Tracking down the Preston Puma

Here's a video I made about David Glyn Jones, who is on the trail of what he believes is a puma living wild on some rough ground just outside his home town of Preston. David is deaf, which to my untrained eye appears to go some way to explaining why he is more observant than average. Plus he's been tracking wildlife since he was a boy, and loves spending time outdoors. He can look at a tree branch, patch of Himalayan balsam or a grass field and spot signs that I wouldn't have noticed in a million years. Tracking down whatever-it-is has become something of an obsession for him. I managed to borrow a couple of trail cameras from Minox to help with his quest. I went to visit him at home last week, and this is the result.

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Welsh big cat on the prowl again

My informant from Wales has called to say that his local big cat is active again - three sheep killed last week, and another this morning. (Previous post on this subject here)

Locals have heard 'screaming' at night, and the sheep have all been killed in a distinctive manner, quite unlike the work of rogue dogs etc. Some of the sheep have been so thoroughly eaten that only a fleece and stomach contents remain in the morning - it takes some creature to do that in a night!

The farmer whose sheep were taken made the mistake of telling the police about it. So what did they do? They confiscated his guns!

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UPDATE 14/10/09: I asked one of our experts to comment on the details of this case, as reported to me. Here's what he said:

Big cats tend to drag their prey up into a tree, whenever possible; clearly this isn't happening here. They also favour woodland, however sparse, for their lair; is there somewhere in the vicinity that could provide such cover? If so, a series of 'sandpits' dug where the animal would have to exit might provide a clue.

One big cat (however big) couldn't possibly eat a whole sheep on three consecutive days (Thu, Fri, Sat) and why would it kill again on Sunday, but not eat the carcass? Maybe 'it' was disturbed, but the clue is in my putting 'it' into inverted commas ie is 'it' in fact 'them'? A mother with kittens perhaps. The fact that the ears have been chewed could indicate kittens hanging onto the ears trying to emulate their mother during the attack, or chewing on them prior to being given permission to feed off the main carcass. This is becoming a might fanciful, though.

Another thing about eating raw flesh is that it takes 48 hours to go through the system as opposed to 24 hours with cooked flesh; ask the kennel huntsman of any pack of hounds. So eating raw flesh on consecutive days doesn't make sense.

Why did it leave the stomach contents? Most carnivores value greatly the partially digested herbage found in their victims' stomachs. It helps to provide necessary roughage without the need to graze actual blades of grass for which their teeth are poorly suited.

Blood in the ears and frothy blood in the mouth might suggest death by strangulation (or lung damage) a vet would be able to tell you better than I, so almost anything could be responsible for that, even a mink might manage it.

Pugmarks are particularly difficult to find unless sand or mud has been crossed. Even then, it takes an experienced eye to identify them positively. If there are any, it might be helpful to note that cats can withdraw their claws when walking (and extend them when attacking) so the lack of claw marks could be an indicator, but by no means foolproof.

I once tracked a cattle-eating leopard in Namibia for four hours along a dried up river bed and never once saw any sign of its claws in the soft sand. On another occasion on the Botswana/South Africa border I followed the pugmarks of a leopard along the muddy bank of the Limpopo for an hour and a half; this leopard's claws were evident all along the way. For reasons too long to go into here, I didn't shoot either of those cats, but I watched them often through my binoculars, so I do know what animal made those pugmarks.

Coursing is legal - with a cheetah!

Photo: www.fieldsportschannel.tv

Check out this story (with video) in today's Sunday Times. OK, so it's as much publicity stunt as it is real life, but it does show up the Hunting Act as a complete dog's breakfast. And it provided another opportunity for LACS's Louise Robertson to sound like a whiny pointless idiot: "The link between teaching an animal to hunt and the eventual release of captive-bred animals into the wild is extremely tenuous" she says. Perhaps she'd rather teach predators to say "One veggie burger and a packet of organic muesli please."

Big cat evidence from Wales

There's a Welsh sheep farmer who always drops in to see us at the Midland Game Fair. I look forward to catching up with him each year, and hearing the latest news in his struggle with the local big cat population - or whatever it is that keeps nabbing his sheep. He's convinced it's a big cat, and having seen some of his photos of mangled sheep it's hard to argue with that.

He has just sent me this photo of a fox that was shot one night at 1.30am and hung on the barbed wire fence. When the farmer went to collect it at 9.30am, it had been half eaten by... well, what do you think?