This book review first appeared in Fortean Times magazine.
The British Big Cat Phenomenon – Differing Theories, Eye Witness Reports, and the Predators Diet, Jonathan McGowan, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 190 pages
The British Big Cat Phenomenon -Searching for Evidence and Territorial Marks, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022 191 pages
The British Big Cat phenomenon – Sightings, field signs and bones, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 183 pages
The British Big Cat Phenomenon - Environmental impact, politics, cover ups, and revelations, Hangar 1 Publishing, North Haven, 2022, 153 pages
Black and white photos, no index or bibliography
Jonathan McGowan's achievement in gathering so much evidence for big cats in Britain over a lifetime is extraordinary.
The British Big Cat Phenomenon comprises four slim volumes. It's unclear what order they're in, but I'm guessing
Differing Theories comes first, followed by
Searching, then
Sightings and then
Environmental as the final in the series.
Differing opens as an evocative natural history memoir, describing McGowan's first sightings of big cats as a teenager in the 1980s. After an abusive childhood with periods in foster care, the young McGowan sought solace in watching wildlife, badgers in particular. It was through nocturnal badger watching that McGowan had his first big cat encounter - with a Dorset puma apparently stalking badgers.
McGowan's experience as a "field naturalist" frequently leads him to big cat sightings - the warning calls of birds alert him to a big cat in the area. He has received multiple reports of a British "running cat" observed while it's on sustained, long-distance chases after deer. This is different behaviour from leopards and pumas – ambush predators that can only manage short sprints.
Searching for Evidence dives straight into the evidence accumulated from McGowan's decades of experience in his "study area" around Bournemouth and Poole. Evidence includes scats (big cat poo) and scent sprayed on bushes and posts. There partial deer skeletons that have fallen out of trees after storms. There's much detail on scent markings and "scrapes" - claw marks in the ground made by big cats scent-marking, on big cat footprints and on how to distinguish them from dog tracks, as well as scratch marks on trees made by climbing leopards.
There are even urban big cats - their scats show up on Poole's parks, golf courses and streets. They travel along Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole green corridors and leave scratches on garden gates and they feast on rats, foxes and domestic cats.
People report hearing the low guttural growls and coughs of Dorset leopards. Puma screams are more cat-like or human-like. Police have been called out when a puma scream was mistaken for a human's.
On camera traps and why they produce so few big cat images, McGowan describes the phenomena of bait suddenly disappearing from them. "Something very strange is going on." I'd have appreciated sources for McGowan's assertion in
Sightings, the next(?) volume, that cats can avoid the infra-red of camera traps by sensing electromagnetism through their whiskers.
Where is the big cat road kill? In some thinly-populated parts of the USA, a third of all young pumas are killed on remote roads. But given the UK's road traffic density British big cats would, McGowan believes, already be acclimatised to constantly passing cars and better at be dodging them. Big cats would probably survive most collisions anyway – just as many domestic cats somehow manage to crawl home after a road collision.
McGowan and others have seen big cat roadkill on busy dual carriageways where it's too dangerous to slow down to investigate. Returning a few hours later there’s nothing left, the remains squashed so flat as to be unrecognisable. He found the Blackwater Junction Black Cat – "totally pancaked out", its skin had melted to the tarmac and its bones were all crushed.
Sightings includes 69 photos of big cat field signs and kill signs. Included are many photos of big cat paw prints with McGowan's boot for size comparison, together with images of big cat feeding places littered with bones and grisly images of kills including dead swans and a half-eaten fox.
Stomach-churning detail describes how big cats kill their prey. Leopards clamp their jaws round the muzzle of a deer in a full-face hold to suffocate them, pumas often bite deers' noses off. Kills by dogs and foxes are much messier than those of a big cat.
Why are there so few photos of the big cats themselves? "This is a valid point," admits McGowan. There are a few in
Sightings - a blurry photo of a "blonde puma" and a clearer trail cam image of a big cat sharpening its claws on a tree.
Environmental includes a guide to British big cat scats, with 22 monochrome photos of long thin twisted spiralled scats of leopards, lynx, puma and jungle cats. Some big cat scats McGowan's found contain bones and deer hooves.
There is no bibliography, index or referencing. Nor is McGowan's mostly compelling thesis helped by ranty digressions on how results of DNA tests are "covered up by the authorities". He asserts that the population is "brainwashed" into big cat scepticism, and so on. He's let down by his editors too, with basic typos too numerous to mention.
McGowan concludes
Environmental by convincingly asserting that "the evidence for large cats living in Britain is overwhelming." Issues with the format and structure notwithstanding, the content of the four volumes of
The British Big Cat Phenomenon make it essential reading for any serious British big cat investigator.
VERDICT: 4 stars ****
© Matt Salusbury 2023
Big cats in Dorset - expedition with Jonathan McGowan (June 2013)
Jonathan McGowan's large cat update (October 2012)
Britain's secret wildlife - lizards and big cats with Jonathan McGowan
Big cats of Suffolk website
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