I responded to a tweet the other day that showed a mammal’s footpring in the snow and gave my view as to which mammal might have left it. It reminded me of chapters I have written in three of my books of footprints in the snow and also of my views on ‘big cats.’ I have reproduced the relevant parts here.
The Myth of the Big Cat (part of a chapter in my first book Wildlife Detective)
Many people have claimed to see one but it’s hard to find any evidence to substantiate this most persistent and resilient of rural myths. There are many sightings of big cats reported to the police. I have attended at several of the locations but in truth there is little that the police can do to either establish that the sighting was indeed a big cat or rebut the allegation as a false alarm with good intent. There is seldom anything to look at to make any sort of judgement as to the accuracy of the information or to be satisfied that the efficacy of any evidence leaves no doubt that the animal was a leopard, mountain lion, lynx or whatever exotic species had been imagined. 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 without doubt have been made by a big cat.
Leaving aside smell, which has never entered the equation so far at any of the calls I have attended, the sound aspect was slightly more interesting. One family living in a rural location east of Perth were absolutely convinced that they heard the growl and scream of a big cat one winter’s night, but did nothing to report the matter at the time. The sound seemed to have come from a field in front of the house and had been heard several times. As is sometimes the case the person who has the experience is sure that what he or she hears or sees is a big cat but is not convinced that the story will be believed. A few nights later, in the pitch dark, one of the family was round the back of the house filling a bucket of coal for the fire. He heard a growling sound coming from the wood not many yards from where he was standing and was convinced at that time that the sound came from a big cat. He fled into the house, minus the bucket of coal, and was prepared to endure the cold rather than venture back for the coal. It was at this point that the police were contacted.
There was little point of a police officer attending in the dark. Unless a large furry creature with sharp teeth and sharp claws jumped out of the darkness and attached itself to him, he would be no wiser at the end of his investigation of the scene than the householder whose teeth by this would be chattering for two different reasons.
I attended in the morning and had a good search round, being directed but not accompanied by the householder, but there was not a shred of evidence that a big cat of any sort had visited the vicinity. One thing I didn’t want was for the story of the phantom feline to hit the papers, but unfortunately it did. In my experience this triggers a string of sightings all over the place and there are suddenly more leopards, black panthers and lionesses (never lions) in Scotland – or even Tayside – than there are in the Masai Mara. This inevitably led to another two episodes that I’ll come to shortly but before that there may be a satisfactory conclusion to this big cat that was heard but never seen.
This episode took place in 2003 but in 2005 there were a number of sightings of an eagle owl in exactly the same area. I’ve only heard the sound of eagle owls on television programmes but it seemed remarkably like what was being described. The owl was known to remain in the area for many months and who knows how long it may have been there beforehand. It was eventually caught and was confirmed as an eagle owl. This was about the same time as it was revealed that a pair of eagle owls had been breeding for several years in the north of England and there was considerable speculation that a number of eagle owls could be breeding unnoticed in other parts of the UK. It may be the answer; it may not.
Several days later a shooting agent, this time to the west of Perth, contacted me to say that he had been out shooting foxes at night with the aid of a spotlamp, a common and efficient practice, when he was convinced he had captured a huge black cat with a long tail in the beam of his light. He was so surprised that he didn’t shoot it and it ran off up the field and out of sight. He telephoned me the next day to tell me about the incident and to say that he had found marks in the snow that seemed to be from a big cat.
I met him and we looked at the marks, which were indeed made by an extremely large animal. The animal had been running flat out and the full stretch of its stride was well over six feet. The marks were fairly clear in the snow, which was fresh and had not begun to melt, so I took some photographs and some plaster casts. Plaster casts are not easy in the snow as the snow has to be sprayed first to stop it melting when the plaster is poured into the print, then the plaster has to be allowed to harden before it can be lifted.
While the plaster was hardening, I contemplated other prints in snow I had seen at past locations that had convinced the person who found them they were the prints of big cats. All had been in snow that had started to melt, which had caused the print to grow in size. One set of prints I was sure were those of an otter, yet looked almost as big as those of a lion. What convinced me that the prints were not made by a lion was the fact they were close together and had clearly been made by a comparatively small mammal. It is an interesting experiment to try the next time there is snow and there is a partial thaw. Examine your own footprints made in the snow the day before and they will have expanded in the thaw from your normal size shoe to one several sizes bigger.
