Bullhead bonanza (or not, as it turns out)

My biology class at school was always a little dull. We never really went on field trips, unless it was for a vitally important piece of coursework of course, but generally found ourselves stuck inside a large beige laboratory. So imagine my surprise when my younger sister bursts in exclaiming that her class had been out stream dipping on a stream I had never heard of, and that most importantly, they had caught some bullheads, miller’s thumbs, Cottus gobio, whatever you want to call them. This is our only freshwater sculpin, (a cottid as was pointed out earlier today by an anonymous reader) and it was not a species I had seen before. I set off the next day armed with a net, buckets and a friend to help catch them.

It took us a few minutes to find where they were hiding, and after a while we had our first bullhead. Admittedly, it was only about 10mm long, but still, it was a bullhead. More searching revealed a couple of juveniles, around 40mm long. But then we stumbled along a dead individual. And another. And then another. This was strange. Bullheads are long lived for small fish, and the chances of seeing these dead specimens all dying from old age was disproven due to the huge variation in size, from babies right up to huge 120mm adult males. By the end of the day, we had caught 6 bullheads of a range of sizes and seen others alive (plus a few young 3-spined sticklebacks and an adult female), but seen more dead ones in a state of decay. We found no dead sticklebacks, which is odd, and anyone thinking that my sisters class from the other day were to blame, they can’t have been because we went quite far upstream to catch ours whereas they went downstream.

We also found a putrid dead badger upstream with a huge pile of maggots on top. I chose not to tell my sister this...

I went down there again today briefly just to get some photos, and saw four dead specimens, and 3 live, one of which was certainly the large adult we caught last time. Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this?

Cat prints? Not again...

It is now time to update on the hunt for alien big cats in the UK. Last time, you will remember I was told by a member on an invertebrate’s forum that her boyfriend had taken a cast of the print of an ABC, or so her other half’s mate said, in their local area. Naturally, I asked; “where is it now?” and the reply was “I don't think he has the cast anymore”. “Bugger!” thought I. Never mind, she sent me a link to a photobucket account where there were photos to look at instead. They looked like a good match for a cat to me and the size was well within big cat range. After forwarding them to Richard Freeman, I emailed Hollie, as her name turned out to be, who gave us permission to use the photos, and it is to her that I am very grateful for otherwise this extra evidence would not have come to light. The best photos are shown below.

Also, she said that her boyfriend (Dan) had “actually seen the cat one night when hunting up there, though it was it dark he says he remembers seeing a big pair of eyes, too big for any "normal" animal, and looked orange coloured apparently.”.

Now, it is time to explain this eye shine business. Eye shine is, obviously, caused by light entering an animal’s eye, reflecting out of the animal’s eye and then entering our own. The shine effect is from a layer of tissue called the Tapetum lucidum which is found in many vertebrate animals. Its function is to reflect light into the light sensing cells (Rod cells) in the eye to enhance night vision further. So, when a light is shone into an animal’s eye, you quite often see it shone back at you from their eyes as the light escapes from the lens and through the pupil. Carnivores possess a choroidal tapetum cellulosum which is made of reflective crystals, whereas artiodactyls and perissodactyls have a choroidal tapetum fibrosum made of extracellular fibers. So, these two different reflective layers give different eye shines.

Eye shine varies between different animals, but it is not an exact science. Cats usually have green eye shine (domestic), as do deer, but dogs can vary from green to yellow and to orange, depending on breed. However, a number of reports say that big cats like leopards have orange eye shine, which completely confuses the matter! I must say this subject has been hard to research; everything contradicts everything else!

Then, as if this wasn’t good enough, Hollie spoke to her boyfriend, who said that his mate still had the cast, and that we were welcome to have it for a bit! This is excellent news, so we will have to sit tight and wait for Pat.

In the mean time, Richard got back to me to say this:

“Though I will reserve final judgement until I have actually seen the cast my initial feelings are that these are indeed cat prints. The toes are asymmetrical and lacking in visible claws. The central pad lacks the concave shape of a dog’s .The toes also appear to show greater flexibility than a dog's.”

He attached the following photos; the uppermost photo is of a leopard, whilst the other is of a puma’s print.

Now compare these photos to the cast photos above. Richard says:

“It could belong to a puma or leopard but I think it is most like a puma's with the wide toe pads. In fact the print reminds me of a Florida puma print I saw that had been cast from a track left in sand.”

I agree with him, but also the central pad in a puma is more compact than a leopard’s, very similar to the print in the photo.

For a further analysis, we will have to wait for the print to be delivered. Watch this space with bated breath! But may I just say again how grateful I am to Hollie for letting me look at the photos and for doing her best to help find the cast. If only everyone came forward with evidence!

The absolute final catch up!

Right, this is it now ladles and jellyspoons, the update on ABCs where I finally drag you all up to the present day. The music is on, door firmly closed, fingers flexed and the MSN conversation with JD shut down.

