Category Archives: Science

by jfwknifton | September 8, 2015 · 8:58 am

The Beast of Ennerdale: Part One

When I was researching the Beast of Gevaudan, and his many, many friends, both in France, Italy and a number of other countries, I was amazed to find “England” in one of the lists. I couldn’t believe it! An out of control animal rampaging in our well-ordered and generally wonderful country? A piece of slander by a lying, jealous foreigner, surely!

Well, apparently, no. The whole unfortunate business has been kept very quiet, of course, but in 1810, a mystery creature certainly did rampage across the wild countryside of the Lake District in north western England. Here is that beautiful area. Look for the orange arrow:

The parallels with the Beast of Gévaudan were striking, the only difference being that the English victims were not pretty young shepherdesses or even little boys, but the sheep themselves.
The animal was dubbed at the time “The Girt Dog of Ennerdale”. To me, though, this is a singularly inappropriate name, certainly from the point of view of anyone who wants to attract tourists, rather as they do with the Loch Ness Monster.

“Where is Ennerdale?” you can hear all the tourists asking. “What does ‘Girt’ mean?” and “What is so special about a dog?”
The saga of “The Beast of the Lake District” or, a more striking name perhaps, “The Beast of Ennerdale”, began in spring, or more precisely May, of 1810, when the body of a half consumed sheep was found on the bleak hillside above the lake called Ennerdale Water. On May 10th, Mr Mossop, who lived at Thornholme, to the south of Ennerdale Water on the way to Calderbridge, had a brief glimpse of an unknown animal far away, up on the mountainside. The orange arrow indicates his farm at Thornholme:

Soon after this, an increasing number of sheep began to be attacked. Every night, at least one sheep would be killed.

Clearly, a monster was at large in the county, known at this time as Cumberland. At first the locals walked the hills, trying to find the animal. They had no success, which was not really surprising, given the extent of the hills, and in some cases, the extent of the forests in the valleys between them. One or two of the men had fleeting glimpses of the Beast, which always seemed to emerge just as night was falling. All they could make out was the animal’s size, which was extremely large. In the local dialect, “girt”, or “gurt” meant “great”, so the Beast was christened “The Girt Dog of Ennerdale”. This is Ennerdale. It is very wild country by English standards:

The ferocious Beast killed large numbers of sheep, far beyond what it would have needed for food. Furthermore, it killed its victims in a very unusual way: the corpses of the sheep had their internal organs consumed or even removed, and their blood was apparently drained from their bodies. This was no ordinary dog, feral or otherwise. It was not a fox either. No canid drinks the blood of its prey, and this planted a seed in the minds of a superstitious local population.
Indeed, if these 19th century farmworkers had had wider access to satellite television, I am sure that the spectre of cattle mutilation and UFOs would have raised their ugly heads:

As the situation worsened, more and more men had to leave their ordinary work and their farms, take their dogs, and begin to comb the hills and woods in an effort to find and kill the monster.

Without any success whatsoever. The Beast of Ennerdale was just as elusive and cunning as the Beast of Gévaudan. It did not, on any occasion, stay in an area long enough to attack the same flock of sheep on two successive nights. Its self-secreting powers, the ways it could avoid capture and above all, its propensity for drinking blood soon had the superstitious locals believing that the animal was supernatural. It was soon christened, if that is the word, “The Vampire Dog of Ennerdale”:

Just like the Beast of Gévaudan, it seemed to have a power over ordinary dogs who normally would have been reasonably courageous. Instead, the locals’ dogs would shrink away when asked to follow the Beast’s trail and, as dogs apparently do with Bigfoot, they often just refused to track. The dogs were clearly scared stiff of something that they could understand, but their human owners could not.

Sometimes, when the dogs were a little more positive and were actually pursuing the Beast, it would occasionally let just one catch up and then seize it and crush its forelegs in its powerful teeth. None of the other dogs would then go near it. The Beast was so fleet of foot that it usually only had one dog to deal with at any one time, as all the pursuing dogs would be chasing it at different speeds.
The death toll of sheep continued to mount by the day. Eventually, as a minimum, the unknown killer was slaughtering half a dozen sheep every night. Occasionally the total would mount to eight or ten. This only added to the villagers’ superstitions, of course:

The Beast clearly took sadistic pleasure in ripping sheep to pieces, often to leave them uneaten. On occasion, he would even leave them alive. One of a particular farmer’s favourite rams was watched by the dawn’s first light as the Beast attacked it. The latter ripped out and ate great lumps of best quality mutton from the poor animal’s rear quarters. The crippled victim was then left in the field, unable to fight back, unable even to walk, as its hind legs were paralysed. Another sheep suffered even worse. The shepherd drove the Beast off as it was feasting and then found that the mutton had been stripped off the ribs behind the shoulder to leave visible the poor animal’s still beating heart.

Soon a prominent local, John Russell, put up a £10 reward for what he thought was a huge dog, “Dead or alive” as they say. An even better offer was free beer for the people who kept watch for the Beast. Mr Russell, of course, owned his very own brewery in Whitehaven. He also had a direct interest in the Beast as he was the owner of 3,000 acres of sheep farming land in Ennerdale. Here is a general map of the valley:

The offer for the combatants of free food and especially, alcoholic drink, was taken up by other wealthy sheep farmers who provided as much as £12 for refreshments. Others showed their willingness to provide free meals for all Beasthunters over a certain fixed period of time at a certain location, such as their farm or large house.
Nothing succeeded. And then, just as with the Beast of Gévaudan, a feeling of panic began to sweep the area. Parents would keep their children indoors all day long, too scared to let them go out and play.
The Beast seemed just so calculating and so shrewd. Cleverer than a mere animal. Cleverer than a fox. No traps ever came close to catching it. It was wary and watchful:

People thought that it spent the day high up in its look-out place, watching the scared natives far below in the valley make huge but vain efforts to catch it. The animal’s senses of sight, hearing, and scent, were so acute that it was a rare event indeed, for anybody to come upon it unawares during daylight hours. When it was accidentally approached in daytime, surprisingly perhaps, the animal never did anything vicious towards humans, and always took to its heels. The Beast never uttered the slightest sound, not a single bark, growl or howl.

As happened with its French counterpart in Gévaudan, the dead sheep were all poisoned and left out on the hillside. The Beast was no more attracted to these carcasses than it was to the many traps which were optimistically set to catch it.
One of the more subtle sheepfarmers even tried leaving out a dog on heat to attract the Beast within musket shot, but he had no success with this cunning plan:

The male dogs, of course, as soon as they caught the distant scent of the Beast, still continued with their policy of cowering and whimpering. They refused absolutely to follow this strange, ferocious animal.
As the weeks went by and the summer drew towards its close, the Beast was beginning to have a very negative effect. While the men were all off chasing it, the poor cows often had to wait to be milked. Horses too were not looked after properly and often went hungry. Fields were neglected. Years before computer games, the poor little children were confined to their homes as their parents were too frightened to let them out of their sight. And all this neglect had its impact on the womenfolk of the area who tried (I almost wrote ‘manfully’) to make up for their absent husbands and servants.
Finally, a shepherd out on the hillside, watching his flocks not by night but in the cold grey light of the early morning, caught a clear sight of the monster. In actual fact, his description was not desperately helpful, but to anybody who had ever heard of the Beast of Gévaudan, it had some strangely familiar elements:

Firstly, the Beast of Ennerdale was pale brown or sandy coloured. It was well built and solid. And it was very large. Its jaws seemed unusually large and wide and it had dark stripes on its back. It was a strange mixture of the features of both a very big dog and a very big cat. It was really quick, and, as they found out later, it possessed enormous stamina. The Beast was not like anything the scared shepherd had ever seen before.
After this, the Beast seemed to be spotted more frequently. Shepherds and the bravest of their sheepdogs would chase after it up the hillside. Occasionally a group of some fifty or so locals would assemble, seemingly at the drop of a tricorn hat, to set off following their various hunting hounds, racing across the mountainside.
That princely reward of £10 plus free beer for everybody who kept watch for the Beast attracted scores, if not hundreds of professional hunters to the land around Ennerdale Water. Beer, money and undying fame! What was there not to like?

The would-be hunters, of course, had no success whatsoever. The phrase “Wild Goose Chase” might have been invented for their efforts. At one point there were more than a hundred men and several hundreds of their dogs racing back and forth across the desolate hills. Useless. The killing and the blood sucking and the soft organ eating all continued as before. By the end of the summer, more than 300 sheep had been killed.

Next time: “Chapter Two: This isn’t going to end well”.

