Category: News

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…