The Path of the Panther
by Ian Bond.
AUTHOR: Ian Bond
PUBLISHER: Big Cats In Britain
PAGES: 86
January 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9562016-3-8
PRICE: £6.50 + 50p postage
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Big Cats in Britain are proud to announce the publication of Ian Bond's The Path of the Panther (BCIB Publishing January 2010), which is now available.
Who better to tell us what the book about is Ian himself in the article below.
The Path of the Panther
You never know where a remark might end up taking you. I used to edit the quarterly newsletter for Northumbria Mammal Group and was understandably cock-a-hoop when one of our members, an acknowledged expert on mammal tracks and signs, reckoned that he had found a big cat’s dropping in a wood in Northumberland.
Such a tale would be gold dust to most editors even if their publication wasn’t a specialist wildlife one. I printed it just as he’d written it, but because my natural state of being is to be facetious I prefixed the item with the following comments: Not to be outdone by those suntanned, whispering BBC people, I thought that we would start our own big cat diary. With a bit of luck we will be able to publish a big cat report in each edition of the newsletter; until such time as its existence is proven beyond doubt, at which point we’ll apply for funding for a project officer.
The sliding doors moment was that another well-respected North East naturalist took me seriously and told me of his compelling sighting. Although I have never published details of his report, as he didn’t want the location to be revealed, it remains one of the best both in terms of the sighting itself and the follow up story. Nevertheless the genie was clearly out of the bottle and I thought that I should at least document such reports. The Northumbrian Big Cat Diaries were up and running.
In the intervening ten years I have logged around 150 reports of what are claimed to be big cats in locations from Boulby to Berwick. To some this might not be too surprising, after all, the Durham Puma, our very own version of the Yeti or Loch Ness Monster, has become something of a local legend. However reports of the Durham Puma go back to the early 80s; no matter how many lives that cat had, it used them up at least a decade ago, so what people are seeing now must be a different cat or cats.
My first thought, as an ecologist, was to see if any patterns emerged in where the cats were being reported.
Whilst cats are adaptable they do have habitat preferences, whatever those might be in modern Britain and they also have finite home ranges though these can vary considerably in size. I can’t be too sure, as I expect that I only get to hear about a fraction of alleged sightings but a few places have shown up to be a bit of a hot spot.
Upper Tynedale and the northern edge of the North York Moors figured quite noticeably early on, with another cluster of reports in Weardale coming to light in the past couple of years. However by far the most prominent location for reports was the area from the west of Hartlepool over towards Sedgefield and the north of Stockton. Most of these reports described a large black cat with a long tail.
I christened this the Trimdon Panther, as the sightings seemed to occur within Tony Blair’s then constituency boundary, though subsequent reports showed that the Panther pre-dated Tony Blair (now that would be every editor’s dream headline, were it not for the hyphen).
Of the 150 sightings where a sufficiently detailed description was given, almost 100 report something that best fits the description of a Panther, a large black cat, frequently compared in size to a Labrador. Curiously, another interesting statistic is that a remarkably high proportion of people who see a big cat also have a Labrador. In spite of the Durham Puma moniker, only six of the reports that I have received have actually described something that looked like a Puma as, contrary to what seems to be the popular belief, Pumas are never black. A further seven reports have described a Lynx and a there has been a single one of both Serval and Jungle Cat. I like reports of Lynx as there isn’t really anything else to get them mixed up with, whereas there are plenty of black moggies out there that could potentially masquerade as Panthers if there wasn’t a handy scale to judge their size by. Indeed some of the remaining sightings have described a cat that doesn’t resemble any known to science.
Either we have more species of big cat on the loose in the North East than any one of the world’s continents or I need to allow for an element of error in some of the sightings when trying to analyse them.
Nevertheless most of these reports were either of cats that were fairly close, often closer than the person might have wished, or they were by people who are used to observing wildlife. Perhaps the closest of all of the sightings was by a woman in Stocksfield whose dog had ran to the bottom of the garden and started barking at something through the fence. When she went to pull the dog away she found herself face to face through the fence with a Panther. She rang me to tell me herself as she was rather irate when someone had suggested to her that she had seen a Muntjac deer. As it turned out, when she mentioned it in the village shop almost everyone from the butcher to the baker to the candlestick maker claimed to have seen it.
