Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition was won
by a photograph of one of the world's most elusive animals - the
snow leopard - taken in one of the world's least accessible places: the
Ladakhi Himalayas, 13,000 feet above sea level. The photograph did
not just document the existence of the leopard: after thirteen months
of experiments, and hundreds of less satisfactory pictures of his
quarry, Steve Winter, through a cunning arrangement of camera traps
and lights, eventually produced a perfectly composed portrait. 'I knew
the animal would come;' he reported. His equipment 'was just waiting
for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam'.
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Yet, despite camera traps deployed in likely places throughout Brit-
ain, despite the best efforts of hundreds of enthusiasts armed with
long lenses and thermal-imaging equipment, we have yet to see a sin-
gle unequivocal image captured in this country. Of the photographs
and fragments of footage I have seen - the best the champions of these
mysterious felines can produce - around half are evidently domestic
cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, crude
photoshopping or - as the surrounding vegetation reveals - pictures
taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that
they could be almost anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all
fours. One of the most intriguing features of this story is that hardly
anyone who has set out to find a big cat in Britain has ever seen one.
Almost without exception, the sightings have been unexpected; in
most cases the cats appear to people who had never thought about
them or did not believe in them. Pasteur's maxim - that chance favours
the prepared mind - seems in this case not to apply.
Nor have the tireless efforts to catch or kill these animals yielded
anything more convincing. As Harpur notes, 'more effort and expense
than ever went into Imperial tiger hunts has been expended in the
hunt for anomalous big cats', and it has produced nothing except a
few hapless creatures which have escaped from zoos or circuses or
private collections, and are in almost all cases caught within a few
hours of their light. There is a marvellous account in Harpur's topic
of a policeman sent out at night to investigate the sighting of a lion in
Leamington Spa. He stopped to ask a milkman if he had seen the ani-
mal. As he did so, he recorded, 'the next thing I was aware of was a
passing blur and a sudden weight' in the back of the car. 'In one fluid
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