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Beast of Gévaudan, Bigfoot, Ennerdale, Ennerdale Water, Girt Dog of Ennerdale, Lake District

by jfwknifton | August 7, 2015 · 11:11 am

A lovely old bird called Elsie

(An extract from my birdwatching diary “Crippling Views”)

Saturday, June 25, 1988

Birdline organises another weekend for me. Look for the orange arrows:

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This Saturday, it’s a vagrant duck from North America, a drake Surf Scoter, that has been found offshore at Holme next the Sea in north Norfolk. A very well-behaved bird, it has been seen every single day of the week, and should be a cinch. Should be:

I go with Paul, Robin and Sue. It’s a beautiful summer’s day, blue skies, a bright sun and a typically bracing east coast wind. After an uneventful three hour trip, we park in a layby at the side of the road at the western end of the Holme reserve. As soon as we get out of the car, I see a most peculiar bird. It’s a large tern, flying steadily eastwards along the beach. About the size of a Sandwich Tern, it has a straw yellow bill. I am paralysed, I can’t remember what colour bill a Sandwich Tern has. For a few moments, I think that I’ve got everything exactly backwards, so that all Sandwich Terns have a yellow bill with a black tip. But that’s not the right way round. Sandwich Terns have a black bill with a yellow tip! I force myself to look at the bird for the duration of the flypast, but it’s very difficult to take in a great deal, because I’m so panic stricken:

I think of shouting to Paul, but he’s three miles away, year ticking Redshank. I don’t have the courage to yell to another group of nearby birdwatchers, because deep down, I have a terrible suspicion that I have got it all wrong, that I will be calling out to them just for a Sandwich Tern. I keep looking. The bird is fairly round winged, with fairly dark upper parts to both its wings and back. It has a noticeably white trailing edge to its wings, a little like a Laughing Gull, and for a tern, it seems big, almost the size and bulk of a gull. I walk thirty or forty yards, trying to dismiss the bird as an aberration, the product of a rarity crazed mind. I even consider the idea that I just got out of the car, tired from the driving, and somehow misidentified a Little Tern. There are quite a lot of them over the beach, and mental blocks through fatigue are not that unusual. Then suddenly, the bird reappears. It is in company with two Sandwich Terns and I can easily pick it out, totally different from its two companions:

This time, I shout to Paul and tell him to get on to the last bird. He manages to pick it out and agrees with me on two things. Firstly, that it is different to the Sandwich Terns, and secondly, that it has a straw yellow bill. We have an exciting discussion about it and Paul puts forward the idea that it is a Lesser Crested Tern, a very rare vagrant to Britain, but one which has been seen a few times of late, due in part, it is thought, to a single lost bird which wanders the east coast of Britain, looking eagerly for its Libyan homeland. I haven’t a clue. I’ve never even heard of a Lesser Crested Tern. I thought that Gaddafi had abolished birds as being too flippant. I don’t even have a book with Lesser Crested Tern in it:

When I get back to Nottingham, I spend many a happy hour, trying to get information on the mystery bird. What convinces me though, is an illustration that I find in an old Indian birdwatching book, where the most salient points are the yellow beak, the dark mantle and the brightest of white trailing edges. They ought to know. They see them a damned sight more often than I do. And what finally proves it to me totally is an announcement a couple of days later that a Lesser Crested Tern has recently been present, on and off, at Cley next the Sea, just a few miles down the coast to the east. Seduced by the promise of eternal fame, I send a letter to the Norfolk Bird Recorder, and also to the Reserve Warden at Holme.

The Surf Scoter, of course, after all this, is long gone. We spend the rest of the day looking for it, but without any luck at all. The Common Scoters are exactly that, but among the hundreds of sea duck, there is no bright white head:

We also see a lot of Little Terns, who succeed in sowing the seeds of doubt, but who, at the same time, solve quite a few problems. They fly down the same track as the putative Lesser Crested Tern, but with a completely different flight action. They flutter like butterflies. They don’t fly purposefully like the mystery bird:

And anyway, I saw it in the company of Sandwich Terns, so I have a good idea of its size, and it’s a lot bigger than a Little Tern. It’s a different bird, in actual fact. A thrilling end to a memorable day is provided as we motor south to Kings Lynn, on the way back. Look for the orange arrow:

Just beyond the ring road, we see a large raptor quartering the fields to our left:

It crosses the road above our heads, continues the quartering, and finally disappears behind the line of trees on the horizon. It is a male Montagu’s Harrier, perhaps the North Wootton bird, but more likely, from a site not yet revealed to the Verminous Company of Egg Thieves. It is fairly isolated out here though. Let’s hope that the Montagu’s Harrier family spend their summer undisturbed, raise their babies and leave peacefully. Flying back if possible, not over Malta or any other world centre of illegal hunting:

I sent in my claim of a Lesser Crested Tern to the British Bird Rarities Committee, but after a year or two of careful consideration, they rejected it, even though the Birdwatching Committee in Norfolk seemed reasonably satisfied with it. So, a few years later, I drove to Spurn Head in Yorkshire to see another, or conceivably the same returning, Lesser Crested Tern. Look for Nottingham in the bottom left and the orange arrow:

I went there on two separate occasions, and finished up driving nearly 500 miles in total. After almost two days standing in “The Place”, “The Bird” did not deign to tern up (sick). On the second day, I was there at seven in the morning, and I was then the last to leave at eight o’clock in the evening. Another birdwatcher arriving alone at half past eight then found the bird exactly where it was supposed to be standing and I’d missed it. That started to make it personal.

A little while later, I drove to the north Norfolk coast where foolhardy twitchers were wading across a tidal creek to Scolt Head Island, their telescopes and tripods held above their heads like the Marines in Vietnam. They were looking for a Lesser Crested Tern which had been seen in the Sandwich Tern colony. Look for the orange arrow:

I decided, though, to stay on the mainland, not drown and keep my eyes open for the bird flying down the coast to fish. Three wasted hours. No chance!

It was by now way beyond personal. Around this time a Lesser Crested Tern had been hybridising with Sandwich Terns in a tern colony on the Farne Islands, some three or four miles off the coast of Northumberland, some 200 miles to the north of Nottingham. Eventually, everybody realised that all the many records of Lesser Crested Tern on the English East Coast were most probably this one returning individual, being seen over and over again by different people. Because the initials of a Lesser Crested Tern are “LCT”, the bird was now being called “Elsie”. I decided to bite the bullet and drive up to the Farne Islands. As the bird was nesting, it should be a cinch. Should be.

Look for the orange arrows :

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I failed to see it. So I decided to try again, and at very long last, I saw Elsie’s straw yellow bill sticking jauntily out of a crowd of black billed Sandwich Terns, all sitting on their eggs.

And I watched this good tern, this most excellent tern, for a very long time. A very long time. And then, half an hour later, I came back for seconds. And yes, I had already seen a bird just like Elsie, with her unmistakable bill, somewhere else, a long time previously, but the details escaped me for the moment.
Afterwards, I worked out that the nearest colonies of Lesser Crested Tern were on the coast of Libya. To see one, I had driven to Holme (210 miles for the round trip), Spurn Head twice (500 miles for two round trips), Scolt Head Island (250 miles for the round trip) and the Farne Islands(880 miles for two round trips). How far is it to Libya by car?

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Filed under History, Personal, Science, Twitching, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Cley-next-the-Sea, Crippling Views, Gaddafi, Holme-next-the-Sea, King’s Lynn, Laughing Gull, Lesser Crested Tern, Libya, Little Tern, Malta, Montagu's Harrier, Norfolk, Norfolk Bird Recorder, North Wootton, Nottingham, Sandwich Tern, Surf Scoter

by jfwknifton | August 2, 2015 · 12:19 pm

The Beast of Orléans and his grandson

This blog post will introduce you to yet another killer monster (or monsters) in the long, long series of killer monsters which have ravaged different areas of France from around 1550 until the present day. I started this long list by telling you about the Beast of Gévaudan. Then it was the Beast of Benais, the Beast of Auxerre and Trucy, the Beast of Cévennes and Gard and Vivarais and then the Beast of Sarlat. This illustration has been used to represent more or less all of them by the uninhibited copyright thieves who wrote sensationalist pamphlets in the Eighteenth Century:

This time I will be looking at the area near Orléans, where a number of “incidents” have taken place over the years:

Many people at the time thought that the culprits were just ordinary wolves, but, as we will see, there are more than enough anomalies to cause the odd doubt here and there. Once again, I will be looking at a number of websites written in French, offering you my translations and you can then make your own mind up between them.

