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.