European links can be claws for celebration in long-term bid to boost endangered wildcats
Scots team looks at Spain and Sweden option
Scotland’s critically endangered wildcat population could be bolstered using animals from Spain, it can be revealed.
The Saving Wildcats partnership, led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), is working to restore Scotland’s critically endangered wildcat population by breeding and releasing them into the wild.
Until now, wildcats from a captive breeding programme across the UK have been paired up at a centre in the RZSS Highland Wildlife Park near Kingussie in Invernessshire. Last year, the first set of kittens was released into the Cairngorms Connect Landscape within the National Park, with up to 20 more set to be released this summer.
There are no immediate plans to introduce wildcats from mainland Europe to the programme, but the option would enable the project to expand the genetic diversity in Scotland’s wild population, which could be key to securing the species’ future. Enclosures have been built in Sweden where wildcats from mainland Europe could be bred for the Scottish population. Animals would be taken to Nordens Ark, a conservation zoo in Sweden and one of the Saving Wildcats project partners, with their captivebred offspring later being transported to Scotland. This method could help circumvent challenges in transferring “wild” animals from the continent direct to Scotland, exacerbated by Brexit. It is thought animals from northern Spain could be most likely.
David Barclay, Saving Wildcats Conservation Manager, said: “It hasn’t happened yet but it’s another arm to the strategy that we’re exploring. We’ve had discussions and meetings with colleagues in Europe and we’ve been looking at the logistics of it. “The cats in Europe are the same subspecies – it was confirmed in 2017 – so the justification for the Scottish population to have been deemed a unique subspecies is just not there.
“It just leaves that door open for us to be able to look at bringing some in to increase the gene pool, but we do still have to look at that European population and see which region would be the most appropriate, both from a genetic and phenotypic perspective, and then from an ecological perspective there are other considerations that we need to take into account. An area that’s been of interest and we’ve been exploring has been northern Spain. We’ve got evidence that the population in northern Spain is genetically similar to the Scottish population and, phenotypically, they actually look quite similar to the Scottish population.”
He added: “We do work with Nordens Ark in Sweden who have their own conservation breeding centre for their native species and we have built two breeding enclosures for wildcats.
“That just gives us a bit more flexibility because if we bring animals from the wild from Europe there’s a range of disease screening and requirements that we have to do. It may be that by using one of our partner facilities in Sweden we can allow them to breed the cats and then we bring the offspring here and that process is actually a lot easier than bringing wild animals.”
Saving Wildcats aims to release about 20 kittens each year over three years.
Currently set to run until 2026, the project is likely to be just the first step in a long-term recovery effort.
Barclay said: “We like to think that this is going to be a tool for wildcat conservation long into the future and we’ve certainly built it in that way to have a legacy for future projects.”