Wild Mammals of the UK: Native Species and Where to See Them

Native or introduced? Britain’s mammals at a glance

Britain was cut off from mainland Europe about 8,000 years ago, so it has fewer mammals than France or Germany. Wolves, bears, lynx, beavers and wild boar were all wiped out by people, while many newcomers arrived with them.

Red fox: the city mammal

The red fox is Britain’s most familiar wild carnivore, found in every habitat from mountains to city centers. Urban foxes have lived in British towns since at least the 1930s and are now most at home in suburbs, where they eat scraps, earthworms, rats, mice, birds and fruit. Foxes are most active at dusk and night, and in winter their screaming calls are a common sound of the mating season. Our red fox profile explains their family life.

Badgers and hedgehogs

The European badger lives in family groups in large burrow systems called setts, some of them used for centuries. Badgers come out after dark to dig for earthworms, their main food, plus beetles, grubs, bulbs and fruit. Badgers and their setts are protected by law in Britain. Read more in our European badger profile.

The hedgehog is the UK’s only spiny mammal and one of its best-loved. It roams up to 1–2 km (0.6–1.2 mi) a night hunting beetles, caterpillars and worms, and hibernates from about November to March. Hedgehogs are now listed as Vulnerable on the 2020 Red List for Britain’s mammals, and surveys suggest that rural numbers have dropped sharply since 2000, mainly because of lost hedgerows, intensive farming and roads. Garden holes that link neighboring yards, known as “hedgehog highways,” help them move around. See our hedgehog profile.

Red and gray squirrels

The red squirrel is Britain’s native squirrel. Gray squirrels from North America were released on estates from the 1870s onward, and they spread across most of England and Wales. Grays are larger, store more fat, raise more young and digest acorns better, and they carry the squirrelpox virus, which does not harm them but kills red squirrels. Where squirrelpox arrives, reds decline far faster than through competition alone.

Most of Britain’s remaining red squirrels live in Scotland. In England, the main strongholds are Northumberland, Cumbria, Formby near Liverpool, the Isle of Wight and Brownsea Island in Dorset, with a small population on Anglesey in Wales. Our comparison of red and gray squirrels shows how to tell them apart.

Otters and pine martens: comeback carnivores

The Eurasian otter almost vanished from much of England in the 1950s–1970s, when organochlorine pesticides such as dieldrin poisoned rivers. After these chemicals were banned and rivers were cleaned up, otters recovered, and by 2011 they had been found in every county in England. In Scotland, especially on Shetland, Mull and the Hebrides, coastal otters often hunt by day in shallow seawater.

The pine marten is a chocolate-brown, cat-sized relative of the weasel with a creamy bib. Persecution left it restricted mostly to northwest Scotland by the early 20th century, but it has spread back across much of Scotland. Martens were moved from Scotland to mid-Wales from 2015 and to the Forest of Dean from 2019, and releases on Dartmoor and Exmoor began in 2024. Where martens return, gray squirrel numbers often fall, which helps red squirrels.

The Scottish wildcat

The wildcat is Britain’s only native wild cat. It looks like a heavy, striped tabby with a thick, blunt, black-ringed tail. Once found across Britain, it was pushed back to the Scottish Highlands by habitat loss and persecution. The biggest threat now is breeding with domestic and feral cats: so many wildcats carry domestic cat genes that the wild population is considered functionally extinct. The Saving Wildcats project began releasing captive-bred wildcats in the Cairngorms National Park in 2023.

Deer: two native species and four newcomers

Britain has six species of wild deer. The red deer is the largest native land mammal, and the stags’ roaring rut in late September and October is a highlight of the British autumn. The small roe deer is the other native deer and is now widespread. Fallow deer were brought by the Normans for hunting parks, sika deer arrived from Asia in the 1860s, and Reeves’s muntjac and Chinese water deer were brought to the Duke of Bedford’s estate at Woburn in Bedfordshire around 1900, from where their descendants escaped or were released. The muntjac, a dog-sized deer that barks, is now common across southern and central England.

Bats and smaller mammals

Bats are the most varied group of British mammals: there are 18 species in the UK, 17 of which breed here. The common pipistrelle weighs only about 5 g (0.2 oz) yet can eat thousands of tiny insects in a night. All bats and their roosts are protected by law.

Among the small mammals, the water vole is often described as Britain’s fastest-declining mammal, hit hard by the loss of riverbanks and by American mink that escaped from fur farms. The hazel dormouse hibernates for about half the year, and the edible dormouse has lived in the Chiltern Hills since Walter Rothschild released some at Tring Park in 1902.

Seals, beavers and boar

Britain is one of the world’s most important places for gray seals, along with Canada. Thousands of white-coated gray seal pups are born on British beaches and islands between September and January, with famous colonies at Donna Nook in Lincolnshire, Blakeney Point and Horsey in Norfolk, and the Farne Islands off Northumberland. Harbor seals, also called common seals, pup in summer and are most numerous in Scotland and around the Wash.

Beavers were hunted out of Britain by the 16th century. Official releases began at Knapdale in Argyll in 2009, the Scottish government allowed beavers to stay in 2016 and protected them by law in 2019, England followed with legal protection in 2022, and Scotland alone had more than 1,500 by 2022. Read more in are there beavers in the UK? Wild boar, extinct in Britain for centuries, now live wild again in places such as the Forest of Dean after escapes from farms.

Where to see wild mammals in the UK

• Richmond Park, London: red and fallow deer, with the rut in September and October.
• The New Forest, Hampshire: fallow, roe, red and sika deer.
• Brownsea Island, Dorset, and the Isle of Wight: red squirrels with no gray squirrels at all.
• Donna Nook, Lincolnshire: gray seal pups from November to December.
• Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire: wild boar, deer and pine martens.
• The Cairngorms and Highlands: red squirrels, pine martens, red deer and mountain hares; see our guide to wildlife of Scotland.
• Shetland and Mull: coastal otters by day.

Watch quietly at dawn and dusk, keep dogs on a lead near deer and seal colonies, and never disturb badger setts or bat roosts.