When I was able to lift the plaster casts I could see evidence of a claw on each toe of the print. This had not been visible until they had been cast. Cats retract their claws when they are walking or running: dogs don’t have this ability. Whatever the beast had been it had been canine and not feline.
Hard on the heels of this sighting and not too many miles away I attended a report of sheep worrying. Several sheep had been killed and the farmer had brought the carcasses in to the steading. He told me on the phone that they had been killed by a big cat and that he could see the claw marks of the cat clearly on the flank of the sheep. I went to the farm and had a look. The sheep had all been killed the same way; by gripping the throat of the animal. Before the coup de grace much of the wool had been ripped off in the struggle to bring the sheep down and there were indeed scratch marks on the flank of one of the unfortunate animals. I was of the view that the scratch marks were too shallow to have been a cat, which has very sharp claws, and not widely enough spaced for a big cat. It was my view that the animal had been a dog. I even elaborated the point that it had been a dog that had fairly sharp claws and probably spent much of its time indoors or at least on grass or another soft surface as the claws were not worn flat by hours of walking on concrete and were not quite sharp enough to penetrate the sheep’s skin to any appreciable depth.
The farmer disagreed. This was the work of a big cat. Whatever had killed the sheep had started to eat one of them at the top of the back leg. I don’t know too much of big cats from the African Plains but I would imagine their habits would be broadly similar to our feral and even domestic cats here, except on a larger dimension. When feral cats here eat the carcass of a rabbit or hare they start at the front end, invariably entering the body cavity through the ribs. There was no damage to the front end of the carcasses. This was my second point but I had not convinced the farmer. The killer of his sheep had been a big cat.
For the next couple of nights the local gamekeeper sat out with his rifle and awaited the return of the big cat. It did not materialise. What did materialise was yet another series of articles in the media of a big cat on the loose. I was asked for comment. I gave a comment that reflected my views – but this was played down as it was not conducive to a dramatic news story. My views were vindicated less than two weeks later. An Alsatian was shot and killed while in the act of attacking sheep several fields away from our first farm. This was a dog that was normally either kept in the house or the confines of the garden but somehow had managed to escape. After that there were no more sheep-worrying incidents and no more reports of big cats in the area.
My last example of a big cat incident relates to a true story told to me by a retired colleague of mine, Inspector John Grierson, who until his retirement was the wildlife crime officer for Northern Constabulary. Before his appointment to that role he was in the traffic department and he and another officer were carrying out a night patrol in a rural part of Inverness-shire. As they drove along a dark road they saw a big black cat run across the road in the headlights. The cat was bigger than an Alsatian and had a long back tail which was stretched straight out behind it as it ran across the road. There was no doubt whatsoever that this was a big cat and it had been seen by two police officers.
They turned the car at the first suitable point along the road to see if they could get a further look at the cat, and drove back the way they had come. When they came to the same spot there was a black calf on the road that had managed to escape from a field and had panicked on seeing the approaching headlights. . .
I keep an open mind on the presence of big cats in our midst but I always wonder, with the number of farmers and gamekeepers patrolling their land at night with spotlamps and rifles on the lookout for foxes, why no-one has ever come in to a police station and said, ‘You’ll never believe what I shot last night…’
Getting it Wrong (part of a chapter in my third book, A Lone Furrow)
I have to finish this chapter with an apology. In Wildlife Detective I devoted a chapter, entitled The Myth of the Big Cat, to my extreme doubt that there are leopards, pumas or lynx wandering the Tayside hills and glens. I have been sceptical of alleged sightings, and while I believe that the reports are genuine, I think they are mistaken. Until now!
The factor of a Perthshire estate emailed me in mid-February 2010 to say that there was a big cat on a particular estate, though he did not want this publicised. Included in his email were three photographs. The first was a paw mark in a light fall of fresh snow, with a ruler beside it showing that it measured about 4 inches in diameter. There will be some dogs that could leave a paw mark that size but this was definitely a cat’s mark; I was 100% happy about that. There were no claw marks, (cats, with the exception of the cheetah, retract their claws when they don’t need them; dogs can’t do that) and the mark was round like a cat’s: in fact it was a giant cat. It was also a giant cat that had been running. It was so big that in the second photograph the gamekeeper who found the marks had walked alongside them and it took three of his paces, about 12 feet, to cover the area from where the first of the cat’s paws hit the ground to where that paw hit the ground next.