The first website actually begins with a man who was writing about wolves in the region around Orléans. Here is the coat of arms of that beautiful city:

This was in 1911, and the writer in question was an historian called Charles de Beaucorps. He wrote:

“In 1691, the wolves’ misdeeds caused many justified complaints and the Royal Commissioner duly informed the national authorities. Learning that the incidents caused by these predators were increasing every day, he asked the King to allow the inhabitants of ten or twelve parishes to have firearms in their homes. Normally they did not dare do so for fear of prosecution by the officers of the Royal Hunt. The Royal Commissioner also told them to carry out hunts and asked Monsieur Béchameil, an officer of the crown, to direct them. Nothing was done to stop this scourge: it grew to such an extent that every day people were being killed or injured by wolves. On September 12th, within musket range of the Chêne Brûlé, a parish in Cercottes, a sixty year old woman was devoured. The King’s Prosecutor in the Neuville Guard, who was keeping a register of children killed or injured by wolves using the death certificates written by parish priests, had listed more than 60 young victims in the space of fifteen months. “

Interestingly enough, this was not, apparently, completely outrageous by the usual standards of behaviour of French wolves, animals which had grown accustomed to feeding on human corpses in open charnel pits until as recently as 1820:

Charles de Beaucorps, however, was nothing if not a very thorough investigator:

“Despite the hunts and more than two hundred wolves killed, the attacks continued for years, right up until 1702 (a total of eleven years). The first teams of hunters obtained hardly any results. It needed the militia and the Duke of Vendôme, supported by thirty musketeers, to stop this scourge.

In 1700, an “Enormous Beast” was killed in the forest and brought back for the Royal Commissioner, leading to the payment of a reward of thirteen pounds.”

And nobody, of course, managed to write a precise scientific description of exactly what this “Bête énorme” was. Presumably, though, for it to be considered a “Bête énorme” in the middle of more than two hundred dead wolves, all of which must have looked pretty much the same as all the others, it cannot have been an ordinary wolf.

Around the same time, there were equally strange events in Fontainebleau:

“In 1679, woodcutters were killed and eaten in the Forest of Fontainebleau. The parish registers of Bois-le-Roi mentioned several cases of attacks.”

It might have been wolves, but I am surprised that, if it were, they did not say so. As the map shows, these gory killings took place not a million miles from Orléans:

Shortly after this, came the animal which was to become really famous. It was given the name of “The Beast of Orléans”. According to a website we have already visited:

“There were actually two distinct episodes which took place almost a century apart. The first, the Beast of Orléans, happened in 1709, as attested by a letter from Monsieur Polluche Lumina, who lived in the Rue des Hennequins, dated June 17th 1765. It says this:

“I am taking the liberty to write to you about the ferocious Beast of Gévaudan. The more I reflect on all the stories which appeared in the newspapers the more I find a resemblance with what has happened here and what I myself saw in part after the Great Winter of 1709. There appeared an animal which people called “The Beast” which only attacked women and children. There were the same ways of moving around, the same
sharpness and even timidity as the Beast of Gévaudan:

The devastation was so serious that in six months there were more than 100 people killed and as many wounded. This provoked the king to send his royal wolf catchers. The officer who commanded them did not bother to follow the trail of destruction which this animal produced and which was normally around the perimeter of the forest.

He decided instead, every morning, to have several hunts in the woods with bloodhounds, after which his men went on a reconnaissance. Then, without making any noise whatsoever, they positioned marksmen all around the area. The dogs were then released into the forest.

If the Beast was not found, they would go and carry out the same tactics in another area to pursue the Beast. There was hardly any hunt where the men did not kill one, two or three wolves, because the Beast was nothing different from them. Could they not employ the same tactics to destroy the so-called Beast of Gévaudan? I presume that the situation there is just like it was here. Just wolves and nothing more. I forgot to say that they killed a good hundred wolves in this area. In the stomach of several they found hair and other things which proved that they had eaten human flesh. They managed to destroy the species, the wolf, to such a point that there was no longer any question of there being a so-called “Beast” to which fear had given names and features each one more frightening than the last.”

Clearly, Monsieur Polluche Lumina thought that the Beast of Orleans was merely a wolf or wolves, seen under conditions of extreme stress and fear. Such terror supposedly exaggerated the witnesses’ testimony to such an extent that the idea of a monster was born. Not everybody, though, went for this rather simplistic explanation.

A short pamphlet about the Beast was printed at Chartres by Garnier-Allabre, the well-known local manufacturer of wallpaper and pictures. He may well have interviewed the witnesses about what they had seen. Garnier-Allabre produced this illustration which, to me, looks nothing like any wolf I have ever seen, even a stylised one. It has scales! It is armoured! It is as much like an anklylosaurus as a wolf!:

The leaflet also contained the following text:

“This cruel beast tears and devours everything it encounters in its path and causes desolation among whole families in the areas that it moves through. Last December 25th, near the entrance to a village near Beaugency, it found an unfortunate woodcutter and his wife and his eldest son. The ferocious beast first attacked the unfortunate woman. The poor woodcutter and then his son tried to defend her and a terrific battle ensued. Despite their efforts and those of several other people who rushed to the rescue, the unfortunate woman was killed and several others were wounded.
It is impossible to calculate the number of unfortunate people who were victims of the rapacity of this wild beast; it is covered with scales, and no weapon has any effect on it. Let us pray to God, my dear friends, to deliver us from this monster, and pray, too, for the speedy recovery of those injured by this animal. “

The local historian Monsieur Lottin also makes mention of the Beast and links the Beast of Orléans to the Beast of Gévaudan:

“A cruel beast, believed to be a hyena and which ravaged Gévaudan, Auvergne, Nivernais , Bourbonnais and the areas around Orléans and against which regular frontline troops had operated , was killed at that time , by the Sieur Antoine, a skilful hunter. This ferocious animal had caused the greatest devastation and had inspired universal terror. Coloured pictures, produced by Monsieur Letourny, a paper merchant in the Place du Martroi , who had gained a reputation for this kind of engraving, were sold by the thousand.”

Alas, none seem to have survived.

Extremely close to Orléans is the tiny town of Chaingy. It is represented by the red square:

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Even nowadays Chaingy has only 3,669 inhabitants. It was here that an unbelievably aggressive creature struck more than a century after “The Beast of Orléans”. The same website continues:

“In 1814, the Beast of Chaingy also gave rise to an abundance of images. There has been much confusion between the two creatures, at least on the level of how the illustrations would represent “The Beast”. This is not surprising: the printers did not trouble themselves over exact details and were more than willing to copy each other’s efforts:

The case of the Beast of Chaingy took place in 1814. It is possible that it reflected other cases of “Beasts” from a long time before, such as the one described by Monsieur Polluche Lumina which took place a long time before (1709). The Beast of Chaingy is a creature which has been a little better documented :

“On December 6th, 1814 , several women and children who were collecting dead wood in the forest were attacked by a she-wolf . The animal killed two and injured eight more. The Baron de Talleyrand, whose magnificent full name was Alexandre Daniel de Talleyrand-Périgord was Prefect of this area. He ordered a hunt and the beast was slain near Cercottes.”

This is as maybe, but, for me, if this creature was just an ordinary canis lupus, then its behaviour was absolutely extraordinary. Nobody nowadays would expect a group of people to be attacked, or even challenged, in a wood by a lone she-wolf. To then have two individuals killed and eight more wounded is quite astonishing. All I can suggest is that this animal was, as has been said so many times both about the Beast of Gévaudan and about many others:

“C’était comme un loup mais ce n’était pas un loup.”
“It was like a wolf but it was not a wolf.”

