BIG CAT BULLETIN
Anomalous felines continue to prowl Britain’s streets and fields
Sightings of anomalous big cats (ABCs), large Alsatian-sized and typically melanistic (black), continue to be made across the British Isles, though the decline in local newspaper coverage has meant a falling-off in reports reaching Fortean Towers. Here are the highlights of 2017/18, as reflected in clippings received.
Just after midnight on 4 January 2017, Alan Tomlinson believes he saw a ‘panther’ near to Junction 1 of the M180 in South Yorkshire, close to Doncaster services in Thorne. Its tail was 2-3ft (60-90cm) long. Doncaster Free Press, 12 Jan 2017.
On 4 March, a mutilated ewe was found less than 100 yards from a croft in Swordly in the Scottish Highlands, thought to be the work of an ABC roaming the most remote parts of northern Scotland, killing sheep and leaving no trace but bones and wool. Jim Johnston, 66, of Bettyhill said that over the past five years about 40 sheep had been found dead, apparently killed in one go, all neatly stripped of their skin before being eaten, across an area of about 200 square miles (518 km2) between the parishes of Farr and Tongue. He said the predator “manages to peel the skin off, probably because it doesn’t like the wool, and it skins the sheep in a most expert way. It has a very powerful bite. It crunches right through the bones and kills the animal very easily.” Independent, 7 Mar 2017.
On 15 April, a 32-year-old woman and her teenage daughter filmed a sleek black ABC prowling through long grass near a picnic area in Crowcombe Park Gate in the Quantock Hills, Somerset. Some members of Beastwatch UK identified it as a panther or jaguar, while others suggested it could be two dogs together, a bear, or a horse (!). One said: “I’m 99.9 per cent sure that it’s a feline. Everything about it is like a melanistic jaguar.” Danny Bamping of the British Big Cats Society, whom the tabloids routinely consult on the subject these days, thought it more canine than feline. Police logged 13 ABC sightings in Somerset in 2016. D.Mail, Sun, D.Mirror, 17 April; Western Gazette, 20 April 2017.
At 4.30am on 18 June, taxi driver Jahid Choudhury photographed a large beige cat beside Napsbury Lane, St Albans, Hertfordshire. He was adamant it wasn’t a domestic cat. The previous April, a halfeaten deer had been found in nearby Wheathampstead. In late August, a brown-beige “cougar”, 5ft (1.5m) long excluding the tail, was seen near Fleetville, Hertfordshire. “The tail itself was really long and it wasn’t bushy like a fox, and it had a funny stump at the end of its tail,” said the (unnamed) witness. This was said to be at least the fifth ABC report near St Albans during 2017. In 2016, Hertfordshire Police had logged 26 ABC reports in the previous five years. Hertfordshire Advertiser, 22 June, 7 Sept; D.Star, 23 June; Sunday Sun, 10 Sept 2017.
On 18 September, Pauline Kerman, walking along the Cinder Path near Whitby, North Yorkshire, saw a large cat looking “very much like a puma” 200 yards away. Whitby Gazette, 29 Sept, 8 Oct 2017.
A woman driving home at night in Gloucestershire last December was chased along a road near the Woolpack Inn in Slad by a “black panther”.
The unnamed 31-year-old from Stroud said: “I was driving about 40 miles an hour [64km/h] and it was bounding along the verge on the right-hand side of the road. After two or three minutes it shot up into the fields. It was the size of a small Labrador.” Big cat tracker Frank Tunbridge said “quite a number” of ABC sightings in Gloucestershire in 2017 “have occurred in daylight hours, and often close to human habitation” – although there were also many nocturnal encounters, such as one by seven people in Woodchester Park at 10.45pm one night in July, “roughly Labrador size, jet black, with yellow eyes”. Tunbridge claimed that there were “between 20 and 25 sightings” of ABCs reported every week throughout the UK. Gloucestershire Live, 2 Aug; Western Daily Press, 27 Dec 2017; Sunday Sun, D.Star Sunday, 14 Jan 2018.
On the morning of Sunday, 14 January 2018, taxi driver Michelle Woodall, 49, saw an 8ft (2.4m) “black panther” walking into woods in Sible Hedingham, near Braintree in Essex. “I was just doing my hair when I looked out of the window and saw a panther-like cat,” she told essexlive.news (16 Jan 2018). “It was walking along like it was in no rush, it certainly wasn’t frightened of anything. It was the walk that was so distinctive because obviously a dog, a cat, a fox move completely differently.” She watched it take up to six strides before it disappeared into woodland by the River Colne.
