On thursday Prudence took me and Corinna for another walk, this time along the lane which leads from Huddisford woods to Ashcroft farm - an area which has had far more than its share of big cat sightings over the past few years. Interestingly, two different mystery cats have been reported over the years; one larger and black, and the other smaller and brown. One one occasion they were seen together.
It is this dichotomy of sightings which is one of the anomalies which has inspired Di Francis to come up with her controversial theory about a putative species of indigenous British big cat - one which exhibits a marked display of sexual dimorphism.
Here we should stress that the hairs found by Andrew Perry et al in 2010 were incontravertably those of a leopard, and furthermore one of the sub-Saharan subspecies.
It was still bloody cold as we walked along the lane, but everywhere you looked there were attractive displays of mosses and lichens. I have always been fascinated by these primitive plants ever since when - as a boy on holiday in the New Forest during the winter of 1963/4, my mother used to take me out for walks collecting mosses that she used to put into soup bowls and make into tiny moss gardens.
The Huddissford end of our walk leads past a part of the forestry plantation which was felled last year, and it is interesting to see how the newly corrugated terrain created by mechanical diggers, tractors etc is starting to form new ponds. Will they become stagnant and barren? Or will they provide invaluable oasises for the local wildlife. I can't wait to find out..
And finally, with all the talk of big cat prints on the blog, here are two footprints from the layby where we parked the car before embarking on our journey. The top one was made by Prudence, the other one not...
Today's music is pretty obvious really. I can't find a live version of it so you will have to do with the 1977 studio one..
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