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.