sweasel.com

Small pig? http://is.gd/VwMuxQ

It’s a cat – a fat and hairy cat. Hence the legs look short. It moves like a cat, it’s about the right shape and size.

I suspect you’re right. A big fat sucker. We live in a pretty sparsely populated place, though, and this guy is news to us.

The ears look cat-like as well. So YOU TOO have fat cats over there in East Pondia?

Oh, man: this is so cool. Stick with it until he gets the sculptures to walk by themselves using wind power.

Got it from a Sissy Willis tweet.

Even with so little to see, the gait is definitely cat. I suppose it’s its garden gait . . .

<squints at David Bain>

Maybe a cat as noted above but I tend to think it is a groundhog…..do you have those over there??

I think it’s a young badger.

I’ve never heard of a groundhog in the wild in Britain.

Looks like a hairy dark cat to me, too.

Doesn’t seem to have badger markings, which should be lighter than the visible background…

I think it was a cat, but I hope you catch a badger on camera one day. These are nice animals, though farmers think they spread TB to cattle (and might be right). I met one once on the way home from the pub. We regarded each other amiably for a minute, then it grunted and wandered away. Don’t mess with a badger, though. Their forelegs are built for digging and can kill a dog.

In folklore, they’re wise animals (as in The Wind in the Willows). When I was a kid, my mother would take a break from dissecting owl pellets in the kitchen to go out on badger watches.

A fluffy and tailless cat? I’m not seeing a tail on that critter.

If you lived here in Oz, my first guess would be wombat, but their stride isn’t as long as on that critter.

Peter Risdon – thank you for the kind words 🙂

It took us many, many nights of spying but we did finally catch one of my fambly on the wildlife cam a few months ago.

Of course, it’s a slightly worrying development as chicken houses present no obstacle to a hungry badger and, as for a vegetable garden – Yippee! Worms!

Which reminds me….

Oh, and yes – it’s a cat, I’m sure. If my relatives were dropping by they’d have let me know. Someone has to buy the beer, after all…

Definitely not a badger, too dark as mentioned, and also badgers are built very low to the ground.

Years ago before the miracle of lasik, I was bowhunting antelope in northeastern Colorado and happened to have my glasses off. I looked down the small hillside I was sitting on and saw a blurry image of what appeared to be a giant mutant cockroach running toward me at impressive speed. When I managed to fumble my glasses on I saw it was a badger, being chased by another, very unhappy badger. Luckily the chaser caught up to the chasee before they reached me, and they engaged in a brief tussle before the first one ran off and the other returned triumphantly to his burrow. Neither of them at any point seemed to take any notice of me, for which I was quite grateful. The impression of flatness and speed as they were running really stuck with me.

Stoatie, does anyone in your area own a munchkin cat? that pic really resembles one of that breed…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kgqF8BFZoU

Feral Hog, maybe Siberian boar….young one.

Watch out, as Siberian boars have been introduced as game critters here and are interbreeding with wild hogs. Some kid shot a 500lb. critter a couple years ago.

The earliest that boars breed in the UK seems to be February, so a piglet would probably be smaller than that, and the sow would be close by and probably would have been caught on camera. I’d say fat, fluffy cat, or a badger (the low quality of the image and/or dirt on the animal could explain the apparent lack of white markings).

jic,
Thanks for the info.

The relationship of grass size and height seemed to me to show a critter larger than cat size….but hell, WTF do I know….buried in this fookin’sub-zero cold!!!

I need more anti-freeze, in the form of 25 year old Laphroaig!

What Fun! A wildlife cam! I vote for fat cat, too.

I have $5 bucks on a chunky munchkin cat…

I would call it Rodger.

Sven, have you cracked a bottle of Stranahans Colorado Whiskey? I have a bottle that I’m saving for my next party, but mostly I stock Scotch and Irish varieties…

Frit – When I was a much younger bubble-blower, one of my family’s cats, Kitty-coon, had a breach kitten that she was having trouble getting out the ol slip and slide. She got impatient and grabbed the tail (the only part that was sticking out) and gave a good YANK! Off came most of the tail, and shortly thereafter, down the chute came the kitten.

We named him STUBBINS, and he was one of the funniest kittehs my family ever had. ALWAYS into something…….

Some years ago, on a wild urge I bought a night scope. Nothing too exotic, Gen II+. The big reason was that sometimes at night one of the dogs will get up, go to the window, peer down (master bedroom’s on the second floor) and growl. So I wanted to catch a glimpse of whatever it was.

