This article is from the Winds of Change newsletter

Looking for hope for the future of nature from 2024? Often it can be hard to find, but a five-day whirl around Scotland visiting nature projects, many of them community-led, gave me a glimpse of some of the positive work being done around recovery as well as an injection of hope for the future.

The tour, hosted by Highlands and Islands Environment Foundation and The European Nature Trust (TENT), took me from wildcats and reforestation at the Alladale Wilderness Reserve to a snorkel through restored seagrass meadows at Craignish.

Along the way, there were nature-friendly farm clusters, wetlands and beavers, a community group fighting a local salmon farm, rainforest protection projects and tree nurseries.

Each of these projects was important in itself, but some also can be seen as part of a wider movement in which the communities are taking the lead in restoring nature. Here, as we launch ourselves into 2025, are just a few of them.

Wildcats and woodland restoration

Alladale is probably most famous as being the Scottish wilderness reserve owned by the heir to the MFI fortune, Paul Lister, a philanthropist with a vision of restoring nature and releasing wolves on his land.

Lister's wolves don’t look as if they are coming very soon - but at Alladale is a small enclosure that is home to another rare predator, a wildcat breeding programme.

The cats, a critically endangered species, clamber over a personal assault course and stare out through the mesh, looking for all the world like the average domestic kitty.

These particular cats are, like housebound pets, destined never to be released, but the kittens from the project were transferred to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland breed and release centre at the Highland Wildlife Park, Kincraig.

(Image: Gethin Chamberlain/TENT/HIEF) In 2023, 19 wildcats bred at the Highland Wildlife Park were released into the Cairngorms, wearing GPS collars. By June last year, two had disappeared, one had died of peritonitis, another had died after being knocked over in the road, and two of the females had given birth to kittens.

The chances of seeing them there are vanishingly small - but Alladale, like Kincraig, represents a chance to see a wilder relative of the........

© Herald Scotland