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This week is\xa0Caitie Sith\xa0and Dave's episode! They want to learn about animals reintroduced to Scotland, especially the Highland wildcat!\n\nThe Scottish (or Highland) wildcat:\n\n\n\nThe Eurasian lynx:\n\n\n\nThe Eurasian beaver (with babies!):\n\n\n\nThe white-tailed eagle:\n\n\n\nReindeer in Scotland:\n\n\n\nThe pine marten:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis week is Caitie Sith and Dave\u2019s episode, where we\u2019ll learn about the re-wilding of Scotland! Re-wilding is the process of restoring an ecosystem to its natural state, basically reversing habitat loss. Most of the time there\u2019s a lot more to it than just reintroducing native animals, but sometimes that\u2019s all that\u2019s required.\nScotland is a part of the island of Great Britain, north of England. People have lived there since the last glaciers melted at the end of the Pleistocene, around 12,000 years ago. During the Pleistocene and a few thousand years after the glaciers melted, Scotland was connected to Europe by a lot of marshy land where today there\u2019s ocean, and naturally many animals lived in Scotland that were also found in Europe at the time. Some of the ice age megafauna that lived in Scotland included the woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, bison, aurochs, wild boar, saiga antelope, giant deer, red deer, reindeer, moose, wild horse, beaver, walrus, Polar bear, brown bear, lynx, wolf, Arctic fox, and cave lion. Many fossil and subfossil remains of Pleistocene animals were destroyed by the formation and movement of thick glacier ice, which scoured the land down to bedrock in many places, so those are only the animals we know for sure lived in Scotland.\nBut Scotland wasn\u2019t covered by glaciers all the time. The Pleistocene wasn\u2019t a single ice age but a series of cold events interspersed with warming trends. During these interglacial periods, which lasted some 10- to 15,000 years at a time, animals would move to Scotland from other places or become more numerous than before. Then the climate would start cooling again, glaciers would slowly form over many years, and animals would move to areas where there was more food. This happened repeatedly over a period of more than 2.5 million years.\nIn other words, while we have some fossils of Pleistocene animals that once lived in Scotland, we don\u2019t have nearly as many as have been found in England, Ireland, and Wales. But what we do know is that Scotland was once teeming with all kinds of animals we\u2019d never associate with the country today, like cave lions and Polar bears!\nMuch of the ice age megafauna went extinct around 12,000 years ago when the last glaciers melted and the climate started warming. Cold-adapted animals couldn\u2019t always survive in a warmer climate, not to mention that as the climate changed, the types of plants available to eat changed too. Some animals migrated away or went extinct, while some were able to stay in Scotland successfully. This included the red deer, reindeer, wild boar, walrus, brown bear, and lynx.\nIf you\u2019re wondering why that list is full of animals that don\u2019t actually live in Scotland these days, like the brown bear and lynx, it\u2019s because humans hunted many of the native Scottish animals to extinction. Others went extinct due to habitat loss or competition with introduced animals. Many surviving species are endangered today for the same reasons.\nFor example, the Scottish wildcat, also called the Highland wildcat. We talked about it briefly in episode 52 way back in early 2018. One of the animals that migrated to Scotland after the Pleistocene, but before sea levels rose and cut the British Isles off from Europe, was the European wildcat. The Scottish population has been separated from the European population for at least 7,000 years, and some researchers think it should be classified as a subspecies of European wildcat.\nThe Scottish wildcat is a little larger than a domestic cat and is always tabby striped.