My name is Wally Davies and I live at Parachilna, some hundreds of kiolmetres north of Port Augusta in South Australia, on the Western side of the Flinders Ranges.

The "Big Cat Phenomenon" of Outback Australia affected me in 1988 when I visited my brother's farm in Central Victoria and heard about a big female cat that had a cub hidden in the garden. My sister in law accidentally squirted the cub with water where it was hiding in a thicket, and it bolted out and ran down the paddock to hide in some old hollow gum trees.

That night mumma cat came looking for it and was greatly upset when she could not find it. She walked around the house roaring, and yowling, then headed off down the paddock towards the gum trees making a noise that my brother described as sounding like a moke poke with laryngitis. A moke poke, of course, is the tawny frog-mouth, an owl that says, “Moke Poke”.

The cat that was seen resembled a big, scrawny, long legged tabby tomcat and later I found large feline footprints in the dust around the farm that exceeded 75 mm across. From then on I was hooked.

After I returned to South Australia, I was talking to a professional kangaroo hunter and he told me that he had seen a black panther in the ***** Ranges.These ranges lie 100 km. or so to the West from where I live, so I reasoned that if there were big cats over there, there had to be cats in the Flinders Ranges next door. Such indeed proved to be the case and as I build on this Web Site I will tell about my discoveries, successes, failures and disappointments. However this web site will not be confined to the felines, big and small, but will also tell of my experiences with the marsupial predators, both big and small and the hairy bush men, both big and small

Here we see traces of a large felid's tracks which were left in the sand of the Outback desert a few months ago.

At left we see the outline of a felid-type print which was carved nearby this same area by prehistoric people perhaps 30,000 or more years ago.