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Weird Animal Sightings


One of the stations on the eastern end of the Circle Line is supposed to have a resident colony of scorpions
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Ongar station used to have a colony in the 70s, I've not heard anything about it recently.

There are still large colonies in a few dock areas in London, I believe. The species involved is the small brown European Euscorpius flavicaudus, not very venomous, apparently.

There are 'water scorpions' native to the UK, but they're not actually scorpions, they're a bug. They live underwater, and their 'sting' is actually a breathing tube. They look quite a lot like a dead leaf with legs.

Pseudoscorpions are also native to the UK, and they are arachnids, and do have scorpion-like pincers. They don't have a sting. They're not familiar to most people on account of being only a few millimetres long.
 
The Tod Taz

Could it have been a wild boar?
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Not unless they've taken to walking on two legs.

Though you remind me that when I lived in New Mills, at the tail end of an ABC scare, there were reports of a wild boar/feral pig (accounts differed) in a wood near my house. As I went there regularly to monitor badger setts, I'm certain that there were no larger animals present, and certainly not anything rooting like a pig, as one of the things badger watchers look for is soil disturbance. Mistaken ID (of what?) or spectre?
 
hello all! That woz my mate that was, that saw the Taz thing at Cliviger Gorge. In fact we were probably the first people he told. Its going back a couple of years but The details as I remember were this...

He was walking up the rocky track to his farm at night when he saw a large white shape that shot past him up the hill and disappeared at the point it should have collided with a wall. He described it as "a white gorilla with its fur shaved off and no neck" running upright on two legs.

At this point my mate was running home very very fast!. It should be noted hes not a man easily scared, he lived in a very dark isolated spot and didnt even have a lock on his door, but he was definitely spooked by this.

Other points of interest. He earlier had seen an odd light in the sky, and noticed that night all the dogs were howling in the valley. that night his parrot was also spooked and flew off never to return. theres some more relavant stuff but I'll stop now incase I'm getting boring
 
Thanks .I remember him saying he turned after hearing a noise and actually felt the thing rush past him. A more likely explanation than boar is a sheep, which can loook wierd when they apear in the dark, but my friend spent a lot of time on the hills at night and was definitely not the sort to be spooked into a misidentification.

The Gabrielle Hounds,a glowing white pack , are said to sweep down the entire valley,as an omen of misfortune. Eagle crag was home of one of the pendle witches, and has a ghostly white form that flits around it (this is from Devereux, project pennine)
Ariel Light forms are seen by those of us that live on the moors with a regularity bordering on the mundane
:)
 
A couple of years ago I was walking across Tower Bridge with Mrs Zygmunt and her dad. We came across one of the blokes who work on the bridge trying his best to get a huge (2 to 3 inches long) and angry, judging from the noise it was making, stag beetle to crawl into a shoebox. He said they live on the outside of the walkways (the horizontal bits at the top of the bridge), but because the bridge had just been painted, the fumes were making them dozy and fall off! This one had actually landed in the hair :eek!!!!: of a Belgian tourist, which I bet is something she wasn't expecting on her visit. Apparently they are African, and a colony of them has lived in the bridge for many years, presumably introduced via a ship's cargo (St Katharine's dock is right next door).
 
It's very like the cockroaches found in Britain, who are all originally tropical species, but have found their way here in ships cargos & now just thrive in warm & often centraly heated environments like hospitals & hotels.

It's for this same reason, that the minute red pharaoh ants are often found in hospitals.
 
I used to live in inner city Birmingham and once saw a large bird of prey in my garden. The odd thing was that it didn't have a ring or other identification tag because I could see it quite close up and was looking for one. I tried to look it up in a bird book but couldn't really match it to any of the pictures & don't know anything about birds. (Possibly a buzzard?). (It was the size of a large owl with a white breast, dark brown head & wings and a distinctive brown pattern on its legs, for anyone who knows these things.)

