The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
the resemblance ends and the conflict lies. It’s the black that defines both the wildcat’s fur and its sombre northern climate, an aggressive camouflage that breaks up its outline into bands of shadow exactly as a tiger’s stripes do, but without the perpetual sunlight shafting through jungle. Its bushy club tail with a dense black tip has four to six clear black rings; its fur is of dulled zinc with vertical sooty stripes – stripes that also run up and outwards from its burning, emerald eyes. It hunts at dawn and dusk, retiring bandit-like to its lair to lie low throughout the day. A stealthily prowling, silent, green-eyed arch-predator of the dark and dripping Highland woods, it is reputedly untamable, a top carnivore. Ferocious. A snarling, hissing, spitting demon of a cat with murder etched into its soul.
The trouble is that we humans have been introducing domestic cats into wildcat habitat for centuries. Wildcat toms cannot resist domestic pussy, and vice versa. The evolutionary lineage of both is too close and the hybrid progeny of such unseen nocturnal pairings are fertile. Invisibly their genes blend and nowadays many hybrids stalk the Highland woods. By their own promiscuity our precious wildcats are genetically polluting themselves into extinction, a situation only humans can resolve.
In 2012 we at the field studies centre joined forces with Scottish Wildcat Action to implement their optimistic-sounding ‘Conservation Action Plan’ to try to save the last few remaining wildcats in the Highlands (Felis silvestris grampia – cat of the Grampian woods), part of which would be captive breeding for release into carefully monitored, prime quality habitat. That was the bit that interested us: the breeding and release of sexually mature kittens to bolster whatever remains of the wildcat population still out there. If there is any. We don’t know – nobody does. We hope there might be a few left in the remoter mountain reaches of our local glens.
The Scottish wildcat is the very essence of wildness and wild places, and, hope or no hope, it’s ours. It badly needs a marketing manager. Throughout recent history our wildcats have been present the length and breadth of Scotland, a top predator in some of the most rugged and wild landscapes in the UK, perfect for a super-cat. If your average domestic tabby is a Ford, our wildcat is a Ferrari. They call it the Highland tiger: bigger, stronger, meaner, sleeker, stealthier . . . and, like poor old Shere Khan, the tiger in the Jungle Book, it’s in serious trouble because of us and the way we’ve always treated land as a resource without much thought for wildlife: there for exploiting and to hell with the consequences. It’s our fault – our ignorance, our stupidity, our negligence, our selfishness, our greed. That’s bad, very bad. We could do much better if we put our minds to it – if only we would put our minds to it. We could, you know: humans don’t have to behave like mindless vandals. We have the wit and the ways; it’s the will that snarls us up. We could stop the rot and reverse the destructive trend for most wildlife if only we could focus minds. The wildcat is precious. We must not lose it.
It seems to have taken forever to get some official conservation action, but it has happened at last. We pray it’s not too late. The whole bureaucratic machinery of government recently lumbered into action. The National Lottery stumped up. Money shouts and has claws. Suddenly there were press releases, websites, blogs, tweets, posts – all that social media guff buzzed around the world before you could say kitty. We held meetings, published plans to neuter or remove feral domestic cats and hybrids, created research and monitoring jobs, consulted everyone except God and the cats themselves. We were beginning to feel a bit smug – dangerously smug. After two years and twenty meetings we hadn’t saved a single wildcat. So I took myself off to Spain to learn about their highly successful captive breeding and release project for the Iberian lynx – just what we were trying to achieve with the wildcats at home.
I met up with the Spanish biologists near Seville. We all spoke the same language of nature conservation, if not in quite the same tongue. Spanish wildcats are slightly smaller than ours, the same species without the grampia. From the illustrations and photos, theirs – gato montes – have a paler pelage to reflect the higher levels of sunlight and make the black stripes look blacker, but they are otherwise identical.
They’ve suffered the same old problems: loss of habitat to industrial agriculture and forestry, persecution by gamekeepers and hunters, hybridisation with domestic and feral cats, and road kill . . . all the familiar insults we’ve thrown at ours. We think we’re down to the last few hundred animals in the Highlands, and it’s pretty doubtful whether any of those are pure wildcats. The Spanish don’t seem to have much of a clue about their gato, but they’re doing great things for their lynx.
So I headed for Coto Doñana National Park, 1,300 square miles of coastal dunes and salt marsh, Las Marismas, and semi-natural pine forest stretching from just south of Seville down to the Portuguese border, the Gulf of Cadiz foaming at its fringes and one of the last refuges of Europe’s most endangered cat, the deliciously spotted Iberian lynx. I longed to see one in the wild; a slim chance, but one I wanted to try. I would not see a lynx, but I was to discover much more about myself.
I knew a bit about Doñana. Memories came lancing through. I’d been there once before – back in . . . was it ’65 or ’66? – when my parents had stayed at the grandiose former hunting lodge Palacio Doñana, a large, ornate, whitewashed mansion, back then a stylish hostel for intrepid visitors. My father had rushed back to London on business and left my mother there for a few days. She’d loved it and urged me to join her. There were good reasons for always wanting to please my mother.
A tantalisingly brief visit all those years ago, just one night – supper and a schooner of dark amontillado together in the Palacio, her silvery laugh, a gentle totter out into the glove-soft moonlight – all her fragile health could cope with. The heady perfume of night-scented jasmine, dama de noche, wrapping us round, then back to the fireside in the echoing, whitewashed salon, olive logs crackling like pistol fire till bedtime. In the morning we were off again, driving away. A toe dipped in, just that and no more. I had always hoped to make it back one day. Now, almost fifty years later, I was there again.
I turned off the main road and bumped down a sandy track. To my left the tidal marshes and rippling reed-beds stretched away toward the Guadalquivir river. Then, a mile or two later, wholly unexpectedly, and without any announcement, the imposing edifice of the Palacio loomed up in front of me like a mirage, tucked into the edge of the forest, its compound enclosed by a perimeter wall of startling white. ‘Oh my God! I’ve been here.’ I called out, forgetting that there was nobody to hear me. ‘That’s it! That’s where my parents stayed yonks ago.’
It had been a grand hunting lodge like many that were built in the Highlands of Scotland at the height of the Victorian sporting era, although this was considerably older. The Duchess of Alba had entertained Francisco Goya there in the eighteenth century and it had harboured many other dignitaries, including General Franco, to hunt deer and wild boar. So had Lord Alanbrooke, the British Field Marshal and Second World War Chief of Allied Staff who’d had a stormy relationship with Winston Churchill but still managed to be powerfully influential over the Allied victory.
When Alanbrooke rented the Palacio in 1958, he and his wife had hosted a natural history expedition led by the founding triumvirate of what would later become the World Wildlife Fund: Guy Mountfort, Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, three towering grandees of the embryonic nature conservation movement. With characteristic brimming enthusiasm, my mother had bought me a copy of Mountfort’s splendid book, Portrait of a Wilderness – The Story of the Coto Doñana Expeditions, and I had spent many hours poring over the black and white photographs. I still treasure it today, her fluid handwriting in the flyleaf, ‘I hope you can join expeditions like this one day.’
Memory billowed in – jaw flexing and a lump forming in my throat. Yes, it was here, on the edge of these marshes. That was the building; I’d stayed here in the ’60s, spent a night with her here. Then, just then, trapped by that implausible cocktail of circumstance and emotions, my abstract notion came flooding back in.
I suddenly saw that it had taken me most of a lifetime properly to understand that from early childhood every encounter with nature, each little glimpse of truth and comprehension of the natural world, had braided together to make me what I am. From some formative vital spark I had been hoarding images