Plenty of deer up there, but my dogs never growl at them. But we do have bear, bobcat, and cougar. The first two I have spotted, the third never although I sometimes find cougar scat or tracks while hiking, and I’d bet money the cougars have seen me (no, I’m not talking Demi Moore).

I even at time ponder building a tree platform to lay on in a sleeping bag, watching for nocturnal prowlers. How well do cougars climb trees?

Better check to see where FLOTUS was last night…

There are cougars in our area. They’re very good at climbing, but their specialty is leaping–vertically and horizontally. Attacks against people are so rare, if you took an air horn and bear spray with you to your platform, you’d be safe.

Chupacabra

No dancing stoats, but I did get cussed at by a weasel once.

No, really.

I interrupted one in the process of dragging a ground squirrel out of it’s hole. The squirrel was putting up a fight, and the noise is what caught my attention.

All I could see was a furry, squirming mass making strange noises, so I moved closer. Suddenly, one or both noticed me and sort of sprang apart, staring at me. The squirrel recovered first and disappeared down the hole, the weasel snapping at it’s tail.

It looked down the hole where it’s lunch (presumably) had vanished, gave me a dirty look and said something I feel pretty sure was not complimentary before running off.

Your rare nocturnal sighting was a Womble, wombling underground, wonbling overground, wombling free, and making good use of the things that he found. Bit out of his mormal patch of SW19/20, but maybe on a field trip. Might have found some bounty in your trash heap. I bet if you’d caught him he;d have sounded just like dear old Bernard Cribbins.

A recent news story on a raccoon spotted in a (I think) Kent garden caught my eye. The guy had still images, it was definitely a raccoon and the local wildlife groups reckoned it was a pet that had escaped, or been abandoned.

But I can’t think of anything in the pet trade that fits that image. Very, very fat cat doesn’t quite do it either, but I’m currently viewing this on my phone. Will look it up later on and see if the picture quality is better on a desktop.

I’ve just checked the chip from last night. Our beast hasn’t returned yet.

I’m still guessing cat. In the middle image, there’s a pretty distinct cat-like ear. And British cats are much more burly and mush-faced than the cats I’m accustomed to (think Happy Cat from Cheezburger).

It sure is a coon-like bastard, though.

Scubafreak,
Stranahans ….YES! good and smokey.

It’s obviously an english pygmy hippo. sheesh

I’m voting “Cat”….
even though the “english pygmy hippo” guess is intriguing..

Armadillo, perhaps? That goddamned Jeff Goldstein has been eating leftovers off my spoil heap again!

Hmm, yes, I’m going to have to go with cat but my oh my, that’s one hugely fat cat!

Or perhaps, the little known Furry Pigmy Hippo!

Marmot

Spongmonkey

Scubafreak: I will always love bob-tailed or tail-less cats. My first cat had some Japanese bobtail in her, and was born with a tail that never got longer than 4″. My third cat had Manx in him, and his tail never got longer than 1″ long! Both cats were awesome owners.

Frit: Yep, i miss little Stubbins, he was a GREAT cat.

Always exploring, always getting into and out of trouble. LOTS of spirit….

It looks like there is a round thing behind the hips on one of the pictures which is either a short tail or he is lashing his tail side to side so you are seeing the tail curling forward on itself.

I have a rather stout bodied long hair cat who also tends to roll his tail into a spiral when not walking so that it looks like a ladies bun rather than a long tail.

You should try setting the controls to take a single pic instead of a series of pictures in quick succession. From my experience at work, quite a few game cams have a tendency to give you fuzzy pictures if they’re set to take multiple pics in rapid succession, such as the ones featured up above.

That being said, from all of the night-time pics that I’ve looked at over the years, my semi-professional opinion would be that it’s a well-fed porker.

As an additional means of nailing down the ID of anything you might capture on camera in the future, you should set up a meter stick in front of the camera to give yourself (and us) a reference scale.

Looks like a reverse albino snipe……

;o)

I also guessed pig, maybe a pot-belly that escaped from pet-hood. Pigs are quite the survivors.

I’m with the others with saying that, be a piggy.

Me and M’s elder also wish to say that it might also be a feral piglet?

Is this creature creepy and weird or what? I have to admit, this is surely not a cute animal.

That’s a fat cat. Quite likely pregnant.

The mystery creature is a badger. The very first couple frames distinctly shows the white stripe down the face. Badger, plain and simple

Your mystery creature is a badger, plain and simple. The first couple frames distinctly display a white stripee down the animal’s face… Badger. Ya need to watch more animal planet.