Grapevine Stories
Big cats in the Highlands: how did four lynx appear in the Cairngorms?
Here's an interesting article from Scribehound's contributor, Camilla Swift who is a journalist when time allows. Otherwise she'll be walking hound puppies, trying to shoot clays, falling off horses or running a point to point - or else thinking about any/all of the above
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The week before Last, four lynx were captured in the Highlands. But how did they get there? Was this an attempt at reintroducing them to the wild? Or a private owner, who simply couldn't cope?
One evening the week before last, a post popped up on my Facebook newsfeed from the Highlands and Islands Police. “Around 4.20pm on Wednesday, 8 January 2025, police were advised that two lynx had been spotted in the Drumguish area near to Kingussie”, it said. For those who knew the area even vaguely, the immediate assumption was that these were escapees from the Highland Wildlife Park at Kingcraig, just down the road from Kingussie. Either that, or someone was getting confused with Scottish wildcats, populations of which have been recently re-released in a similar location.
But no. The Wildlife Park were quick to confirm that none of their cats had escaped, and in a picture which started to do the rounds, they certainly did appear to look like Eurasian Lynx.
Where had they come from, and what were they doing? Had they been living in the wild, and come closer to human habitation in search of food as temperatures plummeted in the Highlands? Or had someone left them there recently, and deliberately?
Working overnight, the Highland Wildlife Park and Police Scotland managed to trap the two cats and confirm that they were indeed lynx, and would be transported to Edinburgh Zoo where they could be quarantined and have their health assessed. The question remained as to where they’d come from, but they were safely captured at least…
If you thought that was the end of the saga, you’d be wrong.
On Thursday morning, two lynx were captured. On Friday morning, Police Scotland put out another post: “Around 7.20am on Friday, 10 January, we received a report of another two lynx being seen in the Dell of Killiehuntly area near Kingussie.” It went on: “Enquiries suggest the sighting is connected with a release of two lynx seen in the same area on Wednesday, 8 January.”
What was going on? Not just two lynx, but four? It couldn’t be a coincidence, surely? Within the day, the two further lynx were captured and taken to the Wildlife Park. But then, overnight, other news emerged. One of the most recently captured lynx had died overnight; the reason for its death has not yet been confirmed.
So was this a case of ‘rogue’, or ‘guerilla’ rewilding? Or is it a case of someone – a private animal collector – dumping the animals as they were no longer able to cope, either through financial problems or another reason?
Anyone who follows the goings-on in Scottish nature will know that rewilding is a huge topic in the country. A ‘Rewilding Nation Charter’ has been established which urges the Scottish Government to declare Scotland the ‘world’s first rewilding nation’. With beavers, and white-tailed eagles, proponents of rewilding have had some of their first successes.
There are now calls to rewild other species, and lynx are right at the top of that list.
Bearing all of that in mind, it’s no surprise that there were plenty of comments online asking why the lynx couldn’t simply be left ‘to be free’. But most of those involved in the rewilding debate in an official capacity were – on paper at least – quick to condemn the release of these four.
This was partly because, as it quickly became clear, these cats were nowhere near prepared for release into the wild. The first pair of lynx to be captured were described by David Field, chief executive of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, as “very young and habituated – they are looking to humans for security and food, they are used to heating.” They wouldn’t have lasted long in the wild, he was suggesting.
The Lynx to Scotland partnership are behind the promotion of a trial reintroduction of the lynx to Scotland. This group is comprised of three charities: Trees for Life, Scotland: The Big Picture and the Lifescape Project.
Steve Micklewright, chief executive of Trees for Life, commented that: “This sorry saga is a reminder why an official future reintroduction of lynx to the Highlands must be properly managed with habitat assessments, public consultation, and a government licence,” adding that the death of one of the lynx post-capture “shows why illegal animal abandonment like this is so irresponsible and wrong.”
So it certainly wasn’t an official rewilding attempt. But could it have been an amateurish attempt to rewild lynx? (At this point I’ll add that many people claim that lynx already are living wild in the Highlands and have been doing so for many years). Or could it have been a publicity stunt, designed to provoke conversation around the topic of lynx reintroduction, or hurry decision-makers along?
David Field of the RZSS addressed this: "Sadly there are rogue rewilders out there who bypass all the established international best practice and bypass all professional organisations which are discussing lynx coming back to Scotland. They are impatient and then proceed in a way which is this rebellious rogue rewilding. That's really sad and that's a real, real risk."
As Field alluded to in his comment, there are people out there who are frustrated at the perceived ‘hoops’ which they feel they are being made to jump through before lynx can be reintroduced. ‘Why can’t they just let us get on with it?’ is the feeling from them. As many of you will I’m sure recognise, we have been in this situation before but with beavers, not lynx.
Many people with fenced-in populations of beavers have discovered how good beavers are at escaping from behind fencing – particularly when releasing them into the wild means dealing with officialdom. Wild boar have also proved particularly adept at doing this, meaning that we now have populations of both wild boar and beavers in England and Scotland. As Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall put it in their book ‘Black ops and beaver bombing’, “the simple rule with boar, as with beavers, is that if you keep them inside an enclosure, sooner or later they’ll appear, abracadabra, outside that enclosure.” Rewilding via the back door, some people call this.
And while many of those who are keen to see the lynx – and many other species – return to the British Isles did condemn the illegal release of these cats, the underlying hum was that the ‘powers that be’ were to blame, for putting the brakes on lynx reintroductions in the UK.
Ben Goldsmith – a keen rewilder, chair of the Conservative Environment Network, and former Defra board-member – wrote that “the big question arising from this bizarre Cairngorms lynx story is not how the poor things got there; but why lynx, a secretive, beautiful British native species no larger than a labrador, have not been officially reintroduced to Britain long ago.” He pointed the finger of blame at “the malevolence of a small rural cabal opposed to any kind of wildlife recovery.”
He went on: “Life is short, and you can well see why some people are tempted to take matters into their own hands. Every single wild-living beaver in Britain today is there as a result of unlicensed releases, not to mention goshawks, wild boar and a host of other recovering native species.”
Peter Cairns, the executive director of SCOTLAND: The Big Picture; one of the partners in the Lynx to Scotland project, told the BBC that “irresponsible and illegal releases such as this are simply counter-productive.”
But sharing Ben Goldsmith’s post, he wrote that “as Ben says, the gulf between the process to legally restore any native species to the UK, let alone lynx, and the unrestrained release of millions of non-native gamebirds, reflects our ecological illiteracy, as a society… I’m not condoning the unlicensed release of lynx, but I recognise the paralysis in a system that is unwilling to adapt to address the dual climate and nature crises.”
And then Derek Gow, the self-styled “reintroduction specialist” and arguably the most famous guerrilla rewilder in the UK, who had this to say on Twitter:
So is that how things stand? If we don't change the law fast enough, people simply take matters into their own hands?
It still remains a mystery how these four lynx ended up captured in the wild. If they were an attempt at a reintroduction, it seems very badly done, as they were obviously not prepared for a life in the Highlands in mid-winter and one of them has subsequently died, most likely as a result of its adventure. Perhaps someone who couldn't cope with them dumped them near the Wildlife Park in the hope they would be found quickly?
Whatever the answer, what this whole debacle certainly has done is reignite the debate over whether lynx should be living among us. Which way the argument will swing remains to be seen, but what we have discovered is that if lynx are going to be reintroduced to the UK, this certainly isn't the way to do it.
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