Hi, I’m Helena, one of the conservation project officers for Saving Wildcats! 

My job is to work with local communities to understand how people can benefit from living alongside wildcats. I deliver sessions in schools just like yours, give presentations to community groups, attend lots of meetings and events and help with the project’s social media. I get to talk about wildcats all the time! 

Wildcats in Scotland are on the brink of extinction. For hundreds of years, they have been hunted, so the number of wildcats has fallen dramatically, their habitat has been cut down, so there are fewer places for them to live, and that combination means the few wildcats left have bred with feral and domestic cats as they couldn’t find other wildcats. Feral, domestic cats, like the cats we have at home, are a completely different species of cat, so when they breed with a wildcat the kittens are hybrids – part wildcat and part feral cat, which aren’t so well suited to living in their natural wildcat habitat. 

A study found that there weren’t even enough wildcats left for their population to recover without our help. The last hope for wildcats is to breed them in captivity and then release them into the wild. So, that’s what we did! 

Saving Wildcats is a European partnership project dedicated to Scottish wildcat conservation and recovery, essentially that means we’re working to give wildcats a future here in Scotland. It’s the latest of several projects working to save Britain’s last wild cat species but the first to focus on breeding cats for release!  

We have a special centre at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s Highland Wildlife Park in an area at the back of their main reserve because it is really important that our wildcats don’t get used to seeing people if they are to be released into the wild. 

Spring and summer 2022 was our first breeding season, and we had an amazing year, with over 20 kittens being born! Those individuals are now going to be released in June 2023, which is so exciting. We’ve been helping them get ready for a life in the wild, trying to tap into their instincts as predators so they will be able to catch prey like rabbits and voles, climb trees and make dens, everything a wildcat needs to be a wildcat. 

We’re hoping to release about 20 wildcats every year until 2026 and will put special collars on them so we can see where they go and learn lots about how they find a territory and a home in the wild. It isn’t unusual for male wildcats to move up to 10km in one night so the field team will have to be on their toes while tracking them! 

It’s going to take a long time and a team effort to save wildcats, while our keeper team are looking after wildcats and their kittens at Highland Wildlife Park, our field team are monitoring habitats around the national park to find the best release spots and monitor the wildcats, our vet team is making sure all the cats are healthy and neutering feral cats we find in the local area, and our project management team helps keep everyone on track! Local communities, that means you! are a big part of that team too, we need everyone to be a wildcat champion!