31/08/2026
We went to a nature park near Crieff while we were in Scotland to specifically see a wildcat, but alas, he was hiding.
The Highland tiger is not a cat that went wild. It is an animal that has been here since before there was a Scotland. 🐾
The Scottish wildcat is the last wild feline left in Britain. Its ancestors walked in after the ice retreated, seven or eight thousand years ago, and it lived across the whole island until forest clearance, persecution and the sporting estates pushed it back into the Highlands and then almost out of existence.
Up close it is nothing like a tabby. It is heavier through the chest, broader in the skull, and the tail is the giveaway. Thick, blunt at the end, and ringed with solid black bands that never join into a stripe along the top. There is no white on it anywhere. Its gut is longer than a domestic cat's, its brain proportionally larger, and it cannot be tamed, not even hand reared from a kitten, which is a thing keepers state very plainly.
What nearly finished it was not the gamekeeper's trap. It was interbreeding with feral domestic cats. In 2019 an international assessment concluded there was no longer a viable wild population left in Scotland at all, because almost everything remaining carried domestic ancestry.
So they built one. A dedicated breeding centre went up at the Highland Wildlife Park, and in the summer of 2023 nineteen wildcats were released into the Cairngorms, the first conservation release of wildcats anywhere in Britain. All but one survived the first ten months. They put on weight. And then kittens were born in the wild.
There are people standing in Scottish woodland tonight listening for an animal the experts had already written off. 🌲
Scotland lost it on paper first, which turned out not to be the same thing as losing it.
