BIG CAT NEWS: Down the little wooden hills again...

The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper column inches than any other cryptozoological subject.

There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived in some way by us, so we should have a go at publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in.

It takes a long time to do, and is a fairly tedious task, so I am not promising that they will be done each day, but I will do them as regularly as I can. JD

Wild cat 'big enough to pose a threat'
Luton Today
A DOG walker fears that a child may be put at risk after she came face to face with a mystery cougar that appears to be stalking Heath and Reach. On Saturday last week (March 3) Jane Banting was walking with her dog down a footpath off the Heath Road ...

These first two stories are basically the same, but I am including both, not just for the sake of completeness, but to illustrate how news stories get proliferated through chains of local publications. The sighting report is actually a particularly good one:

"The gait, body shape and tail convinced me that this was, in fact, a large wild cat of some description. I reported the sighting to the police when I got home and searched on the internet.

I couldn’t really find the animal I had seen until reading the paper just now. It appears that what I saw was a cougar. I had been misled because all the web images were of a light brown animal whereas the one I saw was dark brown and mottled in colour."

This perfectly illustrates the confusion that happens when witnesses find that the animal that they have seen is not an exact match for something that they have seen in the reference books.

Wild cat 'big enough to pose a threat'
Dunstable Today
Ahead of me I initially saw what I thought was a very large dark brown tabby cat. As I got closer I realised that the animal was much bigger, in fact bigger than my dog (a collie cross). “Thinking it was a dog I looked for the owner but then the animal ...

And then, also from Bedfordshire (which seems to be the new Gloucestershire in terms of big cat sightings) here is a rather neat little utility. I would like to have the same on our utilities....

See where big cats have been spotted in Beds
Luton Today
Following our story last week about the sighting near Barton, we've created a Big Cat Map where you can find out about other sightings of over-sized felines on the prowl. The creatures have been spotted near Leighton Buzzard and Dunstable, ...