First year of wildcat restoration hailed big success - NatureScot

New research confirms that the first year of a project to reintroduce wildcats to Scotland was highly effective, with survival and reproduction rates exceeding expectations.

The study, published in a special edition of IUCN’s Cat News, concludes that breeding for release is an effective strategy for wildcat conservation, with 95 percent of released cats surviving their first ten months in the wild.

Approved under licence from NatureScot, and led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, the Saving Wildcats partnership carefully selected a number of wildcats to be bred and prepared for life in the wild at a specialist breeding-for-release-centre at Highland Wildlife Park, before releasing 19 individuals into the Cairngorms National Park in the summer of 2023. Those animals were initially all tracked using GPS radio collars.

The cats surpassed expectations, with all but one surviving the first ten months in the wild. Health checks post-release showed very few signs of injury or disease, and the cats put on an average increase of 20% in bodyweight during the monitoring period.

However, the research also confirmed that hybridisation, through interbreeding with domestic cats, remains a threat to the long-term future of the species. To tackle this, Saving Wildcats has been working in partnership with Cats Protection to trap, neuter, vaccinate and return 132 feral domestic cats since the project began.

In 2019 wildcats had been described as at the brink of extinction in Britain, with the population too small, too hybridised and too fragmented to be viable. However, since then, 46 wildcats have been released through the Saving Wildcats project, with females in the wild successfully producing litters of kittens in 2024 and 2025.