Two photos of a possible melanistic leopard seen near Eye. The copyright holder is known to me.
I was sent these two photos on 23 April 2025 by a witness near Eye in North Suffolk, who doesn’t want to give any further identifying details.
They told me they’d seen a large black animal walking up and down along the tree line at the end of a field behind their garden, the distance from where they were to the animal when they photographed it was a good few minutes walk. They observed it for more than five minutes before it sat down “with its head up”, which is when they took these photos. They were taken using the zoom on a Samsung phone of recent vintage.
There’s a third photo, but it’s the usual black blur we have come to expect from mobile photo cameras trying to do wildlife photography without huge lenses.
Below are cropped, blown up versions of the two photos. In one of them it seems to show a sleek, shiny-furred black seated animal’s head, possibly turned to the side, with its paws out in front and short, rounded ears visible on the top of its head. All these features are found in melanistic (black) leopards, by far the most commonly reported big cat in Suffolk and in the UK.
If – as it appears – the animal has its head to the side, then it would rule out a misidentified dumped realistic soft toy “panther”, which are often in a sitting position and have been mistaken for big cats in the past. (The Trimley tiger and the tiger in Siam Gardens, Sudbury – Suffolk Free Press, 28 February 2012 – are examples. But some big cats that turned out to be real, such as the Beccles lynx, were originally written off as misidentified dumped soft toys.)
The witness reported hearing “growling” around the nearby village of Mendlesham “a few months ago” and says they go out shooting and know their deer, they were convinced it wasn’t a rutting deer they heard. They also report having seen the hindquarters and tail of a black big cat disappearing into the undergrowth back in around 2002, in their childhood, in another nearby village.
I have sent the photos to some experts and I am awaiting their opinions on these.
Cropped and blown-up versions of the above photos.
See also my gallery of evidence for big cats in and around Suffolk, including videos.