I spoke to an expert in Scottish wildcats, Keith Ringland, who had seen and photographed the paw marks. He was even more convinced than I was that it was a big cat. When I asked him what kind it could be he said a leopard (the famous black panther, which is in fact a melanistic leopard), a puma or a lynx. I immediately thought back to a talk I gave in 2009. There was an audience of just over 100 and at the end, at time for questions, a lady asked me my view on big cats. I told her what my thoughts were and as I was doing so I could see that she was a believer. She was not at all pleased with my answer and shunned me during the tea and biscuits afterwards. If I knew who she was I’d be phoning her up now.
Even though the owner of the huge paw marks in the snow was never found, I should have hedged my bets and entitled my earlier chapter The Myth of the Big Cat? A question mark can make a huge difference and makes a U-turn a little easier.
Part of a chapter in my book A Wealth of Wildlife covering a year I spent walking over a Highland Perthshire Estate
Sunday 19 February 2012. Weather: one or two inches of snow on the ground, having fallen the previous evening. Temperature -3 degrees, gradually reaching 4 degrees as the sun came out about 9.30 am. Thankfully no wind.
There was only a dusting of snow at home, though I suspected there would be slightly more on the estate. The forecast was good so I thought I might take advantage of an opportunity to track birds and mammals that may have passed earlier. If snow has lain overnight without freezing it is an open book as to what has taken place during the night. I hoped that would be the case. A light snowfall, in line with yesterday evening’s weather forecast, makes little difference to the nocturnal activities of mammals, thought a heavy snowfall severely limits the movements of the smaller ones. I could see as I drove up the A9 that the hills were white; in fact after leaving the dual carriageway the narrower roads were white as well, and demanded careful driving to avoid landing in the ditch. There was a good omen soon after I left the dual carriageway. As I passed a sawmill 10 or a dozen fallow deer were ambling from one side of the bellmouth to the other, and about 10 yards from my car. They took no notice of the vehicle, though I was unable to stop or even slow down before I had passed the entrance and lost them to sight. Most were the dark variety, with a single dappled one among them. A good start!
I left my car at the shooting lodge. There was an inch or so of snow there, more where it had been drifting in yesterday evening’s wind. It was crunchy underfoot, but thankfully that was only on any field or hill tracks. If I walked to the side of any tracks the snow was quite soft, and allowed me to walk quietly rather than alert every beastie within quarter of a mile. Rabbit tracks were everywhere, and as I headed up towards the Larch Wood a fox had crossed my route. Its passage must have been during early evening as drifting snow had partly filled in its tracks, but the neat straight line of paw prints, with toe marks still visible in an occasional one, confirmed who had left the tracks. Fallow deer had also been down very close to the shooting lodge. Their cleat marks were mostly filled in with snow as well, but where they dragged each foot forward, barely off the ground, they left two virtually parallel lines, punctuated every time they put a foot down. Roe are much more dainty when walking and, unless the snow is deep, are less inclined to drag their cleats through the snow.
I cut into the small roundel of mainly larch trees immediately before the Larch Wood. A rabbit ahead of me thumped the ground with a back foot (the sound carrying quite clearly in the absence of wind) and another rabbit came out of a nearby burrow to assess the danger for itself. The two looked at me, 20 yards away, trying to work out – in almost monochrome vision – what this apparition was. It’s strange that birds see in colour yet most mammals, with the exception of primates and some marsupials, only appear to see shaded versions of colours. Most mammals in Scotland are nocturnal so I suppose improved night vision might be the reason, and certainly an advantage.
As I was watching the two rabbits I was aware of a chaffinch half-heartedly trying to sing. I’ve heard chaffinches singing at home over the last few mornings, but these mornings were milder with no snow. The one above me sounded a bit downcast that the route to spring had faltered spectacularly and eventually gave up its musical efforts. The rabbits’ patience was wearing better than mine, and I finally moved forward, causing both of them to take off through the wood. Most observers might wonder why they did not bolt down the adjacent burrow, especially considering one had not long emerged from the it. When I walked forward I could see that the burrow was quite small with only three entrances. Taking refuge in what appeared to be a small, shallow, burrow might put them at great risk if the ‘predator’ had seen where they had gone. Making for a bigger burrow, or even an equally small burrow but out of sight of the predator, was a much safer option.
I was torn between looking down at tracks and looking up for birds, but when I did eventually tear my gaze away from the myriad of tracks in the snow I could see a buzzard’s nest high in a larch tree. It looked in good repair and was probably from the previous year. The chances are they’ll be back to the roundel, or even the same nest, this year.