In 1868, the last real wolf in the region was killed by a poacher in Chaingy, a man called Blaise Basset. The body of the animal is now on display at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Orléans.
And here it is:

Hardly the type of creature to kill two people and wound a further eight. I’m more scared of those polyester slacks if truth be told.
And finally. Let’s hope that this is merely an imaginative drawing of the Beast of Chaingy. If it’s from a trailcam, we could all be in trouble:

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Alexandre Daniel de Talleyrand-Périgord, Beaugency, Blaise Basset, Chaingy, Chartres, Fontainebleau, Gévaudan, Monsieur Letourny, Orléans, Place de Martroi, Polluche Lumina

by jfwknifton | July 24, 2015 · 4:05 pm

The Corncrake: the sound of Victorian England

Nowadays the Corncrake is limited to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland although there is also what seems to be a highly successful reintroduction scheme being carried out in the RSPB Nene Washes Reserve in Cambridgeshire, England:

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Corncrakes were present throughout the length and breadth of England and their distinctive call was heard in every sunlit field. Even their Latin name, crex crex, is onomatopoeic. The birds were described as producing the most distinctive summer sound to be heard on a country walk anywhere in England. This is the song of the corncrake, beautifully recorded by “therhys927”

Corncrakes will often sing all through the night, and they can in fact be pretty aggravating little so-and-so’s once the initial novelty has worn off:

John Clare, England’s greatest poet, wrote a poem about the bird which he knew as the “Landrail”:

“How sweet and pleasant grows the way
Through summer time again
While Landrails call from day to day
Amid the grass and grain

We hear it in the weeding time
When knee deep waves the corn
We hear it in the summers prime
Through meadows night and morn

And now I hear it in the grass
That grows as sweet again
And let a minutes notice pass
And now tis in the grain”

Nowadays, the Corncrakes are all gone, gradually killed off by decade after decade of desire for profit, intensive farming practices and in particular the mechanised mowing techniques used by the nation’s farmers in place of the trusty scythe. This sad decline is chronicled in Nottinghamshire by the county’s Victorian birdwatchers:

In 1866, in his “Ornithology of Nottinghamshire”, William Felkin wrote that “the corncrake is very common”. Three years later, in 1869, William Sterland provided a charming account of this delightful bird in “The Birds of Sherwood Forest”:

“That bird of singular habits and note, the corncrake, visits us in abundance every year, sometimes arriving as early as the first of May, while in 1853 I did not hear its note until the 18th. This was unusually late; the season being a remarkably cold and backward one, a fact of which our other migratory birds also seemed, in some mysterious way, to be fully cognisant. Nothing, indeed, relating to the feathered tribes is more wonderful or more deserving of our admiration than that knowledge, call it instinct or what you will, which, implanted in them by their Creator, enables them to hasten or delay their departure for their distant but temporary places of abode, according as the seasons there are suitable to their necessities or otherwise. How strikingly is this wisdom brought forward in Holy Scripture: “Yes, the Stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed time and the turtle, and the crane, and the swallow observe the time of their coming.”

William Sterland seems well aware of the piece of Corncrake behaviour which was to prove its downfall, as the mechanized mower made its inexorable way forward:

“I have never succeeded in causing the Corncrake to take wing except with a dog, and even then its flight is always brief, as it takes an early opportunity of dropping to the ground and regaining its cover. It flies rather slowly with its legs hanging down, and there is such an air of effort about his movements on the wing, that I have often wondered how its migrations are performed.
Its ventriloquial powers are well known to every observer. Now it’s harsh “Crake, crake” seems within a few yards, and the next moment it sounds as if it were halfway across the field, and this apparent variation in distance is so well simulated that in a consecutive repetition of its call for ten or twelve times, a few notes will sound as if uttered almost at your feet, and the next two or three from afar, and yet the bird is standing motionless all the time, as I have several times tested. Its singular call I have often imitated by drawing my nail across the teeth of a pocket comb, and thus inducing its near approach.”

Again Sterland reveals how fully conscious he is of the problems the Corncrake will face throughout the rest of the nineteenth century:

“The female sits very closely on eggs, so closely indeed, as not infrequently to lose her life by the mower’s scythe. I have known two instances of this, in one of which the poor bird was almost cut in two.”

Ten years later, in 1879, William Sterland provided additional details about the Corncrake:

“An abundant summer visitor. It is also been found in winter, and on this account has been thought by some to hibernate; but apart from the fact that no bird is known to hibernate, why should a corncrake which remains during the winter not be able to fare as well as a water rail or a common snipe. Cold does not affect them.”

In his “Scribblings of a Hedgerow Naturalist”(1904), Joseph Whitaker wrote:

“The other evening when talking to Rose the Nottingham taxidermist (who has set up a great many specimens in this collection) I remarked how very few Corncrake there were about, he said he well remembered about 35 years ago, a man bringing a large basket to his father, of these birds, which he had shot in two days, and they numbered over fifty; at that time he said the meadows round Nottingham were full of them, and their call could be heard on all sides. This year I have heard one, although I have been about a great deal.”

No Corncrakes in 1904, no meadows in 2014! Elsewhere Joseph Whitaker wrote about his country house at Rainworth, between Nottingham, and Mansfield:

“I am sorry to say the Corn Crake is getting scarcer. I have not heard one near the house was several years, although twenty years ago they were in every mowing field. No doubt the result of mowing machines which cuts the young up often I fear.”

Three years later in 1907, Joseph Whitaker provided in “The Birds of Nottinghamshire” the following information :

“I sorrow to say that this interesting bird is a rapidly vanishing species, not only as far as Notts is concerned, but in many other counties. Twenty years back it was the exception in the spring not to hear a corncrake in nearly every mowing field in the Trent Valley, and almost every seed and grass field left for hay in other parts. In this very high and dry parish of Blidworth, we had between ten and fifteen pairs, now for the last three years not a bird has been heard.”

Like his fellow nature writers, Joseph Whitaker chronicles the decline:

“At Southwell, on a June night, their curious call resounded on all sides; now this year there may be two pairs. Mr Henry Smith Junior of Cropwell Butler informs me that this scarcity is very noticeable in that part, and in fact all over the south of the county.”

Alas, Whitaker was to be proved wrong when he wrote:

“Let us hope that it will be many years before they are quite a bird of the past, but if they decrease during the next twenty years as fast as their decrease during the last two decades, it pains me to think that it may be so.
I once heard a corncrake calling inside the kitchen garden at Welbeck Abbey.”

And finally, in “Jottings of a Naturalist” in 1912, Whitaker wrote:

“Twenty years ago there were Corncrakes all over the parish, in fact it was the exception not to hear them in every mowing field, but I know that there is been none for the last ten years, not a single bird heard, and the parish is six thousand acres; and it is not only so in these parts, it is the same everywhere.”

And really, that was that. The end of the Corncrake.

As the Great War loomed, the Victorian age drew to a close. No more mowing fields, no more meadows full of flowers, no more clouds of brightly coloured butterflies. And no more Corncrakes. Just mud, blood, war and death.

To film a Corncrake nowadays, you are more or less wasting your time in England. This beautiful, atmospheric video comes from “mikhailrodionov” in faraway Russia:

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Filed under History, Nottingham, Science, Twitching, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as birdwatcher, Blidworth, corncrake, Cropwell Butler, Great War, Henry Smith Junior, John Clare, Joseph Whitaker, Jottings of a Naturalist, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Ornithology of Nottinghamshire, Outer Hebrides, Rainworth, Rose the Nottingham taxidermist, RSPB Nene Washes, Scotland, Scribblings of a Hedgerow Naturalist, The Birds of Nottinghamshire, The Birds of Sherwood Forest, Trent Valley, Victorian, Welbeck Abbey, William Felkin, William Sterland

by jfwknifton | July 19, 2015 · 4:32 pm

If you go down to the woods today, you’d better not go alone…

One more monster to terrorise the local peasantry of bygone France was the so called “Bête de Cinglais” which was also called the “Bête d’Evreux”. Its bloodstained career lasted from 1632–1633, as it terrorised the province of Normandy, bringing violent death to one of the most beautiful areas of a beautiful country. Indeed, there is a sharp contrast here with the wild mountains frequented by so many other of the monsters we have read about. Here is a map of northern France:

And here is a bit more of a close-up. The green UFO marks the precise location:

As always, the best approach is to take an average of the various French websites. The “Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology”, the “Institut Virtuel de Cryptozoologie”, states that:

“In 1632, about fifteen kilometres to the south of Caen, in the Forest of Cinglais, an animal carried out a reign of terror. Those who survived its attacks described it as a kind of huge mastiff of extraordinary agility and speed. Two historical documents mention the mysterious beast: the “Gazette de France” of March 19th 1632 and the edition of June 17th 1633. The edition of 1632 announces that the predator has already devoured around fifteen people in a month.

Forest rangers have shot at it with their muskets but are unable to cause any injury. The priests are trying to mobilize the inhabitants of the neighbouring parishes but the population is so traumatised that very few volunteers dare to take part in the hunts. The hunters themselves do not want to venture into the woods unless they are in a large group. The 1633 edition of the newspaper announces the killing of an animal at the end of a massive hunt lasting three days, organised by the Count de la Suze, with the participation of between 5,000-6,000 hunters and beaters. The Beast of Cinglais looks like a kind of wolf, but is longer, and more red in colour with a more pointed tail and a wider rump than an ordinary wolf. At least thirty people have now been killed.”

