Animal · Spain, France, Germany
European wildcat
Felis silvestris — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The European wildcat looks like a sturdy grey tabby, but it is a wild species of its own, with a thick blunt tail ringed in black. It has hunted in Europe's forests far longer than any house cat has lived with people.
Picture credit: Glen Bowman (CC BY 2.0) · Aconcagua (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Aconcagua (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the European wildcat live?
Home: old broadleaf forests with hedges and quiet clearings.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 45–65 cm body, plus a 30 cm tail. It weighs about 4.5 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A wildcat hunts alone, mostly at dawn and dusk, and mice and voles make up almost all of its meals. It waits beside a mouse hole with its ears turned forward, then pounces in one short spring. Unlike a house cat, its tail is thick, blunt at the end and marked with two or three clear black rings, and a dark stripe runs down its back. It needs old forests with hollow trees, brambles and quiet corners for its kittens, and it crosses fields and roads to reach the next patch of wood. Hunting and forest clearing once pushed it out of large parts of Europe, and in Scotland it nearly vanished altogether. Today it is protected, green bridges over motorways help it travel, and in countries like Germany it is slowly spreading again. Its biggest problem now is mating with stray house cats, because that blurs what makes a wildcat a wildcat.
Find it on the globe
European wildcat is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How can you tell a wildcat from a grey house cat?
Look at the tail: a wildcat's is thick, ends bluntly like a club and carries two or three clean black rings. Its coat is softly washed grey-brown with a dark line along the spine, never sharply patterned like many house cats.
Where does the European wildcat live?
Is it simply a house cat gone wild?
No. The wildcat is its own species, Felis silvestris, and it lived in European forests long before farming began. House cats come from a different animal, the African wildcat of the Near East, and although the two can have kittens together, that mixing is exactly what worries conservationists.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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