum as an ideological movement over the last couple of decades. The charity Rewilding Britain sets out the movement’s principles and goals on its website as follows:
Rewilding is the large-scale restoration of ecosystems where nature can take care of itself. It seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing species – allowing them to shape the landscape and the habitats within. Rewilding encourages a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive. It provides opportunities for communities to diversify and create nature-based economies; for living systems to provide the ecological functions on which we all depend; and for people to re-connect with wild nature.
We believe in four principles of rewilding.
1 People, communities and livelihoods are key. Rewilding is a choice of land management. It relies on people deciding to explore an alternative future for the land and people.
2 Natural processes drive outcomes. Rewilding is not geared to reach any human-defined optimal point or end state. It goes where nature takes it.
3 Work at nature’s scale. Rewilding needs sufficient scale so that nature can reinstate natural processes and create ecologically coherent units.
4 Benefits are for the long term. Rewilding is an opportunity to leave a positive legacy for future generations. It should be secured for the long term.
Rewilding projects cover reintroductions, habitat enhancements, restorations of ancient landscapes, more wildlife-friendly management of farmland, and much more. By their very nature they are on a grand scale. Reading about rewilding is hugely inspiring. One project, on the Knepp estate not far from where I live, has involved transforming an unprofitable and wildlife-depleted farm to a spectacular mosaic of natural habitats, which have attracted rare wildlife such as turtle doves, nightingales and purple emperors – and it remains a farm, too, but now it is a profitable farm. The same can be done anywhere, given the will and the work. Wildcat country is ripe for rewilding and the process is already beginning. The return of the wildcat itself is not the only goal, though. It’s just one part of a wider and wilder story.
The Scottish wildcat’s story is a singular tale of an exceptional animal facing an unusual and intractable range of problems, but it is still a component of the wider and wilder world. Only if we place this cat in context can we really see its problems and their solutions.
When I began this book I didn’t expect to be finishing it with a real sense of hope, but to my surprise I’ve learned that hope is indeed an option – the only option. The Scottish wildcat, with the help of all those who care for it, is fighting as fiercely as the wildcats of legend to survive and reclaim its lands. I, for one, wouldn’t bet against it.