Wildcat app a far cry from cards in PG Tips
PICTURE the scene, I was 18-years-old and walking in Agyll’s Knapdale Forest, my long curly hair and thirty-buttoned cheesecloth shirt blowing in the wind, as my three-quarter length Musquash fur coat, bought from Oxfam for 10 shillings, tried its best and failed to keep out the Highland winter.
Some sight; especially if you factor in the cowboy boots, purple loons and mascara. Camouflaged I wasn’t, but I was in the best place in Scotland to get up close and personal with Scottish wildcats, and tucked in my pocket was a card I had collected from a packet of PG Tips, I think , from a series of British Mammals to aid my identification.
I’d know one if I saw one I thought to myself, and indeed I did over the next 12 months - big males, family parties, and many fleeting glimpses at dusk and dawn.
I was working in a residential school which catered for children from inner-city Glasgow, and it was a toss-up between me and the kids for who had the widest eyes at this amazing place.
All these years later and I still know what this amazing cat looks like, but it is not so simple these days as hybrydisation has taken place with stray domestic tabbies and positive identification is fraught with danger, which in turn could lead to a much more catastrophic situation - the possible loss of pure-bred Scottish wildcats altogether.
The situation is not entirely new because I remember being told by a Forestry Commission deer stalker that the best way to distinguish between true blood and feral was the tail.
If the dark rings, which in the true wildcat are completely separate, were joined by a line, as though someone had run a paintbrush from base to tip, it was feral.
I was very pleased to hear this week of the innovative new website app to help people record sightings of the elusive feline, Scottish Wildcat Action (SWA) – the first official national initiative to help the species – and the Mammal Society are behind the new app.
Sightings can be reported online at www. scottishwildcataction.org or by using the Mammal Tracker app on iPhone or Android.
Scottish wildcats are one of the UK’s most endangered species. App users can report sightings of wildcats, hybrids and feral cats and, once verified, a sighting will be displayed on a map of Scotland. Officials from SWA will then decide on a course of action.
The Scottish wildcat is related to European wildcats but has lived in isolation since the English Channel formed after the last ice age, creating a distinctive and unique Scottish species. In contrast, thousands of feral or ‘stray’ cats living in the wild are descended from cats domesticated from the African wildcat living in the Near East.
Domestic cats, and particularly ferals, can threaten the survival of wildcats by transmitting disease. They also dilute the gene pool as they breed with wildcats.
Derek Crawley from the Mammal Society said: ‘The free Mammal Tracker App was originally set up for recording mammals of the South East of England.
“We are delighted to be upgrading the app so it can now contribute to the conservation and monitoring of mammals right across the UK.”
Scottish Wildcat Action is the first official national conservation plan with a vision to restore viable populations of Scottish wildcats north of the Highland fault line. It is committed to working with local people in wildcat priority areas to reduce the risks of hybridisation, disease and accidental persecution.
The Mammal Society promotes evidence-based conservation and delivers training courses to professionals and members of the public (www.mammal.org.uk/ training). It produces good practice conservation and mitigation handbooks and undertakes scientific research to improve conservation. It is currently conducting the official review of the conservation status and population size of British mammals for the English, Scottish and Welsh governments. Its Mammal Atlas, which tracks the change in mammal distribution over the last 20 years, will be published in early 2017.
For more details contact Charlotte Marshall from the Mammal Society at info@themammalsociety. org: 02380010985 or 07891495854.
As for me, I’m still an 18-year-old hippie at heart, but that outfit is long gone.