Report from Phil Crosby
Large black cat seen at Cordona
26 th June 2002
A lady (a farmer's daughter who has spent her life in the countryside) was walking her dog at lunch time today - as she returned home around 1:45 pm, she observed the sheep & a horse in the field behind her house behaving in a very agitated manner (all of them circling, and clearly watching something). Curious as to what caused this she looked around her - the field has a wood adjacent to it (the stone wall which is her garden wall continues up as the boundary for the field, so the woodland also backs on to her garden) and the edge of the field was in shadow. She saw movement and spotted an animal moving down the line of the wall. As it moved into sunlight she saw it to be a black cat - she described it as slightly larger than her flat-coated retriever, and with a long tail, and a flattish face compared to a dog.
Additional info: behind the house, the woods run up and into hills, and there is open land for around 10 km in that direction. The locality is all fairly sparsely populated by humans, but has a "huge" number of deer & rabbit. There have been other sightings discussed locally in recent weeks - perhaps by coincidence (or not?) they starting some logging operations in the forest the cat came from a few weeks ago.
This lady is happy for the sighting to be added to the website, but she does not want any reporters etc. chasing her for a story - I have therefore said we will not use her name, but say simply "a lady from Cardona". She is not remotely scared by this and will continue to exercise her dog locally - she has promised to forward any other sightings to us.
My own view is that this sounds like a melanistic leopard - she certainly sounded a credible witness who is very calm & collected and has no wish to magnify the story.
Phil Crosby
26 th June 2002
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