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A wildlife ecologist says it is “highly unlikely” that a black panther is roaming the Canterbury highlands.
There have been multiple recent sightings of what is apparently a great black cat, a Canterbury legend that has been around since at least the late 1970s.
During Labor Weekend, Mark Orr reported seeing a cat at his knee in Hanmer Springs.
Last month, Jesse Feary shot a one meter long and 11 kilogram wild black cat that he believed was the baby of an even larger cat he saw.
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The cat Feary shot weighs more than any wild cat previously captured by the Department of Conservation (DOC). The average size of male feral cats caught by the department is 3.75 kg.
But Professor Yolanda van Heezik, a zoologist at the University of Otago, said the most likely explanation for the sightings remains that it is a large wild cat.
He said it was “highly unlikely” that a panther or cougar could have gotten past New Zealand’s biosecurity measures and survived in the wild without real confirmation of their existence.
Mark Orr / Supplied
Mark Orr took a mountain bike near Hanmer Springs when he took this photograph of an animal that says “100% is not a dog.”
Such an animal would also leave tracks, he said.
“Given its size, you would expect it to target populations as well, but we have no record from farmers of their population being killed by a big cat, for example.
“Just because it’s really big doesn’t mean it’s a cougar or a panther,” he said.
Van Heezik thought that people tended to underestimate the size of wild cats and said that it was not unusual for them to be black.
JESSE FEARY
Jesse Feary isn’t going to pose alone after shooting what he thinks is a big cat in North Canterbury in September.
He said it was possible, although speculation, that people were seeing an abnormally large feral cat and that it would be nice to have stronger evidence.
DOC Senior Biodiversity Ranger Dean Nelson said that feral cats typically weighed no more than 7kg, which was the heaviest feral cat DOC had ever recorded.
The “extreme end of its size range” was about a meter long when stretched, Nelson said.
He said it was interesting that people reported seeing black cats, given that most of the feral cats caught by the DOC in the Mackenzie Basin were predominantly tabby.