As I came out of the roundel, two dunnocks were feeding on the tip of a blown fir tree, apparently the only two avian companions for the despondent chaffinch. I crossed a narrow, damp area to reach the entrance to the Larch Wood. On the left of the entrance there is a huge area of wild rhododendrons. Red-legged partridges started to explode out of there at my approach. I was amazed as they continued to come out, making a total of at least 70. I saw from the footprints in the snow as I went in through the open gate to the wood that other partridges had run across to the right; tracks with three toes forward, one back and with a small furrow in the snow made by the middle toe scraping the snow, thereby joining the footprints together. This was an incredible pack of partridges for mid-February, especially after a busy shooting season. I’ll be interested to see if they pair up; whether they’ll nest on the lower ground rather than on the hill; if red-legged partridges are good parents, and if there is a good enough food supply to sustain chicks. I suspect there will be plenty food, as no chemicals are used on the estate so insects, essential for many young birds, should thrive.
The Larch Wood was quiet. There were plenty tracks of fallow and some of roe, but the only bird I saw was a robin. A primary school pupil once wrote in a nature diary during a project I ran that ‘robins only come out when there is snow.’ There was certainly snow today; maybe she was right! I walked to the top of the wood to where larch and sycamore trees give way to sitka spruce, and wondered if I might see a red squirrel. The red squirrel habitat had degenerated with so many recently-fallen trees, but hopefully there may be sufficient remaining to sustain a few of the scarce and loveable beasties.
At the top of one of the trees, though out of my view, a mistle thrush was singing. Even he, like the earlier chaffinch, was putting little effort into the song and gave up after a few bars. It was nearly 10.00 o’clock and the sun had come out, but not enough to convince birds that their musical endeavours – which are really about communication and territory – would be wasted. Did they know of a spell of wintry weather ahead?
I left the wood and had a look round the corner at one of my favourite rock-seats (too wet to sit on today) to see if there was any sign of the black rabbit. En route I crossed fox tracks heading in that direction and hoped black bun had not been on last night’s menu. There was no sign of the black rabbit, but I’ll not give up hope just yet… The fox tracks continued down over the burn and up the small incline to the gate leading to the grass field that leads up to Eerie Valley. The tracks were nice and clear, probably made around dawn, so I decided to follow to see what Vulpes vulpes had been up to.
When the fox walked in a straight line it was easy to confirm the habit they have of placing the hind foot almost on top of the imprint of the front foot. Unlike some other mammals where there are usually two parallel lines of tracks the fox normally leaves a single line of tracks. This single line led to a rabbit burrow, where the fox had investigated two of the entrances before moving on and turning right to head down to the dyke separating the field from the hill. It followed the line of the dyke to near the top of the field and was joined (or at least its tracks were joined) there by the tracks of another fox coming in from the centre of the field. The two sets of tracks continued, without any signs of one fox greeting the other (which made me think the tracks were made at different times and that the two foxes had not, in fact, met), through the gate at the top of the field and through the next gate 20 yards along that led to the hill and Eerie Valley.
Once on the hill one set of tracks veered sharp left, but the other – my original fox – continued along the track through the hill that leads to the pegs for the partridge drives. A couple of hundred yards along the track it deviated sharply to the left to the bracken, flattened by the winter frosts, and almost immediately came out onto the track again in two bounds. At that point there was a small red bloodstained patch of snow where the fox had crunched and eaten the morsel it had caught, probably a wood mouse or a field vole. I could even see in the snow where the fox had briefly sat on its haunches while it dined, with the impression in the snow of the lower part of its back legs, from toe to hock, forming an open ‘V’, almost surrounded by the semi-circular impression of its backside. Any countryside walk in fresh snow can reveal these secrets to anyone who can interpret them.
The fox walked on a bit further, investigating – though not eating – a fallow deer gralloch, before cutting right-handed again down towards the burn running through Eerie Valley. Just after the fox left the path, the tracks of a small mammal, probably a field vole, crossed the path from left to right. Surprisingly I’ve never seen a live vole on the estate, but they were certainly here. Maybe this year will be a good vole year, and consequently lead to better breeding success of species such as stoats, weasels, owls, kestrels, hen harriers and merlins. The vole doesn’t have many friends!
I sell most of my books myself.To obtain a signed copy of A Lone Furrow (10), A Wealth of Wildlife (£10) or Wildlife Detective (£15) contact me at wildlifedetective@gmail.com
Wildlife Detective 
A fascinating post, thank you.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.