I saw in the local paper that some red kites had been released vaguely near where I was and wondered if this is what I had seen but they were all supposed to be ringed.

I know these birds are native to the UK, but in the middle of Birmingham, next to a main road? We hardly got any birds at all in the garden let alone a buzzard thing and why wasn't it ringed?

With hindsight I should have reported it to a bird organisation but it didn't occur to me at the time.
 
You may have seen reference to a bittern being sighted in London recently. There was also a report of them being seen near Mounts Bay in Cornwall in the last few weeks. This particularly interests me because I saw one in West Wales during a big freeze in the early 80s.

This thing was standing in the road in front of our car, and as I didn't recognize it I asked a bird-watching neighbour what it was. He got some books out and showed us some likely suspects, and we picked the bittern, not realising how rare it
had become. He was so impressed he made an official report of our sighting to some Bird body or other.

Nice to see them making a comeback now.
 
I live in South Essex and recently my father insists he saw what he thinks was a Vulture of some kind in the sky just across the road, he says it was being attacked and warned off by a host of other birds.

He knows a fair bit about birds so I'm pretty sure whatever it was, it wasn't a common English bird.

All the best,

Randall.
 
I wouldn't be at all surprised by a Buzard in Brum. I've seen one over Leeds, and they are extending their range at a phenomenal pace.

Birders/Twitchers keep logs of out of place birds, and from my glances at monthly lists in the birding press, there are far more than you'd expect, including some quite dramatic ones. Good place to check if you do sight something out of the ordinary. I presume there are websites as well
 
Saw a big black cat hurdle a fence in Faygate, W Sussex. But at that time everyone was seeing them, so nothing original there.

Also saw what I swear was a dead wallaby on the motorway near Loughborough. Didn't get to stop and dissect it, thanks to the whole motorway thing. But i'm convinced it was. BIg tail, the lot.
 
The dead wallaby sounds quite reasonable.

There was one killed on the A1 in Bedfordshire about four years ago. At the time there had been a lot of ABC sightings, the "powers that be" were saying: "Can't be an ABC, must have been the wallaby"!!!!

The general feeling locally was if a wallaby's out there, what else is there?
 
When I was about age ten or so, a friend and I saw what we thought was a werewolf. It was in the winter time and we were in a frozen over cranberry bog, in the town of Mashpee, Massachusetts, so it may have been in late 1979, or early 1980, if I'm not remembering incorrectly.

It was getting dark, it must have been about 3:30pm or so, but we were having too much fun, smashing ice where it was thin, sliding on it where it was thick. I was wearing boots with absolutely NO traction [cowboy boots, don't ask! I always used to wear them, what can I say, I'm a freak!] and I was getting the most distance on my slides, at the time it was great craik.

I can't really think of a good way to describe what a cranberry bog looks like to someone who hasn't been to one, but I think of them as a sort of New England version of the rice paddie. It's a system of irrigation ditches that will run for acres and acres, and connects in such a way that with the simple placing or removing of a few planks of wood, one could flood or drain an entire city block's worth of land. We were constantly messing around with the water system there, and the only thing that kept us out of trouble was the fact that the bog was being sold and reworked into what has now become the Quashnett Valley golf course, one of the largest on Cape Cod.

The roads that ran through this place were of hard packed dirt, and as they had also flooded with water the week before, they were like straight smooth tracks of flat ice. The only place to get traction was at the very edge of the road where the ridge of dirt that made up it's border dropped away to the bog, three feet down. Imagine multiple levels of ice, some hiding water another three foot deep, and some hidind solid ground.

Well, we were sliding our way back towards the general direction of home [the Mashpee United Church Village, for those of you with map programs!] when we heard a peculiar "coughing" sound.
We had both been laughing, and joking, and carrying on like young boys do, but we both froze when we heard that sound.
It wasn't loud, or especially malign or anything, just a simple cough.
Initially I thought to myself "Oh Lord, we're busted for sure!" as I though that it was an adult who had been watching us destroy everything we could possibly destroy.