This, conceivably, may be a depiction of the creature:

Interestingly enough, there was a further series of attacks only some fifteen years later in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is a very similar area to the Forest of Cinglais and is not particularly far away at all:

The Fontainebleau story is carried by the same website:

“In 1679, woodcutters were killed and eaten in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Records in the parish of Bois-le-Roi mention several cases of attacks.”

A website which specialises in the ghostly aspects of the beautiful Forest of Fontainebleau also carries a few tales of ancient beasts thought to live there:

“There used to exist around the beginning of the sixteenth century a fabulous animal that spread terror in the Forest of Fontainebleau and its surroundings. All indications are that it was a wolf, but some cried “Werewolf”, or tried to blame a magician who was said to be an expert in the art of shape shifting.”

“And then, around 1660, long before the famous Beast of Gévaudan, there was already talk around this area of the Bête du Gâtinais, the Beast of Gâtinais, a frightful creature which looked like a monstrous wolf. His greatly exaggerated exploits, murdering children and young girls, used to feed people’s fears. Such stories caused many sleepless nights. It was even said that the Beast used to cross the River Seine to come and steal little children and animals on the far side.”

Even in fairly modern times:

“Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an old woman recounted the story of a great evil beast which lived in the forest and which came out from time to time to attack farm labourers, shepherds and flocks of sheep. The monster had to its credit a whole multitude of atrocities, dead sheep, dogs killed and children who just disappeared. The little girl who set off to gather hazelnuts in the woods, and was never seen again. The young nine year old boy devoured near the village of Nanteuil les Meaux”

The website’s author states that:

“It is quite possible that these three stories all refer to the same species of animal, described at different times in history….With evidence of this type, spread over long periods of time….it is not easy to make sense of things, to separate the mythical and imaginary monster from a mere animal.”

That “mere animal”, of course, is the wolf, considered in the France of bygone years to be guilty of far more serious attacks on humans than, say, the wolves of present day North America or Europe. This is the location of Fontainebleau. Compare this map with the maps for the Beast of Caen/Evreaux/Cinglais”:

As far as Fontainebleau during the first half of the sixteenth century is concerned, there were certainly many people who thought that nobody should ever go down to the woods. If they did, they would certainly be sure of a really big surprise, one with lots of a fangs and an aggressive attitude that needed quite a lot of adjustment. And yes, there were lots of marvellous things to eat, (in a way) but it was better not to go alone. It’s really lovely down in the woods, but perhaps it is safer to stay at home:

The same fascinating website continues:

“In the reign of King François the First, during the first half of the sixteenth century, a certain Sebastian Rabutin was to rid the country of a terrible lynx which was just as murderous as any of our previous beasts. It too was devastating the same region, devouring in turn both young girls and children. This monster, which appears in a fresco in the ballroom of the Château de Fontainebleau where it is depicted as some kind of hybrid between a wolf and a feline, was so formidable that no one dared confront it . For the record, the “loup-cervier”, in Latin “lupus cervarius”, which means deer wolf, is the common name of the Lynx, a big cat which hunts hares or rabbits, but never deer or men.”

I have not been able to trace the fresco in the ballroom of the château, but there is quite a lot to go at:

There is absolutely no way though that any of these French monsters was a lynx, as I have already discussed in a previous blogpost about the Beast of Benais.

Fairly close to both Caen and Fontainebleau is the beautiful cathedral city of Chartres:

The “Institut Virtuel de Cryptozoologie” reports how:

“At Chartres, in 1581, a young boy was buried at Ver-les-Chartres, killed by a “wild beast”, “une beste sauvage” whose identity we are not at all sure of.”

If this were not a wolf, and a wolf would surely have been recognised, then it may well have been one of the mysterious beasts we have been examining.

But let’s just forget this supporting cast for the moment. Let’s return to “La Bête de Cinglais”. Another interesting blogpost about this fearsome creature comes from Evelyne Achon:

“The Forest of Cinglais is about 15 kilometres to the south of Caen. The “Beast of Cinglais” is also called “The Beast of Evreux” or “The Beast of Caen”. It refers to a man eating animal behind a series of attacks on humans.

The first attack was mentioned in 1632. These attacks are known through articles in contemporary newspaper. The Gazette de France therefore reported on March 19, 1632:

“News from Caen in Normandy. The 10th of March in the year 1632. Since last month in the forest of Cinglais, and then between there and Falaise, people have seen a wild beast that has already devoured fifteen people. Those who have avoided his fangs report that this savage beast is similar to a large mastiff of such a speed that it would be impossible to run and catch him on foot. He is of such extraordinary agility that people have seen him jump right over the river in certain places. Some people call him Thérende. Local residents and forest gamekeepers have shot at him from range with their arquebuses on several occasions, but without wounding him. They do not dare approach him, or even to reveal themselves, until they are organised in a large group, exactly as they will be today when they hear the sound of the alarm bell, to which all the parishioners from all the parishes around have been invited by their village priests, as three thousand people are assembled to carry out the hunt. “

A gigantic beat was organized in June 1633, with the participation of between 5,000 and 6,000 men. An animal was killed, and the attacks ceased.

Here is an old engraving of the Beast. Spaghetti for lunch:

The Gazette de France reported on June 17th the death of the creature as follows:

“This raging mad beast which I wrote about last year as having eaten in two months more than thirty people in this forest was believed by everybody to be a creature of magical properties. But the Count de la Suze, having assembled by the order of our Lieutenant General on the 21st of this month between 5000 to 6000 people, has pursued the creature so keenly that after three days it was killed by a shot from a flintlock musket. It turned out to be some kind of wolf but longer, redder in colour with a pointed tail and a rump wider than normal. “

Here is the Forest of Cinglais:

Wikipedia supplies a little information, but seems, perhaps, rather coy:

“This beast was identified as a wolf, but a mystery still remains. It was described as a kind of red wolf with an elongated body and a more pointed tail than a common wolf. It seemed very quick and agile.”

Another old friend, Vampiredarknews knows the details equally well:

“In 1632, this Beast killed fifteen victims in only one month. It struck in Normandy, where those who escaped described it as a great extremely fast and agile mastiff. It then settled in the Forest of Cinglais, about fifteen kilometres south of Caen. It then killed a dozen or so victims before they organized a hunt that lasted three days and brought together more than 5000 people. It was killed on June 23, 1633 by the Count de la Suze.”

One final website makes a very good point:

“It will eventually be described as a wolf, but a great mystery still hangs around this story ; the behaviour and the agility of the creature are in no way anything like that of a wolf.”

In the fullness of time, I will finish this almost interminable list of “Monsters of France” and draw them all together as the same unknown species. This particular creature is a good example. The Forest of Cinglais, the Forest of Fontainebleau and the charming countryside around Orléans are all pretty much the same kind of environment. The looks and behaviour of these beasts are not unique. Other localities have had strange reddish animals, animals with noticeable tails, animals with extreme agility or with great speed or an ability to leap long distances. There must be a link between them all.

I am very struck by the words of Abbé Pierre Pourcher about the Beast of Gévaudan:

“Everybody who saw it said it was not a wolf. Everybody who did not see it said it was.”

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Filed under Cryptozoology, France, History, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as bête, Bête de Benais, Bête du Gâtinais, bêtes, Beast, Beast of Benais, Caen, Chartres, Cinglais, cryptozoologie, Evreux, Falaise, Fontainebleau, Forest of Cinglais, Forest of Fontainebleau, France, lynx, mastiff, Monster, Normandy, Orléans, the Beast of Gatinais, wolf

by jfwknifton | July 6, 2015 · 8:02 am

You have three minutes to learn to swim

In a previous blogpost I spoke about the Great Storm of 1703. Just under a hundred years previously, in 1607, there had been a huge, spectacular, surging flood in the West Country, centred on the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary. Much damage was done, in particular to the area near the orange arrow:

The floodwaters which struck on January 30th were in no way the result of a long period of continuous rain, such as has been the case in the recent years of our own century. Indeed contemporary writers stated that:

“The winter was extremely warm and very much drying….even smaller brooks remained ice free. Already in February the sowing was performed, in the same time violets are to have flowered.”

It is always possible, of course, that this long ago catastrophe was the result of a sudden surge, caused by high tides and very strong winds, as has happened several times in Norfolk and Suffolk in the last two hundred years. Some meteorologists, though, have looked beyond this.

Contemporary scientists such as Professor Simon Hazlitt, and Australian geologist Ted Bryant therefore,postulated in their research paper in 2002 that the flooding was caused by a tsunami. Their evidence, other than presumably the immense volumes of water involved in the incident, are that various deposits of sand, pebbles and shells, scattered around the Severn Estuary, are compatible with having been brought from the open ocean.

