Wildkatze Bremen

The European wildcat prefers large, near-natural and structurally diverse forests, in particular broadleaf and mixed woodland with rich understorey, windthrow areas, dead wood, bramble thickets, root plates, rocky outcrops and old fox or badger setts. These features provide daytime hiding places, breeding sites and ambush points for hunting voles. The wildcat avoids settlements and cleared agricultural landscapes but occasionally uses structurally rich open land and forest edges as hunting habitat. It is mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, lives as a solitary species and feeds overwhelmingly on voles and other small mammals.

After decades of persecution the wildcat was severely reduced and locally extinct in much of the DACH region. Since legal protection from 1934 onwards and especially over recent decades a positive trend has emerged: the species is slowly expanding out of stable strongholds in the German uplands such as the Eifel, Hunsrück, Palatinate Forest, Taunus, Spessart, Rhön, Hainich, Harz and Solling, recolonising adjoining areas as far as the North German lowland. The German population is estimated at roughly 1,700 to 5,000 animals, distributed across largely isolated focal areas in south-west and central Germany. In Switzerland the species is confined to the Jura arc, where monitoring has shown a clear expansion within a decade. In Austria only small and probably isolated populations have so far been confirmed, so every individual is particularly valuable for the local population.

For hunters reliable identification against the tabby house cat is essential, because the risk of confusion is high and a misidentification can constitute an offence under nature-conservation and hunting law. Indicators of a wildcat include the broad, heavy head with a flesh-coloured nose, at most six diffuse longitudinal stripes on the forehead that merge into roughly four more distinct stripes on the neck, a long, faintly tabby coat on a grey-beige background, and above all the thick bushy tail with two to three clearly separated, closed black rings and a blunt black tip. House cats by contrast usually show a tapered tail tip, many diffuse and incomplete rings and either heavier or much sharper striping. Reliable identification on external features alone is barely possible even for experts; the most secure evidence comes from genetic analysis, for example via hair samples on lure sticks. Please refrain from shooting free-roaming cats in areas where wildcat presence is possible, and report sightings, road casualties or camera-trap images to the responsible nature-conservation and hunting authorities or to the ongoing monitoring programmes of BUND, the federal states and the Swiss cantons. Your observations are an important contribution to national wildcat monitoring.