by Maria Giulia Checchi –
At only 2 years old, my parents Broch and Maree should think of me as something of a prodigy, for I am already involved in two scientific studies. Alas, I didn’t complete any university degree nor even high school, but with my impeccable CV I’m sure that it will not be a problem for long. Interested in what these studies entails, you say? Allow me to provide a brief overview from someone who is intimately familiar with the process.
But before we delve into it, a little background is required: after centuries of habitat loss, direct persecution, and hybridisation with our domestic cousins, my species has been brought to the brink of extinction in the UK. Humans are to blame for this, yet some among their kind took matters into their own claw-less paws and worked incessantly to save our species. Has this worked? Indeed, but the road ahead is longer still. The mating calls of my kin now echo in the faraway land of Cairngorms. I am told that 46 wildcats have reclaimed this ancestral habitat and that they are already populating it with young ones that will spread their paws even further. Yet we were once the sovereigns of Great Britain, found in its every woodland, overlooking the landscape from mountains and hill. This is a good start, but we shall not be happy until our full glory is restored.
How, then, can we captive wildcats help our wild siblings to thrive? The obvious answer is breeding. I myself descend from Aigas’ veteran breeding pair; my grandparents Brora and Fergus, and my parents too bred to bring me to life. And yet not all pairs across the project can breed at the same time. Where would one even begin to house that many kittens, after all? This is where research effort comes into place.
The first project I will tell you about has to do with faeces. Like every mammal, we wildcats consume our food, digest it, and then excrete the discarded material in the form of scat. This gets removed from our enclosures every day, while in the wild it might be used to mark a territory or be buried under leaf litter and soil. Such a regular part of our ecology holds a vast potential for the development of new conservation techniques. Scat can in fact be collected and analysed to find out who it belongs to, what the released wildcat is eating, if they are healthy, and, possibly, even if a female is pregnant. Therefore conservationists can gain invaluable information from it, granted that they are able to find it. And here comes the tricky part: how can they find wildcat scat in such a wide area? Certainly not by sight alone, but with the help of one of their other domesticated animals: dogs. These less refined quadrupeds can in fact be trained to find wildcat scat by smell. The use of their services is rather novel, but their reliability has already been tested and found to be far better than what humans can accomplish. Therefore, the seven of us donate some of our scat for the noble task of training these dogs. Each scat gets triple-bagged and sent over to an expert trainer, thus providing useful samples to teach their dogs what to look for in the field. Finding scat will enhance the monitoring of our released kin, which itself will provide more data to inform future releases.
Trialling new monitoring techniques is also the aim of our second project; this time focused on pawprints. What distinguishes a wildcat pawprint from a domestic cat’s? As far as the human eye can tell, nothing. This is when a new tool comes into place, one that… Here, I wrote the name on my paw… One that is called ‘morphometrics’ and it works as such: sand pits are placed into our enclosures. As we walk in them, maybe exploring the new texture or hoping for some hidden food, we leave pawprints behind. The good quality ones are then measured by the keepers and a ‘photo’, a flat copy of them, gets sent to WildTrack Specialist Group. So far, we have contributed more than 200 pawprints to the project. Will it be possible to differentiate between our pawprints and those of cats? While we might not know the verdict yet, the keepers will share any update on the field centre’s wildcat newsletter, to which I am told you can sign up for free. While I would argue that our tracks must certainly look more majestic, I am lucky enough to have never seen a domestic cat. We shall see. For the time being, I will continue to work as a partner in these projects, with every walk and defecation leading my species closer to a new golden era.
Profile: Rowan is a 2-year-old wildcat part of the Aigas Wildcat Breeding Programme. Although she can appear shy in front of keepers, she has been very outgoing with her neighbour, Nairn, especially during the mating season. Rowan and the other wildcats are helping securing a future for their released relatives not only by giving birth to the new generation, but also by helping us to collect invaluable data.
Want to help us looking after Rowan and the other resident wildcats? You can adopt a wildcat on the Aigas Field Centre website and make a donation to the Breeding Programme.
words by Maria Giulia Checchi, photos by Jacob New