When we turned around to face back into the bog, we were not expecting to see what we did, which was some kind of naked 'dog-faced' man, who was crouching on a pile of dirt just off into the wood to our right, scrutinizing us.
I felt a shock of horror that hit me so hard, I felt as though my fingertips had been blown off by the escaping adrenaline! My legs almost gave out, and I heard my friend Doug scream in a high pitched voice.

This was no man in a mask! It looked like a German Shepard, but with darker markings, and the hair covered almost it's whole body. It had some places on it's torso and legs where I could see that it had grayish colored skin, but it looked like a regular human body other than the color of the skin and the hair, regular enough to be able to also see that this 'it' was actually a 'he'! [Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this thing was set on "Go!" or anything, I just noticed because I was shocked that someone would be out in the cold, so naked!] It's eyes were very strange, they DID seem a bit fake, they were so black, and I got the impression of some kind of bug, or lobster eyes.

We were both so panicked that I still can't recall who started running first. What I do remember though, is how much like a nightmare it was for me, as I could get NO traction with my boots to run. It was like a dream where you know something bad is coming up behind you, and you are paralyzed, or moving at half-speed.

We DID get the hell out of there pretty fast, and it took us a while before we ever went back. I can still remember today, the sound that galvanized me into finally just digging my bootheels into the ice as if I were wearing crampons.
As I turned to run, I heard the thing sigh. First it sighed, and then it farted.
Somehow I had myself convinced that the fart was because it was launching itself at my back, you know, the way a bird shits before it takes off in flight? I couldn't remember seeing it's hands/paws, so I was sure I was going to feel something sawing at my spine any minute.

When we got out to the road [Old Barnstable Rd.] we looked back, and as I'm sure comes as no great shock to anyone here, we saw nothing. It was gone. [if it had ever really been]

We did end up going back to the bog, and the surrounding woods, quite a bit, as they lay on the path one had to take to get to any summer recreation areas, like John's Pond, where we would swim, or the nearby military base Camp Edwards/Otis AFB, where we went to pillage and destroy [we used to harrass the guards there!]

Area folklore trained us from our youth to fear the woods because "Granny Squannit would get us!" She was supposed to have a hairy assistant, so that is what we thought we saw. We only saw it a couple more times, and never close up, always far away on a hill at sunset, or once as a dark shape that was checking out our tree fort.
 
David said:
The general feeling locally was if a wallaby's out there, what else is there?
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One winter, about fifteen or so years ago, I saw one of the wallabies that belonged to a colony that had very tenuously established itself near to where I live. These animals were, I believe, the descendants of a private collection released onto the moors during the war. Sadly I don’t think there are any left. My dad describes himself and his father early in WW2 having to pull their pony and trap up short in order to let a bison cross the track in front of them. Another animal from the liberated menagerie apparently.

Right, promise not to laugh - I know the following isn’t on a par with werewolves and their ilk but it gave me pause for thought. Around ten years ago I was walking through Monsal Dale towards Monsal Head in the Derbyshire Peak District when I saw on the hillside to the west of the valley what I can only describe as the granddaddy of all rabbits. It sat in a group of seven or eight other rabbits and was I would estimate about five to six times their bodyweight. It was a lot darker in colour than the animals around it. I know there is a size and weight difference between bucks and does but this bugger was huge. And before anyone thinks the obvious I’m a country boy and know the difference between fully grown rabbits and their kittens - all the animals in the group were mature. The only thing I can think is that it was a domestic escapee of some large breed gone feral. Unless of course it was, ulp...a were-rabbit.

Stop sniggering you bastards - I was not pissed, stoned or otherwise incapacitated!
 
I once saw a huge hare, sitting upright on a hill near Epping Forest. Took me a moment to realise what it was. Massive, evil looking blighter.:devil:
 
Like wise Spook, don't laugh, but was your rabbit a wallaby?

