The Beast of Bucks may have been caught on camera prowling around houses in the dead of night as the legend of a puma-sized creature in the wilds of Buckinghamshire grows
Big cat feared to be on the loose sparking fears in village
A big cat mystery has grown near a UK town as the “Beast of Bucks” was spotted prowling around houses in the dead of night.
Footage captured on a doorbell camera showed the massive black mog lurking on the driveway of a property. It was then seen balancing on top of a skip, looking much larger than a domestic feline. The presence of the nocturnal animal stoked the local legend about a puma-sized creature roaming about in the wilds of Buckinghamshire.
Homeowner David Lawrence who lives in a village near High Wycombe said he saw a large cat which wasn’t “normal”.
Mr Lawrence described the latest sighting of a massive feline in the area, which he only spotted after the six-foot-wide skip had been taken away.
“It looked bigger than a normal cat,” he said. “It was climbing into my skip.
“It has larger paws and a long thick tail and slightly smaller ears than a domestic cat. There’s something about it that shouts to me it’s not normal.”
He said that while there was a lot of speculation about it, everyone he’d shown agreed that it wasn’t a domestic cat.
Mr Lawrence added the creature’s tail was considerably longer, and the back legs are big. He added that the skip it was snapped on wasn’t small, and it covered half the width.
For years, there have been talk about the Beast of Bucks – a cat as big as a puma that’s said to be stalking the county. Since 2020, at least five sightings of this elusive creature have been reported in Buckinghamshire.
The investigators who are determined to prove the existence of these large cats in the county regularly update a Facebook page named Big Cats of the Chilterns.
In 2022, they revealed that a “large Labrador sized cat” was spotted heading towards Chesham. The following year, they reported another sighting of a “large dog sized black cat descending from a tree”. They noted it was a “typical location for large black leopard like animals“.
Last year, Professor Robin Allaby from Warwick University suggested that up to 100 big cats could be wandering the British countryside.
The Life Sciences specialist found evidence of ‘Panthera genus’ DNA on a sheep carcass in the Lake District, suggesting the presence of a lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar, or snow leopard in the UK wilderness.
While some big cat hunters insist that these wild beasts roam the UK countryside, others remain sceptical, with some even accusing the evidence of being weak or potentially photoshopped.