The Scottish wildcat is a population of European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) native to Scotland, now surviving only in fragmented pockets of the northern and eastern Highlands.
Once widespread across Great Britain, the population has collapsed since the early twentieth century through habitat loss and deliberate persecution. Camera-trapping surveys conducted in the Scottish Highlands between 2010 and 2013 showed wildcats favour mixed woodland, while feral and domestic cats occupy grassland. The species is listed as critically endangered in the United Kingdom. Hybridisation with domestic and feral cats poses the gravest threat: all individuals sampled in recent studies exhibited high levels of hybridisation, leading scientists to consider the population functionally extinct in the wild. Pure-bred Scottish wildcats may no longer exist outside captive breeding programmes.
The decline of the Scottish wildcat is covered in our Field Notes piece on conservation pressures facing Scotland’s rarest mammals.
