Steve Piper writes: I hope you all enjoyed the beautiful photos of Macavity the Scottish wildcat kitten in the new magazine, all taken at Wildwood wildlife park last year when he was born, he almost looks an adult now, no less beautiful but a little less cute and a lot more dangerous! Those of you living near Canterbury should think about getting a look at him and his parents Hamish and Flora at Wildwood, where we hope to have the new walkways installed very soon, we’ll let you know when and put up photos too!

As you know the appeal is still running and next we hope to install the next set of walkways at Port Lympne Wildlife Park also in Kent (the July magazine will have interviews from both parks and pictures of the Port Lympne wildcats!). This is the park which manages the captive breeding program so we think it’s an ideal spot for a walkway; apologies to those of you not in the south east, unfortunately a lot of the breeding parks are clustered there, rest assured we will be helping the other centres around the country as well and if you’re in the Highlands get down to Highland Wildlife Park near Aviemore which already has a set donated by a local company.

This week I thought I would answer a group of questions I get asked a lot about the exact relationships between wildcats and domestic cats and why it’s a Scottish wildcat instead of a British one!

The short version of the evolutionary story (there’s a long version on our website if you fancy it!) goes back 12 million years when the first wildcat evolved in Europe, it was the first true small cat to evolve in the world and quickly colonised the dense forests of the continent eventually forming into what we call today the European wildcat, which looks similar to the Scottish ones, just a little smaller and less stripy! The UK was attached to Europe at points throughout this time and we have 2 million year old wildcat fossils found here, though they have probably been here much longer.

It was only in the last few hundred thousand years things got really interesting as successive ice ages spread glaciers into Europe and killed off the forests; each time the wildcats moved south into Asia and Africa. As things warmed up again the European wildcats went back north as the forests re-grew, whilst some stayed behind, evolving a thinner coat and slender body to survive the hot weather, and adapting their camouflage into different shades of brown stripes and spots to fit in with the world around them.

Over time, five distinct wildcats developed; the heavy coated, muscular, stripy and aggressive Europeans, the light coated, slender, reasonably friendly and variously striped and spotted Africans, Near Easterns and Asiatics, whilst in China the thick coated and little known Chinese Mountain Cat appeared across a small region as well.

Approximate modern ranges of the wildcat family, with some prominent gaps through Europe and Asia

In the midst of all this, around 120,000 years ago, an agricultural community in the Middle East realised that the local Near Eastern wildcats were well worth having around as they were great at killing off agricultural pests. Just five female cats in that small community became the founding mothers of every domestic cat alive today; their young spread across the region, eventually meeting Egyptians, Phonecians and other traders who would spread them deep into Asia and Europe.

The descendants of those five cats were progressively bred on purpose or by accident with each other and their local wildcats creating much of the diversity of body shapes we see today; so even in my two moggies I can see that the big thick coated moody one undoubtedly has distant European wildcat ancestors, whilst the tiny thin coated friendly one with her high cheekbones undoubtedly traces back to Asia.

The genes of those original five females can be found today in my cats, your cats, every one of the UK’s 8 or 9 million cats and every single domestic cat, feral and moggy on the entire planet. Of course, for all their wonder, these new domestic cats and their human friends started causing big problems for the wildcats around them. The domestic cats were bred in huge numbers which began to mate into the wild genepool, whilst we got busy hacking down forests and building cities; European wildcats in particular have disappeared across something like 70-80% of their original range because of human development and hunting.

In the UK, we had the good fortune to get our very own form of wildcat which classes as a sub species of the European wildcat. Around 9000 years ago as the ice age glaciers melted the English Channel formed and our population of European wildcats was isolated here. They seem to have stayed quite similar to the European wildcats, really beginning to diversify in Scotland due to the fearsome weather and the incredible patchwork of habitats that emerged as human deforestation really took hold.

Whilst the European wildcat tended to stay a forest specialist that quickly disappeared with the forests, the Scottish form developed a bigger body and thicker coat to deal with a more open environment, and learned to hunt a wide range of species over every habitat available to it, so a modern wildcat territory always includes a mixture of habitat types and that’s what really defines them as a Scottish wildcat rather than a British one, now that England has changed so much from the ancient forests as well, the Scottish form should be suitable for reintroduction around the more remote areas of the north and maybe even Wales as well in the future.

A typical Scottish wildcat territory full of different prey types

Forest, meadow, farmland, river, wetlands and mountains all played host to the determined survivor that is the Scottish wildcat and even as the forest cats disappeared from England, Wales and southern Scotland the Highlands population held on and only began to really decline as shooting estates and persecution increased through the Victorian era, along with the influx of domestic ferals watering down the genepool.

People often tell me the demise of the wildcat is just evolution, with feral cats filling the niches, and it’s true that feral cats can carry out many of the essential ecological duties of the wildcat, but the truth is they never really fit in and have a pretty miserable lifestyle!

In Scotland many ferals simply die from exposure, kittens are predated on by huge birds of prey their mother’s can’t defend them from, and they’re born year round so mortality is high for those that open their eyes in winter months with freezing snow and no food, of course they can also live communally, so habitats can become infested with domestic ferals wiping out prey species and spreading various diseases; it’s a cat designed to live in a much warmer climate alongside people.

By comparison the solitary wildcat, which no other Scottish species dare cross (there’s a famous Highlands story of a wildcat mother bringing down a golden eagle that swooped for her young), is perfectly evolved for the weather, gives birth just once a year in earliest spring so her young have the summer to grow up in and is so independent that any disease never spreads or exists in any great amount.

Like all things in nature, they are perfectly balanced to the world they live in, and removing just a little bit of the persecution, humanely removing those feral cats that just aren’t meant to be there and supporting it all with captive reintroductions will see the wildcat quickly reclaim it’s land. It’s not nearly time for the wildcat to become extinct yet, in fact it’s far more likely to survive even the most apocalyptic global warming scenarios than we are; all we have to do is make some small changes and the amazing creature that is the wildcat can do the rest.