I've seen them (wallaby's) at night in the moonlight, grazing below the 'Bison Hills' at Whipsnade Zoo, in Bedfordshire. And for all the world, thats what they looked like, i.e. a "big bugger" of a rabbit!!!!

Most uncanny, when you first see them!!!!!:eek!!!!:
 
Wasn't there an established colony of wallabys on Cannock Chase?
 
intaglio said:
Wasn't there an established colony of wallabys on Cannock Chase?
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There was certainly one in Derbyshire, but I think a recent bad winter was supposed to have reduced their population number to below what is considered sustainable.
 
I often cycle along the canal bank about 5miles from liverpool city centre, and the last time I saw a heron, a cormarant or shag, completely white ducks are fairly common, and so many swans they queue up to get in the water, and a red squirrel, the nearest reserve of red squirrels is formby about 7 miles away.
 
I've seen some strange fish that where not supposed to live in dutch rivers and some sea-mammals 100 km inland.

My son in law once encountered a very strange fish while fishing with nets on the North Sea, he and his brother became so scared of its wildness that they cut the nets and fled to the shore. They are big men and it's hard to imagine that they could be scared by anything. I asked them if it was a shark or some other big fish, but they told me they had never seen anything like this before.
 
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I know this was not an animal...hopefully! Once, when walking down the mountain I lived on as a child, I heard a tremendous crashing sound coming down through the trees about 30-50 yards away. I looked over, and what looked like a huge bowling ball fell out of the trees and hit the ground with a loud thump. You could hear this sucker breaking off limbs as it went. Needless to say, I got the hell out of there. I don't remember hearing any airplanes. Absolutely no clue.

No, I didn't go back later to see what it was. Huge round things crashing through the trees in the woods should be left alone!
 
I've seen a really big bird fly out from a forest! (It was scary at the time) :(

And once. . . my mum and i were in Wales and we saw a massive big, black dog on the other side of a brook, just sitting there almost trying to stare us out. We left to walk down the lane to the village and as we looked behind us, we saw it slowly following us. . . . It kept following us down this lane for about 5 minutes. Then as we approached the village we turned around and it had vanished!
Black dogs are a big part of British Folklore and often gaurd Rivers, and streams etc.

O.k so they're not really weird animals. Actually it's just a bird and a dog! O.k so i need to get out more. . . . .
 
lockhart - there's a black dog thread somewhere on these boards a few more details might fit in well there. At least i'd read them
 
weird animal sightings

The other day I was up in the scrubs specing for gold with my gold detector.In the middle of a dense stand of rainforest I received an interesting signal and so started to dig.The head I was using is able to pick up signals to 4 feet deep so I was prepared to dig deep.About 2 feet deep I came upon a worm but what a worm 3 to 4 feet long and as wide as your arm.I'd heard about the Gippsland worms which grow to an amazing size but didn't realize that a similar smaller species grew here.I asked the farmer across the road and he confirmed it wasn't a snake but a worm,and only grows in the red scrub soils that have high humic contents.:eek!!!!:
 
Re: weird animal sightings

wildman said:
The other day I was up in the scrubs specing for gold with my gold detector.In the middle of a dense stand of rainforest I received an interesting signal and so started to dig.The head I was using is able to pick up signals to 4 feet deep so I was prepared to dig deep.About 2 feet deep I came upon a worm but what a worm 3 to 4 feet long and as wide as your arm.I'd heard about the Gippsland worms which grow to an amazing size but didn't realize that a similar smaller species grew here.I asked the farmer across the road and he confirmed it wasn't a snake but a worm,and only grows in the red scrub soils that have high humic contents.:eek!!!!:
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Sod the worm, what about the gold?
 
weird animals

It was only a 2 gram piece,and at 1 gram a foot,sod the gold.
 
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