She took her five-year-old Parson Russell Terrier to the spot where the animal had vanished. “As soon as we hit that path his nose went down, his tail went up and he dragged me along,” she said. “We went just over a mile and the whole way down were pawprints.” There were about two dozen with a diameter of about 6in (10cm). She came across them in every 10 strides on the footpath to Sudbury. “I took a photo of a Labrador’s pawprint and it was a third of the size of this cat – and it was a big Labrador.” Locals said they had seen the big cat in the village as well. “This panther was jet black,” she said. “It was daylight and I know what I saw as does everybody else.”
Zoe Newley, who lives a mile from Ms Woodall, said her husband had seen “the black panther” in the village last October; and two women from Sible Hedingham claimed they encountered an ABC on 8 August 2015; Jenny Ward said her 16-year-old son Jason spotted a black cat “bigger than a golden retriever” which stared at the stunned pair before crouching and disappearing into woodland.
At 6pm on 20 February, a 12-year-old girl called Emily encountered a big cat in Chilsham Lane, Herstmonceux, East Sussex, while taking her dog Ziggy for a walk. “It looked like a big black girl lion,” she said. “It looked at me then I got Ziggy and just ran.” Sussex Express, 23 Feb 2018.
In April, Bex Finch and her two children, sitting parked in a lay-by at Torrs in Devon, saw a large dark cat streaking across a field and then “just sitting in the bushes”. She told the North
Devon Gazette (18 April 2018): “It had a long black tail, the head was quite low, it was a feline shape… It was much longer than a dog, about the size of a Labrador or German shepherd in height but much longer… It was black or very, very dark brown… long and sleek, very panther-like.” They watched it for about five to seven minutes. A few days earlier, farmer Mike Botton-Gordon had found a ewe savaged at Churchstow in Devon. A neighbour said he had seen a large cat in a field two miles away in March. Sun, 13 April 2018.
On 14 May, Dawn Paige checked her security cameras after noticing that wheelie bins at her home in Oldbury, West Midlands, had been moved in the early hours. She found footage around 3am of what appeared to be a big cat, about a metre tall. Dudley Zoo, four miles (6.4km) away, said it was not one of their nine big cats. “I had the shock of my life when I saw that thing come into view”, said Ms Paige, 53, a teaching assistant. “At first, I thought it must be a big dog, but it moves just like a cat. I took the footage into work and asked some of the teachers what they thought, and they agree with me it looks like a leopard, or a she-lion. I’ve got a little dog and I’m absolutely terrified for her safety.”
The Sun said the zoo “agreed the creature… looked like a big cat”, but Richard Brown, a curator at the zoo and a former big cat keeper, was quoted in the
Daily Mail the next day saying that it was a “boxer or mastifftype dog”. He added: “It appears to have a muzzle on it, whereas cats have flatter faces. It’s also flat-footed in the way it walks, and is flatter along the back than I would expect a big cat to appear.” Sun, Metro, 17 May; D.Mail, 18 May 2018.
Other ABC sightings for 2017:
25 Jan: St Albans, Herts, “large, sandy-coloured’. 17 Mar: Harpenden, Herts, “jet black”. Mid-Mar: between Egginton and Stratton, Derbyshire. 25 April: Bicester, Oxfordshire, “black panther”. (The ‘Beast of Burford” seen in Oxfordshire since 1990.) May: “black panther” seen eating fox in woods near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire. 27 July: St Albans, Herts, “brown or sandy coloured”. 31 July: Longstanton, Cambs. Aug: Herne Bay, Kent. Aug: Obthorpe, Lincs. 2 Sept: Hortonwood, Shropshire. ( Hertfordshire Advertiser, 2 Feb, 23 Mar, 3 Aug; D.Mirror, 3 Feb, 2+4 Aug; Derby Telegraph, 22 Mar; Western Daily Press, D.Mirror, 1 May; D.Star, 1 June; Sun, 25 Aug; Shropshire Star, 5 Sept 2017.)
For our last ABC reports, see FT344:20-25, 348:20.