Is there evidence of big cats living in Scotland ?

A few weeks ago when it was snowy Dad was walking on the moor near my house. He was watching a herd of ten roe deer from a small wood when he saw something moving up the hill. It was much higher than the deer, and it was on a high up part of the mountain where deer, foxes and badgers didn't normally go. 

It was a long way away, about a kilometre, and about 600 feet higher up than he was so he couldn't see it very well. It looked black and was moving slowly and he took lots of photographs of it.

Even though he uses a long lens, the photographs were poor quality because it was so far away, but he thought was much too big to be a fox or dog.

At the time he thought it looked like a wolf even though he knew there were no wild wolves in Scotland anymore. Here's a wolf from the Scottish Deer Centre:

It wasn't until he got these two photographs that he was sure what he had seen:

The thin black legs, the bushy tail, and the black ears meant it was a fox all along !

Once he knew it was a fox he could explain the rest. It was so high up in the mountains because the snow made it difficult to hunt for food lower down. It moved slower than normal because it was hunting. And he couldn't judge properly how big the fox was because there was nothing nearby on the hill, like a fence or a bush, to get a sense of scale.

So this got me thinking. If my dad who is on the hills a lot could get confused by a fox, maybe this explains why so many people in Scotland who report seeing big cats in the wild ? What would have happened if dad had believed in big cats in Scotland but didn't have the extra pictures to show it was just a fox ?

There are loads of big cat sightings in Scotland and the rest of the UK. In 2012 there were 70 sightings reported to a big cat study group, and 140 reported to police over the previous five years ! 

That's about one sighting every six days in 2012, which means if they are were true there would be loads of big cats (or one that gets seen a lot). But there are no confirmed sightings of big cats, and none have been found dead or killed as roadkill. There was a lynx that was captured in 1980 near Inverness but it refused to eat raw meat and would only eat cooked food, and it wasn't wild at all, so it was most likely someone's pet that they released into the wild.

Here are some of the other cases of big cat sightings:

The Cullen Big Cat Corpse

Everyone wants to find a big cat body because its bones or DNA would prove whether big cats lived here !

In May last year, a dog walker called John Robertson found the body of a strange animal. The picture is a bit gross so you have to click on it to see it.

Very gross image. Click and hold down to see the full picture or click here to see in a new window.

He said "We came across a horrible rotting smell which was this big cat. It looks like it's feasted on the seagulls and maybe it has fallen down the cliff nearby, injured itself and just lay there till it died. I'm sure we'll find out from the DNA tests what type of cat it is, but it certainly seems like one of the big cats." A lot of newspapers published the story and the pictures. (I got permission from the news agency SWNS for me to use the pictures, thanks SWNS !). Here's one of the mouth:

Very gross image. Click and hold down to see the full picture or click here to see in a new window.

It might not have looked like any animal he had seen before but that didn't mean it wasn't an animal that lived nearby. There are lots of animals that live here that people rarely see, like badgers (shy and nocturnal) and grass snakes.

But there is one thing this animal could not have been, and that is a big cat. That is because this mystery animal has at least four cheek teeth on each jaw (cheek teeth are pre-molar or molar teeth which are the teeth at the back of the mouth after the big canine teeth). All cats, whether pussy cats or lions, just have three cheek teeth.

So what could it be ? I checked and the teeth were the same as my otter. 

Very gross image. Click and hold down to see the full picture or click here to see in a new window.

Otters might be strange to Mr Robertson but they are definitely not big cats !

The Faslane Big Cat

In 2009 a military policeman called Chris Swallow at the Faslane naval base in Scotland filmed this. He said "The animal wasn't moving the way I expected a dog to. It was then I realised that what I was seeing was a big cat. It was remarkable. I've heard stories about creatures like this moving about the countryside but never really believed them before. Looking back at the video I don't think there's any doubt that it's a big cat."

The thing about big cats like lynx and tigers is that they are a lot like small cats in the way they are and the way they move. Even their skulls look identical apart from size. Here is the lion skull from when I visited CAHID next to one of my cat skulls.

But the cat in the video was doing one of the things that domestic cats can do but big cats can't. It was walking with its tail sticking up in the air !

The person filming it made the same mistake as my dad did. Even though the cat was next to train lines, he got the scale wrong, and it was a domestic cat, not a big cat.

The Cotswolds Big Cat

This was in England, not in Scotland, but it's important because it is connected to the story I am going to write about next week. In February last year there were remains of animals found which were said to look like they had been killed by a big cat.

Frank Tunbridge who was described as a big cat expert said: ‘I have seen pictures of this carcass. It has all the hallmarks of a big cat kill. The woman found it in a field but when she came back to take photographs, it was completely stripped out, with just its spine left." The animal had been ripped open and was missing its heart, kidneys and liver, he said. Its snout was also missing - important because big cats clamp their jaws over the mouth, causing death by suffocation.

The thing about the snout being missing reminded me a lot about roe deer skulls I had found, like this one:

I didn't think this had been killed by a big cat, but had it been ? It was from a wood just a few miles from my house.

Anyway, the bodies of the animals were tested, and the only extra DNA found was from a fox. So while big cats might strip out the body and bite the snout, foxes sometimes do it too.

The Beast of Bodmin Moor

For a long time, people in Cornwall thought there may be a big cat living on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall in England (a small country to the south of Scotland). Then in 1995 a boy found a big cat skull in the River Fowey. He took it to the National History Museum in London who helped identify it. They have a brilliant interactive bit on their website about it (don't read on here if you want to play it first).

They identified the skull as from a leopard ! Did this mean that leopards were living in Cornwall ? But they also found two other important things. One was a beetle case, which was important because this type of beetle only hatches in the warm, which Bodmin Moor isn't. They also found that the back of the skull had been sawn off like on my leopard skull:

That happens when they are put into old rugs (like mine was) or mounted as trophies.

So wherever the leopard came from, it didn't die on Bodmin Moor.

Alan Stewart, the Wildlife Crime Officer

Where I live there used to be a famous policeman called Alan Stewart who was in charge of the Wildlife Crimes Unit at Tayside Police for ages. He wrote a few books which I have. In his first book "Wildlife Detective", in 2007, in a chapter called "The Myth of The Big Cat" he wrote:

"I have never visited the location of a sighting where I have smelt anything that may indicate the presence of a big cat, or heard anything that resembled any sound made by a big cat, or even seen any mark that could have without doubt have been made by a big cat."

Then he wrote a follow-up book "A Lone Furrow" in 2011 and in a chapter called "Getting it Wrong" he wrote:

"In Wildlife Detective I devoted a chapter entitled "The Myth of the Big Cat" - to my extreme doubt that there are leopards, puma and lynx wandering the Tayside hills and glens. I have been sceptical of alleged sightings, and while I believe the reports are genuine I think they are mistaken. Until now !"

Then he says that in 2010 he was contacted by a Perthshire estate manager who had found footprints on the estate. He said that the footprint was definitely of a big cat, not a dog or other animal,  that was running, and the footprints were twelve feet apart ! He spoke to a big cat expert who said the footprints could have been from a puma, a lynx or a leopard !

(You can buy copies of Mr Stewart's books here. They're really good)

The estate is not too far away from me, so maybe there is a big cat lurking in the woods near me after all !

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