Their explanation for this melodramatic event was an undersea landslide, or perhaps ocean slide, on the sea floor between Cornwall and Ireland. Alternatively, there may have been some kind of earthquake, caused by fault lines in the sea somewhere to the southwest of the area.

Whatever the reason, the results were catastrophic. Water swept five miles inland around Bristol and all along the coast of South Wales from Pembrokeshire to Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. In the Somerset Levels, still the victims of flooding nowadays, some four hundred years later, the waters came as far as forty miles inland. Did they recreate the ancient Glastonbury when the waters turned the Tor into the legendary Avalon?

Certainly though, at Frampton on Severn in Gloucestershire, the flood covered the entire village so that only the spire of the church of St Mary the Virgin emerged from the water. There are some lovely details in this contemporary illustration:

At Burnham on Sea in Somerset, the sea wall was washed away and so were thirty villages in the immediate vicinity. In Huntspill, almost thirty people drowned, with a similar number perishing at Brean which was “swallowed up”. Here, seven out of the nine houses were destroyed: these were typical totals repeated in villages and small towns over the entire area, resulting ultimately in a death toll of at least two thousand people, and that in a fairly sparsely populated agricultural region. Other villages which were devastated included Berrow, Mark, Lympsham, and both South and East Brent were badly affected. Houses and villages were swept away, and overall, an estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) of farmland was inundated. Livestock was destroyed. For ten days the Church of All Saints at Kingston Seymour, near Weston-super-Mare, (look for the orange arrow) was filled with water to a depth of five feet (1.5 m):

A chiselled mark remains showing that the maximum height of the water was more than 25 feet (7.74 metres) above sea level. The church has a commemorative plaque:

“An inundation of the sea water by overflowing and breaking down the Sea banks; happened in this Parish of Kingstone-Seamore, and many others adjoining; by reason whereof many Persons were drown’d and much Cattle and Goods, were lost: the water in the Church was five feet high and the greatest part lay on the ground about ten days. WILLIAM BOWER”

This plaque in the local St Mary’s church records the disaster at Goldcliff near Newport on the Welsh side of the Severn Estuary:

Initially, on the day, all was going well:

“for about nine of the morning, the same being most fayrely and brightly spred, many of the inhabitants of these countreys prepared themselves to their affayres”

Then the sea retreated away from the shore; in contemporary terms, it was “driven back”. This is apparently a classic sign of trouble ahead, tsunami imminent, and sure enough:

“mighty hilles of water tombling over one another in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds. Sometimes it dazzled many of the spectators that they imagined it had bin some fogge or mist coming with great swiftness towards them and with such a smoke as if mountains were all on fire, and to the view of some it seemed as if myriads of thousands of arrows had been shot forth all at one time.”

And there was no escape just by running away:

“(the water)is ‘affirmed to have runne …. with a swiftness so incredible, as that no gray-hounde could have escaped by running before them’.

For me, though, insofar as these events in 1607 are relatively soon after the appearance of the new King James Bible, I personally agree with the sentiments expressed in a contemporary pamphlet which was called:

“God’s warning to the people of England by the great overflowing of the waters”

The familiar contemporary illustration quoted above also came from a pamphlet of the time:

Throughout the area, there were certainly some narrow escapes. Here are four contemporary accounts:

“a maide child, not passing the age of foure years: it is reported that the mother thereof, perceiving the waters to breake so fast into her house, and not being able to escape with it, and having no clothes on, set it upon a beame in the house, to save it from being drowned. And the waters rushing in a pace, a little chicken flew up, it being found in the bosome of it, when helpe came and by the heate thereof preserved the childe’s life”.

“Another little childe is affirmed to have been cast uppon land in a cradle, in which was nothing but a catte the which was discerned as it came floating to the shoare, to leape still from one side of the cradle unto the other, even as if she had been appointed steresman to preserve the small barke from the waves furie”

“A certain man and woman having taken a tree for their succour, espying nothing but death before their eyes, at last among other things which were carried along, they perceived a certain tubbe of great bignesse to come nearer and nearer unto them, until it rested upon that tree wherein they were, committed themselves, and were carried safe until they were cast upon the drie shore”.

“more than did, had perished for want of food, and extreme cold, had not the Rt. Honble. Lord Herbert …. sent out boats to relieve the distresse …. himself going to such houses as he could minister to their provision of meate and other necessaries”.

Nowadays, of course, this just could not happen. We keep a tight control of the weather:

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Perhaps, though, the builders of medieval churches knew a little bit more than us:

Having said that, have no fear. Should a flood, or indeed, a tsunami, ever arrive, we will be helped by an army of graduates from the University of the Bleedin’ Obvious:

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Filed under History, Humour, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Avalon, Bristol Channel, flooding, Glastonbury, Gloucestershire, Great Storm, King James Bible, plaque, Severn Estuary, West Country

by jfwknifton | July 1, 2015 · 1:09 pm

A Werewolf in Cambridgeshire. Run away!!

In three previous blog posts, I discussed “Shuck”, the huge phantom black dog, who for centuries has roamed, for the most part, the fields, fens and even beaches of East Anglia. I showed, though, that the cryptic canid has also walked on occasion in Nottinghamshire, visiting churchyards and graveyards. He frequents ancient tracks and pathways and, in particular, a lonely footpath down by the River Trent in Beckingham. He has been seen in isolated Crow Lane in South Muskham and, in recent times, on a pitch black Blyth Road, near Hodsock Priory:

In my third blogpost, I tried to establish a link with the American Wolfmen such as the “Beast of Bray Road”:

These are hairy bipeds with canid features who, like Black Shuck, seem to occur “near freshwater; on hills; at boundary areas such as roads; and on or near burial grounds, and military zones, and all types of sacred areas around the world”:

These are the words of Linda S Godfrey in her wonderful book, “Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America”:

After receiving this book as a Christmas present in 2013, I received an equally interesting publication in 2014. It was “Haunted Skies Volume One” by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway:

As they say on the cover, the book is part of a whole series telling the entire story of British UFOs. In total, there are ten different volumes and they are, quite simply, an absolute tour de force, a labour of love which runs from 1940 to the present day. So far, I have bought a number of other volumes although I am still a little bit short of the full set (as they say).

What has this got to do with Shuck you may ask? Does this mean that the Beast of Bray Road has moved kennel to England?

Well, in a way, it does. This is Volume 5:

This volume runs from 1972-1974. It contains a tale told about RAF Alconbury, a USAAF airbase in Cambridgeshire, which has a number of claims to fame as being haunted by a variety of different spectres. Here is a large scale map of the area. Look for the orange arrow which indicates the airbase:

And here is a close up. The orange arrow is in the same place on both maps:

The amazing tale told to John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, the authors of the book, by an eyewitness, is that a mechanic was:

“carrying out some routine work to an F-5 Aircraft, parked on the runway, a job that should have been completed in an hour. When he failed to make the telephone call, requesting a lift back from the Hangar, a search went out to find him. They found him sitting in the aircraft, as white as a sheet, with the canopy closed. Although I asked him, many times, what it was that he had seen, he declined, saying that it had frightened him so much that he refused to go anywhere near that location again. We discovered, from another source, that the man had seen a terrifying hairy humanoid, which had walked past the aircraft.”

This is a Northrop F-5 aircraft:

This is a second eyewitness account which they quote:

“I also heard about an incident involving two mechanics, working on an aircraft parked on the north side of the base, one of whom was so frightened by the appearance of a strange hairy creature that he jumped into the cockpit of the aircraft and refused to get out for some time.”

It is entirely impressive that the two co-authors should then discover a third corroborative tale about two USAAF personnel:

“Sergeants Randi Lee and Jackson…. one night, while on patrol with their two dogs, they saw some movement near the towers and called the Main Gate to check if any workmen were still on-site…. As they approached the tower, they came face-to-face with a hairy figure. The dogs stopped in their tracks, absolutely terrified, frantically trying to get away…..The truck arrived just in time to see the creature, whatever it was, climbing over the security fence, where it was last seen entering North Woods.”

It is difficult to imagine how much more thorough these two authors could have been at this point. They manage to find yet another witness to this bizarre tale:

“One foggy night my father received a radio call; there was an intruder within the perimeter…. He tore out in his truck and sped towards the scene…. Seeing a figure in the fog, he pulled over, thinking it was one of his guards. He rolled down his window and was screamed at, full in the face, by what can only be described as a man-like, bipedal creature. My father nearly wet himself in fear. In an instant the thing ran off at incredible speed and my father drove after it. Within moments it had sped past another of the guards….my father and these men witnessed this creature make fantastic, running bounds across the grounds before leaping over two tall, well-spaced barbed wire fences in a single bound. It disappeared into the surrounding woods.”

