Earlier this year, I started cataloguing over 60 years’ worth of field notebooks, diaries, lectures, papers and reports in the hope of writing books. Its time-consuming work, made more so by the number of fascinating letters and wildlife records which draw me back over the years. I’m surprised how often wildcat comes up although it seems I saw as many hanging dead from fences as I saw alive. In the 1960’s and 1970’s they were pretty widespread, whereas the other mid-sized carnivores were surprisingly scarce. Between 1960 and 1963, working as a full-time field ornithologist in the Scottish Highlands I failed to see a single pine marten despite actively searching for them. Badgers and otters were scarce, and I well remember an old crofter telling me that a fox he’d killed in 1952 was the first seen on the Black Isle for nearly a century.
I’m a great believer in history as an important part of successful wildlife management and essential to ecological restoration, nowadays called rewilding. It’s clear now that hybridisation with domestic cat has been at the root of the recent decline of the wildcat, but what of the other problems. My diaries don’t tell me, but I think I remember that the wildcats I saw, 50 years ago, whether alive or dead, all looked like wildcats rather than hybrids. Could it be that when wildcats were common, there was far less chance of them breeding with feral cats? Or catching diseases from them?
Clearly, in those days, killing by trap, snare, poison or gun reduced the numbers of mammals but that persecution seemed somehow to have a greater impact on the other middle-guild predatory mammals than on wildcats. May be because the others had more easily found resting and breeding dens. This almost certainly changed later in the century, when spotlights became an effective way of shooting predators at night, leading to the killing of more wildcats. Nowadays badger, pine marten, otter and fox (in some areas) are probably commoner than they have ever been in northern Scotland, yet wildcat is in serious decline. Could there be a link? Could the high numbers of its competitors put the wildcat at a disadvantage? I have a sneaking suspicion that it could.
With that thought, I believe it’s necessary to look at the bigger picture, not to concentrate solely on individual species but to think of those species’ place in larger ecosystems. We need to recognise that successful restoration of iconic species may be very difficult unless we think and act in a more holistic way. This brings me to the debate about lynx.
When I hear people say that we cannot bring back the lynx for fear of putting paid to the wildcat, I wonder if they really understand the functioning of ecosystems for wildlife conservation. I remember one winter riding through deep snow in a Carpathian forest and coming across a wildcat eating the remains of a roe deer under a hazel tree. I had earlier followed the footprints of a lynx along a forest track for maybe 2 km. My hosts, experts on large carnivores, knew exactly where I had seen the wildcat because they had seen it with its kill in the snow several days earlier. To them, lynx and wildcat were both simply part of the wildlife community in the mountains of Romania.
The return of the lynx to Scotland truly is an essential part of restoring nature to our country and re-establishing a functioning ecosystem to show the real benefits of rewilding. Instead of posing a threat to wildcat, the impact of lynx on fox and badger would undoubtedly, in my view, benefit the wildcat by reducing the numbers and ranging behaviour of its competitors. In the very long term, true recovery of wildcat may not be possible without restoring the lynx. Time to get on with it?
