Conservationists hail 'major milestone' as wildcat kittens born in Cairngorms
Conservationists believe three of the cats have given birth to kittens following their release into the Cairngorms last summer.
Conservationists have announced the birth of wildcat kittens in the Cairngorms.
1\9 wildcats were released into a site in the national park last summer by Saving Wildcats and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland in a bid to save the threatened species.
Now, after successfully monitoring the cats through GPS tracking and carefully placed cameras, conservationists have discovered three of the cats have had kittens.
Dr Keri Langridge, Field Manager at Saving Wildcats Field Manager said they believe around nine kittens have been born.
She said: "We knew some of the males and females had overlapped and potentially bred. So, the field team were out every day putting camera traps up where a lot of the females were. It's very difficult because they move quite a lot.
"But they've they've been working extremely hard the last couple of months to see if we could get proof that they'd had kittens and they managed to get this footage.
"It was, I think, probably the best moment that we've had so far on the project to see them not just surviving in the wild but actually thriving and doing well. They've reproduced some of the kittens we now know are 10 weeks old which again, that's really good going.
"So these cats are just doing it just far better than we ever gave them credit for."
Due to several threats in the wild including roads, disease and people, conservationists feared for a high mortality rate during the first year of release.
However, the arrival of the kittens has been hailed as a major milestone for wildcat recovery in Scotland.
Dr Langridge described it as a "dream come true" for the team as she explained the "odds were stacked against them".
She continued: "The team here have done an amazing job with rearing them in the captive breeding centre but we never really knew what the survival would be like.
"There's still a lot of threats out there for Wildcats. So we really, really hoped in the first year that they would survive and that they would all stay in the release area."
The team will carry on monitoring and collecting data on the wildcat kittens before more wildcats will be released into the wild this summer.
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