Many similar and confirmatory accounts can be found on the Internet of this interesting, yet frightening creature. Just as I have quoted John Hanson and Dawn Holloway, some of the websites are clearly redolent of Nick Redfern’s blog post of 2007, “Do Werewolves Roam The Woods Of England?”
One of the contributors, a gentleman who calls himself “wes” recounts his own version of the Alconbury creature:

“I encountered a werewolf (lack of better description) in England in 1970, I was 20 years old when I was stationed at RAF Alconbury. I was in a secure weapons storage area when i encountered it. It seemed shocked and surprized to been caught off guard and I froze in total fright. I was armed with a .38 and never once considered using it. There was no aggression on its part. I could not comprehend what I was seeing. It is not human. It has a flat snout and large eyes. Its height is approx 5 ft and weight approx.200 lbs. It is very muscular and thin. It wore no clothing and was only moderately hairy. It ran away on its hind legs and scurried over a chain link fence and ran deep into the dense wooded area adjacent to the base. I was extremely frightened but the fear developed into a total commitment of trying to contact it again. I was obsessed with it. I was able to see it again a few weeks later at a distance in the wooded area. I watched it for about 30 seconds slowly moving through the woods”

At the website “Winter Spirits” a person called “earth_spirit” recounts how he too was in the RAF:

“In 1978 I was stationed with the US Air Force in West Germany and was sent to RAF Alconbury in England for a 30 day TDY (temporary duty.) When I mentioned to a co-worker I was going to RAF Alconbury, he told me that he had been there in 1972 when one of the aircraft mechanics in his squadron had been found late one night in the back seat of an RF-4C Phantom jet, supposedly after he had died of “fright.” The story was that a subsequent investigation revealed unexplained scratches on the glass of the canopy of the jet, and this started a rumor circulating that the unfortunate crew chief had been the victim of what came to be known as the infamous “hard stand monster.”

You could be forgiven for misinterpreting the “hard stand monster” but clearly, there is something behind these stories.

In a fascinating blog, well worth a look, written by Sarah Hapgood and entitled “sjhstrangetales”, the testimony of yet another witness is quoted:

“Dennis Prisbrey, stationed here between 1973/5, told of colleagues seeing a “creature” near the north side of the airfield. One sighting of it scared a colleague so much that he jumped into the cockpit of an aircraft and refused to get out. The creature was also seen climbing over the security fence, and entering the North Woods. Wesley Uptergrove also saw it, and said he tried to pursue it in a truck. He described it as 5ft 9″ tall, with human-like eyes, a flat nose, and large ears.”

With so many websites discussing the unusual, the ghostly and the frightening, it is again just a matter of establishing some kind of average between the many repeated tellings of what is obviously the same incident. One intriguing explanation is offered by Nick Redfern with the full backing of Linda S.Godrey. Clearly based on the fact that these werewolves are often seen near military bases, it is well worth five minutes of your time. This individual is my favourite. He looks as if he waiting for his library book to be stamped:

Whatever happens though, you could do lot worse than to take a look at the many volumes of “Haunted Skies” by John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. They are an unbelievable set of books, although “unbelievable” is perhaps not the best choice of words when discussing UFOs.

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Filed under Aviation, Cryptozoology, History, Science

Tagged as Alconbury, Beast of Bray Road, Beckingham, British UFOs, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, Hodsock Priory, Shuck, South Muskham, werewolf, werewolves, West Germany

by jfwknifton | June 27, 2015 · 8:08 am

An insect with a billion friends

This story is an extract from my old birdwatching diary “Crippling Views”.

These events all took place on Friday, October 28, 1988, which was the fourth day of my stay on the Isles of Scilly:

“A late lie-in this morning, with the Radde’s Warbler ticked off, and little else to get up for, certainly not at five o’clock in the morning:

I eagerly consume a splendid Scillonian breakfast made up of every conceivable Identified Frying Object, with the possible exception of haggis, although this could well be the single mysterious item which I cannot identify with absolute certainty. Then it’s a leisurely walk down to the Porthcressa Restaurant where the magic blackboard promises Melodious Warbler at the Garrison. With a bit of luck, I might see that, and then go over to St Agnes for the Short toed Lark. I walk up the horrendously steep slopes of the hill to the Garrison, and start looking…

Unsuccessful after a couple of hours, I return to Hugh Town, the Big City. I find that I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity facing me. It’s not a bird, but a flying creature just as rare as any of the birds which reach the Scillies. It’s a Locust. Only the fourth or fifth ever to be blown to these rocky isles. At the moment, it is being housed in an art gallery in a backstreet. I stroll over there and find that the insect is living happily in a vivarium on the counter. It is a truly splendid and beautiful creature, far better than any of the birds that I have seen on the Scillies, including the juvenile Rose-coloured Starling:

I could even imagine this magnificent insect being used as a powerful argument for the existence of God, particularly in mediaeval times. It is constructed so wonderfully skilfully that it becomes a classic example of the Celestial Watchmaker. It has one set of protective plates inside another, and then another beyond that. It looks like a knight in armour, but instead of being as dry as dust and rusty like something in an old stately home, this is a live being and it can move. It is a child’s clockwork toy that has the gift of life.

I am surprised by two things. Firstly, the creature’s colour, or rather colours, for it is at one and the same time, both yellow and pink and orange and sandy. I am shocked too by the size. I have never seen a Locust before, and it is absolutely huge. At least to a person like me who leaves the room when the zookeepers take the tarantula out of the glass case, or somebody who thinks that ladybirds are fierce.
The gentleman in the shop tells me that the creature was found on the local beach and was brought to his gallery so it could be drawn and photographed. He quite clearly and obviously is very attached to his six legged guest and seems to be well on the way to regarding it as his very own pet, or at the very least as an attraction to his gallery. Apparently, the British Museum have already contacted him and told him that he must kill it immediately, put it in a cardboard box, and send it to them in a parcel as a scientific specimen:

I am totally appalled and disgusted by this news. I cannot find the words to capture my feelings. It seems somehow so repulsive to kill this beautiful innocent creature which has had to fight so hard for life. It has crossed the Atlantic in all probability, or has perhaps arrived here all the way from West Africa. Now it’s happily munching English grass, but soon it is supposed to die at the whim of some cold hearted scientist who has taken upon himself the right to dole out life or death. It seems to be taking such an advantage of an insect’s lack of awareness and essentially innocent existence.

The gallery owner, I feel, would rather not kill the insect, but keep it. I do try to tell him that in all probability it belongs to him, and that the British Museum have no legal right whatsoever to tell him to do what he does not want to do, and still less to actually make him do it.

Strangely, it seems to be to no purpose. The gallery owner seems overawed by the demands of an organisation as apparently so powerful as the British Museum. And presumably, the locust will have to die. It is so sad that we should be given the chance to meet such an exotic and unusual member of God’s family, but should then lack the reasoning power to do anything more creative or imaginative than to kill it.
I would hope that I personally could do better than that, if put in the position of having to look after a stray innocent. At the very least though, I will remain the only person with a framed, but not autographed, picture of a locust above the fireplace…Even if it is only when my wife is out of the house.

Years and years later and I am sure that I read somewhere that the poor unfortunate locust was not killed for the British Museum, but instead was allowed by its admiring owner to live out its life in its little vivarium on the counter of his gallery. Unfortunately, I have been unable to substantiate this, as I have long forgotten where I read the wonderful news. Locusts continue to reach the shores of our freezing wet little island, but only on very rare occasions. Certainly, there has been nothing like the situation in 1869 when whole swarms of Desert Locusts reached England, apparently from West Africa.

Cruel scientists still insist on killing creatures to prove what they are, and there was considerable outcry a few years ago, when a Californian ornithologist, I think it was, killed the first Arctic Redpoll ever to be found in that state. This, of course, is why Bigfoot keeps such a low profile for somebody who is nine or ten feet tall. He knows he exists, so why should he get himself killed just so that other people can?