Previously we had just finished the quarry palaver, so we can now join the action on Sunday the 7th of December, early in the morning. I awoke early for two reasons, one, today was the day of the British Killifish Society’s annual auction and Jon and Matthew were picking me up to get up there before it started (as it so happened we didn’t, but that’s another story), and also because I wanted to have a look at the deer carcass to see if it had been eaten in the night. I breakfasted and kitted up with the video camera, stills camera (with 70-300mm lens fitted) and cat hunting hat I went out to record the nights action.

After driving up to work the temperature plummeted down to freezing levels (-3 degrees C I think) and so the walk down the road to the deer was slower than expected. Now, I must now talk briefly about the landscape near where the deer was killed. The first photograph is taken from my viewpoint near the top of the hill before it snakes its way past the carp ponds and the dead deer. You can see the road in front of me with brambles and other short plants between the road and the carp pond. A plump bush can be seen on the left which cannot be seen in the second picture. This other photo taken from in a field shows the ponds behind the vegetation, plus its thickness. The position of the deer cannot be seen in either photo, but it is to the right on the pond in the second photo. Got all that? Good.

Walking down the path, I got to the sharp left turn before the road moves in the straight line visible in the photos. It was now that I heard a loud, harsh and distinctive “Khheeeea!”. My immediate thought was “Holy Hell! A Leopard’s warning vocalisation!”. Needless to say, I moved back slowly the way I had came with the camera trained on the area the cry had come from as well as the pond in case it began to move away from me. I heard nothing again, so I went over into the field to take the second photograph. Again, I saw and heard nothing. By this time it was getting up to leaving time to catch the Matt car up to the auction, but I kept moving around closer to the pond. I noticed behind me about 200yrds away a friend who was also interested in ABCs with whom I had been examining the deer’s evidence the day before. We began to chat quietly, and he had been up since before dawn broke to look around the area. He was a keen rifle hunter, so I would have expected him to be both vigilant and muted when moving. He said he had seen nothing other than a large dark mass moving through the woods which could have been a deer. Now I got a phone call from Jon to tell me that they were very close to our meeting area and that I better get a move on.

We ended up being about an hour late, but had a cracking day.

Over the next few weeks the deer was moved around a bit and eaten in parts, probably by badgers, to the present day where it still sits in a broken heap next to some brambles where the badgers keep picking at it.

Nothing really happened for a few weeks until Christmas day when I got bored and decided to go up to the original killing fields (hooray! A reference to a Slayer song!) to see what had changed. After getting very distracted by Ravens (these will wait for another blog) I began my scouting and went up into the field above the normal one and came across a very nice bloody carcase of an adult sheep with a huge hole ripped into its side. As you can see from the photos, a few of the organs including the lungs and probably the heart were still inside the animal. The body was still warm at the time of discovery (1400). The eyes had been taken by the Ravens. The sheep’s head was bent backwards in the same shape as all the other kills.

I photographed and videoed this kill as I have done for all the others, and continued nosing around. I found an old kill which had rotten down to the bones and so the only tissue left was the ligaments between the vertebrae. It was in the same field as the above kill, but in a quiet corner where it looked not to have been disturbed (normally the bodies are moved after a day or two or the farmer knowing that they are there). The attached photos show the skeleton, plus the important bit of evidence for a big cat killing the sheep. The head of the sheep was twisted around to face the opposite direction, whilst the ligaments were still attached. You can see the twisted vertebrae in the photo. I pulled at one of the ligaments after photographing and it came away with little pressure. Because the ligaments are still attached, this leads me to conclude that the sheep had its neck broken before it died, not from an external force after death.

Now, we come up to mid January and finally, I had my trigger cameras to catch this beast! I had tested them beforehand, and myself and a few friends attached them to the fence which something jumps over to get into the field. We set the camera (only one was working) up attached to a fence not in the farmer’s field, nor in the water works land but technically in the quarry’s land, but this seemed to be a no-man’s land between the quarry and the field. We left after this...

Only to return the next day to find that the camera had gone! Seething, I rang Richard who muttered something about “commoners” and “Southerners” before ringing the farmer to see if he had removed them. He said he hadn’t, but he would try and contact the water board to see if they had. I could see the headlines running in my head: “Water technician proves existence of big cats in Britain!”, then a day later “Monster hunters claim the photograph was stolen!” then finally “Monster hunters triumph thanks to video evidence!”. Maybe that was a bit farfetched, but never mind.

A few days later I went back up to the field with a friend to take some photographs of me in suitably dramatic poses for an article being written about me by Geoff Ward (who did the article about the haunted pub a week or so ago, check the archives). Whilst there, I noticed that a few of the jaws were loose from the skulls, so I picked them up for a closer look. I found puncture marks in one, which led me on to search for more. I “stole” 3 jaw bones with damage and a skull which just looks cool. Next time I am up to CFZ headquarters I will take them up for a better opinion than mine.

Let’s hope the next blog is not quite as heavy going as that!