From Crazywell I climbed past a restored medieval stone cross to the logan at the top of Black Tor, which forms a ledge of sorts. I thought this was a possibility as lynxes like to make their dens under ledges, but I found nothing save for the marbled shapes of crab’s lichen and a small circular hole in the ground, probably made by an adder. A few hundred yards on I encountered a sheep with a pronounced limp. Was this the first sign of the lynx? The keepers at Dartmoor Zoo had said that the lynx was unlikely to kill any livestock but this was not to say that the cat could not inflict a leg injury on a sheep. Upon review, I decided the evidence was inconclusive. I was almost back at my car and I had not found my lynx, but to be honest that was OK, as I hadn’t had any decisive plan of action for a scenario in which I did. I certainly wasn’t going to dob Flaviu in to the authorities and probably would have decided against taking him home. I already had four cats, which was more than enough. I tend to find that, with cats, neediness increases in a ratio directly in accordance with size. My smallest one was fairly aloof and got on with her own thing, but the biggest was constantly following me around, dribbling on my clothes, sitting on my chest and watching me sleep in a slightly unnerving way or asking my opinion on stuff that he really should have been confident enough not to need affirmation about.
Back at my house a browse through social media suggested that opinion on Flaviu was split into three main camps. A few people were concerned that Flaviu might head towards Plymouth and eat one of the city’s many schoolchildren. The Plymouth Herald ran a story about a pair of lovers who were due to have their wedding at the zoo in the near future and were worried that Flaviu might choose that moment to return, gatecrashing the festivities. Some people were keeping their fingers crossed Flaviu was soon rescued and returned to the zoo. Others – and I tended to side with this camp – were rooting for Flaviu to make it on his own and hoping his escape was an early step towards the rightful re-wilding of Dartmoor, which would hopefully soon also include the appearance of wolves and bears. The parts of the Norfolk and Suffolk countryside that I stomped around before I lived in Devon were similar to the South West in that they had lots of famous ghost animals roaming about, many of which were of a wild nature. But in Norfolk and Suffolk people rarely talked about reintroducing actual living wild animals to the countryside. There had been a re-flooded fen a mile up the road from my house but at no point did anyone discuss the logistics of introducing a moose or hippo into it. Here, however, people talk about that sort of stuff all the time.
‘I’m going to Ireland,’ a neighbour of mine in Devon announced earlier in the summer.
‘Ooh lovely,’ I said. ‘Why are you going there?’
‘I’m going to a wedding,’ she said. ‘I might bring back some pine martens too, and release them into the woods. If we had them here it could lead to a strong resurgence of red squirrels. I’m taking my van, so I’ll have plenty of room.’ She showed me a space in the back of her van beneath one of the seats which she’d cleared out, where the pine martens might be able to sleep in what for pine martens would be relative comfort on the long journey across the water, down through the convoluted roads of Wales and round the hook of the Bristol Channel back to the South West Peninsula.
One reason I was not more dejected about not locating the lynx on Dartmoor was that I’d already had a bumper week for spotting unlikely wildlife in my home county. Just a few days previously I had, for the first time in my life, had a close-up sighting of beavers swimming around in the wild. This occurred on the River Otter, about forty miles east of where I live.
Nobody knows exactly how the beavers first appeared on the Otter. The most likely theory is that they were captive beavers from a beaver farm, released by the owner of the captive beavers or someone loosely or not at all affiliated to the custodian of the captive beavers. Sightings of them by members of the public began in 2010. Not long afterwards, the beavers began to breed. The Conservative government then decided to have the beavers removed from the river, owing to the fact that it does not like the UK to be in any way a fun or diverse place. Fortunately, the Devon Wildlife Trust, with overwhelming support from conservationists, opposed this removal and – having tested the beavers for diseases and found them to be in rude health – managed to get a licence for the beavers to live on the river for five years and their effect on the environment to be monitored. There were now thought to be around twenty on the River Otter.
I did not travel to the river expecting to see wild beavers. Just to have
