The Ghost of Our Woodland A wildcat mother comforts her kittens upon a bed of packed grass sheltered by the thorns, flowers and berries from within a lattice of bramble repeating endlessly into the forest. In search of food, she leaves her young in pursuit of game, weaving through the royal-crested ferns to scale a cascade of moss-eaten rocks to a summit. Her fur, lit by the pale morning sun, is a painting of ochre and cream. Her eyes filled with the verdant green of the alpine wilderness. The Scottish wildcat stands upon this existential precipice to be pushed to its death by the invisible hand. It is a necessity that I preface this article with an explanation of the historical and anatomical differences between the Scottish wildcat, Felis silvestris, and the common household cat, Felis catus. The Scottish wildcat is a beast wholly unto itself and can be in no means compared to the domestic shorthair. Unlike our sweet, docile tabbies who live a state of perpetual repose by the fireplace or upon a cushioned sofa, the Scottish wildcat has been carved, from its inception, by the biting winds of the adversity and conditioned by merciless rule of natural law. These very different environmental pressures have produced two very different felines. The domestic cat has thinner, shedding fur, owing to desert-origin, compared to the silvestris’ fur thickened for insulation against the showers and hail granted from our Scottish climate. Wildcats are equipped with both longer legs and broader paws for rambling over mountainous terrain and typically a quarter larger in overall size, with an average female specimen being of equal size to a male domestic shorthair. Our bewhiskered pets possess a tapered, ribbon-like tail that are out-flanked by the wildcat tail; thick, bushy and enringed with black until its end as though it has been dipped into ink. The eye of the domestic cat embodies the various colours of cut gems; the wildcat eye is only of polished emerald. The wildcat had embarked on its evolutionary path of liberty and adventure over nine-thousand years ago following the deglaciation period of the last Ice Age, supported by remains dated to 9600 to 10050BC in Thatcham in Berkshire corresponding to the time of forest reestablishment in the South of England. This new, unexplored land, recaptured from the retreating ice, beckoned a mass migration of animals to such an extent that this unoccupied isle was suddenly the host of a complex ecosystem, with the wildcat being one of the carnivoran fauna to make enormous gains the wars of succession over the entire island. If this powerful, sly and skilful animal gifted with a brave heart and adventurous spirit had such a brilliant start, then why are they seemingly absent from our ecosystem? James Ritchie, Scottish naturalist, writes in ‘The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland’, ‘At a time not very remote, [the wildcat] roamed the whole of the mainland, and in earlier days, even found a home on the islands…’ Mr Ritchie then provides a timeline of a century of death that obliterated the population of our national felines, motivated chiefly from the protection of livestock and gamebirds following centuries of deforestation. The presence of the wildcat has been absent long from the centres of urban development, the cities and suburbs, housing our populations stretching across the central belt of the country. Yet, in the wilds of the surrounding areas and the provincial districts of Scotland, the wildcat had established a period of societal cohabitation to bestow nomenclature upon a variety of local sites once harbouring its presence. This is the case for the land north of the Solway Firth of Dumfries and Galloway which has in its possession places titled as ‘Wild Cat Wood’ and ‘Wildcat Craig’. In Berwickshire remains the legacy of the Felis silvestris with locations under the name of Wulcatt Yett, Cat-Leeburn, and Cat-Cleugh in Roxburghshire. In 1830, the wildcat was ousted from the border counties north of the Solway Firth, with the final one killed in Berwickshire in 1849. Moving from the far lowlands and north of the central valley of Scotland, the forests at the mouth of the Moray firth fell silent of wildcat mewing in 1830 and 1842 being the death date for Stirlingshire wildcats, with the final two souls of Kincardineshire wildcats joining their fallen feline kin in 1850. The Don Valley eradicated the wildcat in 1862 with Glen Tanar extinguishing their feline flame in 1875. A decade of wildcat persecution from 1776 to 1786 by Braemar parishes resulted in the deaths of 44 wildcats. Far from the light of man within Scotland’s areas of heavy forest cover, the wildcat found no refuge; the trapping and subsequent death of a wildcat in 1857 ended the Perthshire breed; the removal of the last wildcat from Loch Awe occurred in 1864 and with Inverness-shire losing the Felis silvestris in 1873. James Ritchie writes, ‘…and now they have been exterminated throughout the whole of that mountainous country, even to the wilds of Rannoch.’ These efforts were not undertaken by the process of accident and error, but by active encouragement from landed gentry. Financial rewards were offered in exchange for wildcat heads on the estate of the Duchess of Sutherland, culminating in the mass killing of 901 animals divided between wildcats, pine martens and other woodland inhabitants. James Ritchie finishes this sobering chapter with a morose conclusion, ‘…the Wildcat in Scotland has proceeded rapidly on the path to extermination and there is little likelihood of it ever regaining lost ground…’ Writing in 1920, James Ritchie composed the book without the knowledge about the approaching land reforms that would grip our country and the monumental effect this reformation would have for wildcat populations. The creation of the Forestry Commission saw the replanting of thousands of woodland acres which increased the coverage of land suitable for accommodating the wildcat. The economic fallout from the First World War caused the decline of hunting as a pastime which lessened the demand for strict control and protective provisions being placed upon the game to shield them from the claws of our ferocious predator. Combined, these developments caused a rebirthing of wildcat numbers to levels unseen for centuries. It very much was a proliferation of feline life, with these apex predators regaining ground as far south as the central belt, where they reigned at healthy levels for three decades spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, according to field studies concluded in 1991 by Nigel Easterbee. Again, the same question must be asked; if there was such a success story, why is our land bereft of wildcats? Despite their population explosion, there was a lack of account for the influence posed by the domestic shorthairs now present in the country in ever-greater numbers. In the age of the glacier with its infinite winter, the Felis catus was not even in existence, with its Egyptian ancestors not to court the hearts of humans for at least 5000 years after Felis silvestris set their green eyes towards the white of Dover. The tabby arrived on these pebbled shores in the Iron Age at the earliest period, shown from a 1979 discovery of kitten bones at an archaeological site by Robert Harcourt in Dorset. A consequence of clearing the forests during that same historical chapter was the retreating of the wildcat to the sparsely-populated regions of this island along with its gradual drop in numbers. The future expansions in the industries of agriculture and of urbanisation led to an increase
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