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Filed under Cornwall, History, Personal, Science, Twitching, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Arctic Redpoll, Bigfoot, British Museum, Celestial Watchmaker, Crippling Views, Garrison, Hugh Town, Isles of Scilly, Locust, Melodious Warbler, Porthcressa, Radde’s Warbler, Rose-coloured Starling, Scillies, Scillonian, Short toed Lark, West Africa

by jfwknifton | May 31, 2015 · 10:55 am

Marsh Warbler: here yesterday, gone today

(An extract from my old birdwatching diary “Crippling Views”)

Wednesday, June 1, 1988

A quick trip out from my wife’s parents’ house this time. They live on the western edges of Birmingham, but I am off to see a speciality in a nearby area, namely Marsh Warbler. I find the site, next to a picturesque little humpback road bridge, and park the car. Then I set off along the riverbank, towards a brick railway bridge. Look for the orange arrows:

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As I walk along, there are Sedge Warblers, exploding indignantly at me from riverside clumps of vegetation.

There are the odd few Reed Warblers, just to get me excited, but I am hopeful that Marsh Warbler will look completely different from its closely related congener. It’s an unfamiliar and interesting landscape for me, with pollarded willows and soaking wet pastures, full of ferocious Friesian cattle, plotting to charge and trample me to death as soon as my back is turned. When I get to the railway bridge, there is already another birdwatcher looking for Marsh Warblers:

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After about ten minutes or so, a bird appears low down in the vegetation on the opposite bank of the slowly flowing river, just above the waterline. It looks good to me for Marsh Warbler, despite the fact that at no point does it actually sing. Its shade of brown has an appropriate grey tinge and its underparts are whiter than white with no hint of buff.

It has a smooth, flat head, without a crest of any kind. Its legs are a nice pale colour, as it reappears every ten minutes or so at roughly the same place. The bird is obviously doing a circuit around the nettles and the Rosebay Willow Herb, feeding as it goes. Perhaps it has just this minute arrived from Africa, and it’s getting its breath back before it bursts into its imitations of 93 different bird songs, and seven types of lorry reversing signals. Anyway, I agree with the other birdwatcher that this is a Marsh warbler. Then we both pack up and go home, plodding off down the riverside path. There aren’t any reasons to believe that the bird is not what it is supposed to be. Not a single feature contradicts Marsh Warbler as a verdict. Besides, most important of all, it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be.

Nowadays, the Marsh Warbler, as far as I know, no longer breeds in this exact area. There are, and there have been, various breeding records from Kent and Suffolk, among many others, but I no longer know of any reliable site for these birds. I know that I have definitely seen a Marsh Warbler, an individual that was seen by many, many others, who all agreed with the identification…alas! It was on the Isles of Scilly, in bracken in a rocky, overgrown field. Given the habitat and the time of year, there were many, many people who thought that it must be a Blyth’s Reed Warbler. Indeed, there were those who wanted it to be God knows what sort of Warbler from beyond not just Lake Baikal, but Kamchatka itself.

The lone birdwatcher I met at Eckington was a young woman. She still remains the only young woman I have ever seen in a twitching situation. Older women will readily, even eagerly, go on coach trips with the RSPB or the Nottinghamshire Birdwatchers but young women have many and better things to do in my experience. Birdwatching has always been equally short of ethnic minorities. I know now that they exist in British ornithology, but in my twitching days, I never saw a black birdwatcher. I only ever came across one young Asian man, as we all embarked on the Scillonian for one of the old Pelagics, a trip out into the South West Approaches to find Black-browed Albatross and Sea Serpent. But that, as they say, is another story.

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Filed under Science, Twitching, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as Black-browed Albatross, Blyth’s Reed Warbler, Crippling Views, Friesian cattle, Isles of Scilly, Kamchatka, Kent, Lake Baikal, Marsh Warbler, Nottinghamshire Birdwatchers, Pelagic, Rosebay Willow Herb, RSPB, Scillonian, Sea Serpent, South West Approaches, Suffolk

by jfwknifton | May 18, 2015 · 1:30 pm

The Beast of Noth

A more modern monster to menace the peace and tranquillity of the French countryside and its inhabitants was the wonderfully named “Beast of Noth”, “La Bête de Noth”. Here is an aerial view of where it was seen:

Noth is a small village to the north of Limoges. It is marked in red on the map of France. The street map shows just how small a place it is:

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Once again, I will look at a number of French cryptozoological websites and you can take your own average between them. I have combined two apparently closely related websites to produce this, slightly more detailed, account…

“In November 1982 the sun is rising over Noth, a village of just 450 people. Marcel Jinjeau, a market gardener from Fongeneuille near Noth, steps into his field to start the first jobs of the morning. Suddenly he notices through a veil of mist a shape lying on the grass. He thinks it is a calf. The animal feels his presence, sniffs the air then stands up. Marcel pinches himself: it is not a cow, or any bovine. The back end of the animal is slim but the neck is like that of a bull. And the way it walks. It’s like some kind of cat!

The animal walks off to take refuge in the woods. Terrified, Marcel rushes back home. If he tells this story to the village, they will think he is a madman. The following day at first light, just a few hundred metres away, at the Castle of La Fot, one of the servants goes to fetch his master’s car from the garage. As he is approaching the vehicle, he hears a savage growling in the darkness. Frightened, the man goes off to find a torch and a rifle, but when he returns to the garage, there is nothing there. Outside on the other hand, the strange visitor has left the imprint of his paws: four inches long (10cm) long, and nearly five inches(12 cm) across; a hefty animal. In the following days, the beast will leave other tracks: the corpses of lambs, that of a bullock, and a heifer. They are ripped to pieces, torn to shreds. Today though, a storm will wash away all trace of it.
Died of Fright
Meanwhile, that very afternoon the Mayor of Noth, André Lalande, and his friend, one of the partners in the Wolf Centre at Dun-le-Palestel then organise a beat. About thirty local hunters rush off to scour the forest, but the weather is against them. A storm brews up, the wind cuts out all electric power, and vast torrents of water wash their cars away. The animal is seen by several witnesses but many hunters turn back.
Not Rémy L. To prove his reputation as a crack shot, and to brave the elements which have been unleashed, he rushes off into the mud when suddenly – the beast looms up just five metres in front from him. He aims his rifle. But all of his body is shaking. He has never faced an animal of this kind. He fires, but only hits the cabbages. And he flees without further ado, quaking with fear. He will remain in shock for two days, completely incapable of putting a name to this creature. Which disappears, only to reappear forty kilometres away in Haute-Vienne, near Chateauponsac. In this area, witnesses talk of an animal a great deal bigger than a dog, with a long tail and with fur the colour of burnt sienna (a dark orangey-brown). The victims increase in number and terror spreads. People think they are seeing this feline everywhere. In the schools the children take fright and their teachers reassure them as best they can. The Mayor of Noth gives the cast of the paw prints to Dr Klein, a Parisian veterinary who is totally upfront.

“They are those of a lion or a puma.” And just what is an animal like this doing right in the middle of the Creuse region?
Some people have their own ideas. Since no circus has reported any escape of an animal, there must be a man behind it. Somebody who has come back from Africa. Somebody who is wealthy enough to carry out the scheme. All eyes all turn towards an aristocrat in North, the Marquis de V. The rumours become increasingly accusatory, “There has been an incident”, they murmur in the village. “He has lost his lion and he can’t get his hands back on it.” An even stronger rumour is that the Marquis remains a ghostly figure, never there, always somewhere else, away in Moselle. The gossips have an answer for everything. When the zoologists state that the beast’s appetite is abnormally light for a big cat, they argue “It’s because the hand of Man is feeding it”. Moreover when there is a new beat near Chateauponsac on December 12th, two witnesses state that they have caught a glimpse of the Beast deep in the forest……with a man. An hallucination?
During a year there are sporadic reports of people who think that they may have seen this feline, until the gossip finally dies away. Today in the village, nobody is keen to retract what has been said. “No….I tell you….there was an animal, the people who saw it said it used to have a strange expression in its eyes. But one that they will never forget.”

A slightly less dramatic telling of the tale comes in Wikipedia:

“The « Bête de Noth » was a carnivorous animal behind a series of attacks on flocks of sheep from November 1982 onwards, in the Department of Creuse. Among others, on November 10th the Beast of Noth killed a bullock and a heifer each weighing 900lb, both at a place called Maison-neuve.

And then on November 19th, two lambs at Auzillac, with another at Maupas on December 3rd, and then a second heifer at Grand-bourg on December 9th. It was not the attacks on farm animals which appalled people so much as the state in which the corpses were found. They were all horribly ripped to shreds. Rumours began to circulate, suggesting a lion or a puma imported by an aristocrat in the area. During a beat organised in the Forest of Noth in November 1982 one huntsman was confronted by the animal but he was not able to identify it. The whole affair has never been explained.”