Ten years on the reports are still coming in and are even increasing in number: a Panther seen from a train two miles north of Chester le Street; two sightings by a former countryside ranger in a wood near Loftus and a cat footprint, too small to be from a Panther but far too large to be from a moggie, seen by an experienced mammal ecologist near Pickering. The Durham Puma may be dead but long live the Trimdon Panther and its relatives.
REVIEWS
This is Ian's first book, which I am very pleased to review. Ian who is an ecologist in the North East of England, has written a book which is partly a roundup of reported sightings in the North East area, and partly a discussion of those sightings. Included in the second part are maps and also photographs of interest and relevance to the text. At first reading I thought the book was a dry run-through of reports, however on continued reading I realised I was enjoying the read, mainly due to Ian's quite humorous writing style. He also personalised the writing with anecdotes which revealed his affinity with sharing information and experience, which I think is always a sign of a natural writer. For example he mentions a series of dreams he had regarding big cats which I found very interesting and which perhaps gives insight into his mind-set at the time. As well as the humour (see his comments on his new night vision equipment) and personalisation of the writing Ian also shows his academic style, he has good attention to detail which is very important in a book of this nature as we need accuracy in order to map and plot the presence of the big cats. His inclusion of maps is helpful for those of us readers who can't always visualise an area and its geography. He clearly shows a healthy academic scepticism which balances the reports and shows us that he is not going to lead us astray with wild imaginings because ultimately that leads us down a blind alley. I found this an informative read covering the area it does and also enjoyable for the reasons mentioned. Ian's writing style saves this book from being a list of reports to something much more enjoyable. On a more serious note he highlights the fact that there are potential dangers and that going out 'Cat hunting' is not a fun hobby and should be left to those who have knowledge and experience of the nature and habits of these large felines with a view to observing and reporting. I thoroughly recommend this book, especially for those who live in the area covered and those who went on the bus trip at the conference because you have seen the places were many of these sightings occurred. Very well done Ian.
Christine Hall (BA) BCIB.
Studying the feral big cats of Britain means listening to witnesses and learning from them, as well as scouting for the elusive field evidence. Indeed, the witnesses can sometimes lead you to 'evidence' of different sorts. Many scientists are reluctant to hear the views of the people, but Ian Bond is an exception. Ian is a mammal specialist who is prepared to consider the views of folk from all walks of life, who claim to have had big cat sightings or to have stumbled upon signs of their presence. Ian assesses the consistency of feedback and pieces together the sightings in case they give a bigger picture. The Path of the Panther illustrates what can be achieved from taking this approach. It gives an important glimpse of what people's experiences point to in the North East and it opens the door to more investigation.
UK big cat research needs ecologists and mammal experts to come on board more. They will be surprised what a wealth of topics and research issues awaits them. Ian Bond is one of those experts who is showing the way.
Rick Minter, editor, ECOS
This book is the culmination of 10 years worth of writing about sightings of strange felines in the North East of England by Ian Bond, a professional ecologist from Darlington. The Big Cat Diaries were written originally on a seasonal basis as a feature in the quarterly newsletter of Northumbria Mammal Group. This book publishes them in their entirety for the very first time
Ian Bond won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s “Wildlife Travel Writing” award in 2007, and in reading this book, one can see why he was chosen out of the hundreds of entries.
His quarterly features, that are reproduced in this book are sometimes serious, sometimes incredulous and sometimes very funny. We follow Ian Bond on a journey of sorts as he writes about these cats, initially as somewhat of a sceptic, to his current position as being slightly less of a sceptic.
Often the books of this genre, where sightings are recorded one after another in an almost regimental fashion, can be feel very repetitive, and usually would only appeal to the most hardened follower of the big cat phenomena in the UK. This book is different, with its often self deprecating humour coupled with Ian Bond’s knowledge of the countryside and obvious literary talent, it will certainly appeal to not just Big Cat enthusiasts, but anyone with a love of nature.
Shaun Stevens BCIB
