One of the biggest let downs during my time researching big cat sightings around Buckinghamshire and the surrounding areas is I have never 100 percent observed with no shadow of a doubt a big cat in the United kingdom. I have seen two animals that given the circumstances, movement and behaviour probably were big cats but until I see one with a real level of clarity and scale I will continue to be critical of my own eyes. One of the most devastating events on my search so far is being in a taxi back home after a late night party. Both my wife and the taxi driver watched a large dog sized black cat run across the road in front of them while I was fast asleep on the back seat.
In my desperation over the years to extract large big cat sightings and stories from people used to implement a cunning technique when meeting new people. I would usually ask ‘where are you from’? And if they said High Wycombe for example I would say ‘ah! funny you mention High Wycombe my friend recently told me he was driving near there one night and saw a huge black panther cross the road’!. You would simply not believe the amount of times people say ‘I have a story to tell you about that’! Or I have seen them or my dad has seen one. It almost seems if you added together all these hidden sightings you could grab some large numbers when trying to work out a population estimate. It has been said, quite rightly so, for every official sighting there is usually at least ten that go unreported and judging by how many people appear to have seen big cats in Britain it makes for some very big numbers indeed.
Contrast this to some of my leopard research in India in a region that has a widely accepted thriving leopard population the story is very different. I asked 14 taxi drivers if they had ever seen a leopard. Only one out of the 14 knew another taxi driver who had seen one cross the road late at night in his whole life. This pays homage to the incredible ability for leopards to live in high density urban environments and never get seen by people.
The sheer scale of sightings in Britain hit home to me a few months ago when my wife and another couple from our university days got together for a weekend. After much catching up the subject of my big cat tracking in the Chilterns came up which always is an excuse for a giggle. Little did I ever imagine that I was the only person out of the four of us who had ever seen one? Alex during officer training at Oxford saw a panther like cat whilst in the Pennines, Sabeen had seen one when she was young in her back garden in Kent and my wife had seen one in North West London that night in the taxi.
The sheer scale of sightings in Britain hit home to me a few months ago when my wife and another couple from our university days got together for a weekend. After much catching up the subject of my big cat tracking in the Chilterns came up which always is an excuse for a giggle. Little did I ever imagine that I was the only person out of the four of us who had ever seen one? Alex during officer training at Oxford saw a panther like cat whilst in the Pennines, Sabeen had seen one when she was young in her back garden in Kent and my wife had seen one in North West London that night in the taxi.
So how many big cats are there in Buckinghamshire? I have before said in a YouTube video seven would be a guess based on sightings, this is of course just a guess. The truth is it could be more or less and I think the number will never be fully known. One thing is for sure the sightings aligned with verified prints, animal predation and scat mean at the moment at least there is probably more than we ever thought possible.
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