Above is another of my hand-drawn maps with an update on big cat sightings and kill signs in and around Suffolk. It covers the period November 2025 (when I last did an update map) up to March 2026, so just four months, which were averagely busy.
Most of the big cat activity of late has been in Suffolk Coastal District near the coast or in the area around Woodbridge and in the nearby Bawdsey Peninsula.
As you can see from the map, there’s an awful lot of activity in and around Ufford – just north of Woodbridge – with several sightings of a lynx-like cat within a couple of weeks of each other, closely followed by the discovery of a muntjac carcass in the same village of Ufford that showed signs of predation by a big cat. (For a photo and commentary, see here.)
There were in addition to all the big cat activity around Ufford two sightings of a lynx-like cat – a “tabby” big cat seen around Tunstall and another lynx seen not far away at Bawdsey.
There was also a sighting of a “brown” puma-like cat at Blaxhall. There have been more sightings of lynxes and pumas in this period than black leopards in this period, which hasn’t happened before.
Another muntjac corpse that was a possible big cat kill sign was found and photographed at Dunwich, near where I am currently based. For more on this, see here.
As usual, a lot of black leopard activity has been in the area around Bury St Edmunds, which has been a hotspot for big cat activity for the past few years now. The two sightings of black big cats in this part of West Suffolk were just down the road from each other – near Great Barton (there’s an admittedly blurry photo here) and near Fornham St Guinevere. In one of these sightings (the one for which there’s no photo,) a taxi driver taking a break caught in his headlights a glimpse of two black leopards together. While leopards are usually solitary, there have bee sightings of a black leopard with what looked like an older cub.
The other black leopard sighting in the region in recent months was just over the Essex border, at Puttock End which is not far from the South Suffolk town of Sudbury. It’s not an area where big cat sightings are common, but there have been more sightings from South Suffolk and environs within the past year.
I am in discussions with a colleague who is building an online interactive map of Suffolk big cat sightings, with a view to integrating my database into this. I am also in talks about others taking over most of the functions of bigcatsofsuffolk.com. Watch this space.
For earlier maps with sightings of big cats in Suffolk, going all the way back to 2023, see here. Mystery Animals of Suffolk has maps showing sightings of big cats by type of cat from 1974 to 2022.
For evidence of big cats in Suffolk – photos, video and kill signs – see here.