Category: News

My report for Fortean Times on the Cryptozoologie conference in Dinant, Belgium in November 2023, which included my talk on “Reportages en observations des felins dans la compe de Suffolk 1974-2022” (that’s “Reports and sightings of big cats in the county of Suffolk, 1974-2022”) is now online here.

Above is my map of the most recent big cat sightings I have received – mostly via the reporting form of this website since it went live in August 2023. Additionally, there was one report in the East Anglian Daily Times, one via Twitter and a couple to my personal email.

This is basically all the sightings in Suffolk (and one just outside Suffolk, just over the Norfolk border) that I’ve heard since Mystery Animals of Suffolk was published in mid-August 2023.

Are there any identifiable trends in the period of almost a year since Mystery Animals of Suffolk appeared?

Pumas are back, after an almost total absence since they dropped off the Suffolk radar in 2018.

There are many now more reports from female witnesses than in the previous half century. It tended to be men in traditionally male occupations that had them out and about very early in the morning or late a night. Now a significant proportion of reports are from women, often walking their dogs or driving, or as passengers in a car when the driver had to pay attention to the road and didn’t see the big cat. A greater diversity of witnesses to me adds to the credibility of the phenomenon.

In a year I have three reports of strange “growling” sounds, which informants tell me were suggestive of a big cat in the neighbourhood. This is many more than previously. One witness described a sound like a heavy object being dragged along a concrete floor. Another described a “sawing” noise and sent me an internet audio file or a growling leopard saying it sounded exactly like that.

Big cats which the witnesses thought looked like a lynx are back in a big way, especially around the peninsulars – the Felixstowe peninsula around Kirton and Nacton Shore and the tip of the Bawdsey peninsula. I’ve also had my first ever sighting from the Shotley peninsula – also involving a lynx-like cat.

The majority of big cats seen, though, are black big cats, strongly suggestive of melanistic leopards, as is usually the case in any “county samples”.

Most of the sightings have been in Suffolk Coastal – with a cluster around  Saxmundham. There’s also been a couple of sightings in West Suffolk in the area around Ixworth and Stanton (just west of Bury), which has been a big cat hotspot for years.  There’s a solitary sighting of a possible puma in Kennett, near the border with Cambridgeshire, also a long-established big cat stomping ground.

The last year has also seen more activity by what people are beginning to call “meso-predators”, medium-sized predators. These seem to be absolutely huge feral domestic cats or their descendants. I have been investigating a very large feral cat caught on camera in the Brightwell area (near Ipswich). This appears to be a cat at least three feet (1.5 metres) long. A young muntjac deer carcass stripped by a predator in Ditchingham is also suggestive of one of these “meso-predators.”

And yes, there has been one misidentification which was quickly sorted out.

Despite there now being a website dedicated to reporting big cats in Suffolk, the biggest number of sightings that I have heard of in a given year is still that for 2008.

The map doesn’t include historic sightings of big cats seen earlier that have come my way since October 2022. This follows and will be linked from this page.

There will be an update which talks through this data in the forthcoming talk at Dunwich Museum on 20 July.

For more data on big cat sightings from the earliest credible Suffolk sightings in the early 1970s up to October 2022, you’ll have to buy  the book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

Fortean Times, issue FT443 (April 2024) has a review of Mystery Animals of Suffolk by its deputy editor Ian Simmons:
“A cut above the usual local mystery book… this is an example of how a regional cryptozoology book ought to be written.” (The full text of the review will appear on this website shortly.)

An animal caught on a trail cam in Rendlesham. See below for the mundane explanation. Still images: copyright © Mark Veitch

A witness contacted me in February 2023 wanting to show me some images from a night vision trail cam they’d deployed in woodland on the edge of Rendlesham Forest, just outside the Forestry Commission estate and nearer the village and industrial estate.

They’d had the camera up for just over two weeks when they saw an interesting animal they thought might be a “large cat.” Many people do everything on their phones now and don’t have laptops, so the witness had only been able to see the video on a tiny screen without being able to zoom in on images. We agreed to meet so I could plug their trail cam’s SD card into an iPad Pro with its bigger screen so we could take a look.

By the time Mike (the witness) met with me, he said he was less certain what he’d seen was a big cat. His trail cam had videoed dozen of deer (mostly muntjacs), a couple of dogs with dog walkers and a fox for comparison.

Within a very short time of being able to plug the SD card into a bigger screen and zoom in on it, we’d both concluded what he’d caught on camera was in fact a fox. It was an odd-looking fox – it had a shorter than usual snout and a threadbare tail, making it look less fox-like and more cat-like. In one still image you can see just the still identifiable thick brush tail of a fox after  the rest of the animal has disappeared into the undergrowth.

This shows how easy it is to misidentify animals, particularly with all the on-screen artefacts that low resolution video shot at night generates.

Mark is continuing to operate his trail cam. There have been a lot of big cats (black leopards, lynxes or bobcats, pumas) seen in the immediate vicinity over the years. There also seem to be a lot of deer passing through. Big cats follow the deer.

For more misidentifications that turned out not to be big cats after all, see here.

 Spine and pelvis of  young muntjac showing signs of predation, with an adult men’s boot for scale, found in Ditchingham, Norfolk. © Tommy McCarthy

I received these photos of the partial skeleton of  “yearling muntjac”, a young muntjac about a year old. They were found about a quarter of a mile from a road, on a river walk near a stream which is close to the All Hallows’ Convent, the old nunnery in Ditchingham, which is just over the Norfolk border, a short distance from Bungay. My thanks to Tommy McCarthy.

Dorset big cat expert Jonathan McGowan, who’s been studying British big cats and their kill signs for over 40 years, concluded that it was “likely” the result of a big cat kill by a “lynx, jungle cat or wildcat-sized beast.” (I have been following up on several reports in the Woodbridge area recently of exceptionally large feral cats caught on trail cams, there will be an update on this shortly.)  McGowan said it probably wasn’t a kill by a leopard or puma, as they could swallow or chomp up most of the spine without much difficulty, and wouldn’t bother to strip it down in this way.

McGowan said he couldn’t completely rule out a fox as the predator, because foxes would be able to bite off the ends of the ribs quite easily.

The Beaver Trust announced in its Twitter/X feed on 5 January 2024 that it had the previous week released a family of beavers onto “a site in Suffolk,” reintroducing wild beavers into the county for the first time in 400 years.

It is hoped that beavers would help alleviate flooding and boost biodiversity locally. The location of the beaver family’s site is being kept secret for now.

My review of Jonathan McGowan’s The British Big Cat Phenomenon series of books, from Fortean Times magazine. Read it here…