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Ian Bond

Ian has worked in ecology and countryside management for local authorities on Teeside for the past
10 years and is secretary of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management in the north east.
He has a particular interest in mammals and led Stockton Borough Council’s successful Harvest Mouse
re-introduction programme. Ian is a long-standing committee member of Northumbria Mammal Group
and documents sightings of big cats in the north east in the “Big Cat Diaries” column of their newsletter.
He also writes a regular “Droppings” column on oddments of mammal news and in 2007 was BBC
Wildlife Magazine’s “Wildlife Travel Writer of the Year” with a story about the loss of Red Squirrels
in Hartlepool. He claims not to get excited about big cat reports because he fully accepts that there a
few out there but he does get very excited about the prospect of re-introducing lost mammals such as
beavers, wolves and root voles.

The Path of the Panther – The Trail Continues!

My talk is an updated version of the Path of the Panther article that I wrote for the BCIB 2007
Yearbook. Since the article was written a significant number of new sightings have been made
and some other reports have come to light. Like the article it will look at the distribution of big cat
sightings in the north east over the past decade breaking those down, where the evidence indicates,
into categories that might reflect different cat species.
Some of the more notable sightings will be highlighted.