Criticial Time For Wildcats

Jim puts an optimistic new view on efforts to halt the decline of the Scottish wildcat.

- Jim Crumley

SUTHERLAND, somewhere west of Lairg, shortly before a spring dawn, nearing the end of a through-the-night drive on something perilously close to automatic pilot.

Suddenly there was a pair of eyes in the headlights unlike anything I’d seen, ever. They burned from a point in the middle of the road – like green cat’s eyes, I thought, and at that moment I realised what I was looking at. As the car stopped about 20 yards away the headlights illuminated my first wildcat. It had crouched, and gave the impression of staring out the headlights. With its head low to the ground, ears pointed outwards from the edge of a broad skull, its back arching steeply behind its head, it looked ready for anything.

I switched the lights off. The wildcat switched its green eyes off. I waited. It waited. I switched the engine off, wound down the window. The chill air rushed in. I could just make out the unmoving shape in the road.

Then it spoke. One of the clichés that attaches to the wildcat is the terrifying nature of its scream. The voice of this one, then, came as a bit of a surprise. The monosyllable it pronounced was loud and throaty:

“Mau!” it said. Then it walked to the edge of the road, jumped the ditch, landed with a soft thud in the bracken and vanished. Then, from a few yards up the hill: “Mau!” The sound is still in my head, 30 years after the event.

So I wrote 10 years ago – make this 40 years after the event. I was revisiting the article because this winter has witnessed the largest-ever survey of Scottish wildcats, part of a six-year plan which began in 2013, aimed at halting their drastic decline. So far it has not covered itself in glory.