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The Wild Side Of The Isle Of Wight:
(Jim White goes big-cat stalking among the squirrels, woodlice and escaped convict's in Parkhurst Forest.)
Even in the bright, late autumn sunshine, Parkhurst Forest looked more impenetrable than a Booker Prize-winning novel. Never mind that much of the ancient oak forest was destroyed in the great storm of 1987, and that many of its acres are now barely clothed in knee-high saplings: there is still enough cover here for the least gregarious of wildlife.
Off the Forestry Commission path, where it is easy to become profoundly lost, the biggest thing you are likely to be confronted by is an odd woodlouse. When we explored, the red squirrels for which the wood is a last redoubt kept their distance; as did the convict who had, we found out later, escaped from Parkhurst prison on the morning of our visit and was allegedly lurking in the trees.
There was no sign, either, of the creature we had come to find: the Isle of Wight Big Cat. "You'll be very lucky if you see one if you go looking for it," said Jan Williams, a Cheshire housewife who has spent 10 years studying the cat. 'I have never seen one. But I heard one last year. It was a loud, howling miaow, ten times as loud as a Siamese.'
Plenty of people have seen the beast, however. At the headquarters of The Isle of Wight County Press in Newport, where ladies in smart checked uniforms take classified announcements over the counter and the window display features photos of Princess Anne at Cowes Week, there is a fat file ' containing dozens of reports of sightings over the years.
One such was on the night of 11 January 1985, when Leo Cox and Kevin Punch, on their way home from the pub, saw something that 'looked like a domestic cat but was the size of an Alsation'.
Another was in 1983, when Mr Roy Cheek found the mutilated carcass of a lamb on his farmland. 'Perhaps it was the work of foxes,' he said. 'Who knows? I wouldn't simply rule out that some big cat got at it. As a matter of fact 1 saw something like a large dog lurking in a hedgerow near here the other day.'
Jack Corney, who runs the Isle of Wight Zoo in Sandown, has no doubt the cat exists. 'From footprints I have measured and descriptions I have been given of the way the animal behaved when it was confronted by witnesses, I'm of the opinion that we have numerous pumas on the Isle of Wight. "I am not prepared to say what localities I feel they are inhabiting in case the gun boys decide to go after them. The reason they are so rarely seen is that they are nocturnal, they are frightened of human beings and they don't go raiding farmyards if they can find food elsewhere."
But how did they get there? 'Wherever they came from they did not come from this zoo,' said Mr Corney. 'Contrary to public opinion, zoo animals don't want to escape.'
Indeed, Mr Corney's collection of big cats look pretty content in their seafront billet at Sandown, including a pair of conspicuously randy pumas, stalking each other round their compound. "There have been circuses, zoos and menageries on the island since Roman times,' he added. 'They could have gone walkies at any time over the centuries."
About 15 minutes' drive away is Robin Hill Country Park. Here, amid the bouncy castles, assault courses and mini trail-bikes, there is a small collection of cervals - cats so adept at hiding that you can look at their cage for several hours and not see them, let alone notice if they had escaped. The odd wallaby has been known to hop its confines at Robin Hill and go native but none of the cervals has been reported AWOL.
Despite tracking down porcupine in Devon, coypu in East Anglia and wallabies in the Peak District, Simon Baker, the man from the Ministry of Agriculture who is charged with logging exotic mammals, is not convinced by the Isle of Wight puma story. He has monitored plenty of incidents over the years of big cats escaping into the British countryside, some reported lost by zoos, others never claimed after they have been lost or dumped by collectors. But he thinks it is 'most unlikely' that big cats could have established a viable breeding population on the island.
"Something other than a grazing animal would find it difficult to acclimatise," he said. 'If the cat has been reared in zoos it will not be good at finding its own food. And they tend to escape individually: there is no history of them mating with domestic or feral cats.
"There have been Isle of Wight sightings over 40 years. Either lots are escaping from several careless and tacitum collectors, or people are seeing something ordinary under unusual circumstances and misinterpreting it. As far as we know nothing has been found, photographed or reported to us.'
Although they dismiss 90 per cent of sightings, committed cat believers reckon the remaining 10 per cent point to quite plausible puma behaviour. There have been, for instance, increased numbers of sightings in the urban environment, reports of dustbin raids in west Cowes and Shanklin, and encounters around St Mary's Hospital, near Parkhurst.
In South America, pumas have reputedly adopted the urban scavenging tactics of British foxes. But they need plenty of wooded cover to commute in and out of town.
One attractive side-effect of the time-warp in which the Isle of Wight seems to be gripped is that there are still hedgerows, many of which run into the middle of towns. As yet, however, no one has photographed the beast. It is not for want of trying. Investigators regularly arrive at Ryde or Fishboume harbours with night-sights and infra-red tracking devices and set up camp in various wooded parts of the island.
Di Francis, a naturalist from Devon, whose theory is that the IoW cat is an unrecognised species of indigenous large cat living undetected in British countryside, took a team over in 1985. But they found nothing.
'We have learnt to respect the guile of the beast,' said one member of the team. 'It Is an animal that can go around apparently leaving no tracks or evidence behind it whatsoever.'
Jack Corney does not need photographs. 'I have been convinced of the island's cat for some time,' he said. 'But I kept my counsel until I read a rather hysterical letter in the County Press from someone who had seen one and was advising people to keep their children indoors.
'Pumas don't attack human beings. They are not football supporters. How nice to have big cats on the Isle of Wight. It's a bit like the Loch Ness monster: we should not be neurotic, we should say 'how nice'.
Fact File.
Getting there: Ferry services are operated by Wightlink (0705 827744) from Yarmouth to Lymington and Portsmouth to Fishboume (day return for car and four passengers, pounds 27); Red Funnel Ferries (0703 330333) from Southampton and Portsmouth to Cowes.
Literature: Walking on the Isle of Wight (Hale, pounds 5.95) by Patricia Sibley.
Further information: Tourist information centre, Western Esplanade, Isle of Wight P033 2EL (0983 62905).
The Independent: 9th November 1991.