Alien invasion

North Wales is full of aliens, but Stephen Gregory has one particular favourite…

An alien wakes me every morning. At about six o’clock, while the room is still dark, he pats me very gently on the nose.

I wake up and give him a few biscuits. He’s Smokey, our cat, a perfect little black panther we brought to North Wales. An alien, yes ... he was born under the kitchen sink in our house in Borneo, and he flew to Wales with us when I retired from teaching out there.

He touches me on the nose with the soft pads of his paw, as gentle as a kiss. Without even opening my eyes, I reach for a packet of biscuits I keep ready for him and tip a few onto the duvet. Smokey eats them, crunching with his fangs. He curls up next to me, and we both go to sleep again. He isn’t the only panther in Wales... but I’ll come back to that.

Meanwhile, he’s got me thinking about aliens. Not the extra-terrestrial kind that we’re familiar with in films and programmes about the paranormal, but the newcomers to foreign shores all over the world. As I relax in our living room in Caernarfon I marvel at the agility of a grey squirrel in the bare, wintry trees outside. I remember my schooldays in Colwyn Bay, when Mr Lewis would take us into the woods of Pwllycrochan for a nature walk, and all the squirrels we saw were red. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows, of course, that more recently the grey squirrel has come to the British Isles and displaced the native red... he’s bigger and bolder and he’s dominated the woodlands – a vigorously successful alien. And meanwhile the red squirrel has been protected by enthusiastic conservationists, so that, here in North Wales, famously in the south-eastern corner of Anglesey, he’s enjoying his own space and thriving again.

Over the centuries, other aliens have arrived on our shores. Our ubiquitous rabbits were introduced in Roman times. Not content with invading us and conquering us and bringing us their laws and language and customs, the Romans brought us rabbits and pheasants and potatoes – actually maybe not potatoes, I think that was somebody else, a bit later. But, whenever we think there’s nothing more marvellously British and traditional than a frosty field dotted with cuddly brown rabbits and gloriously iridescent pheasants, we should remember that they’re relative newcomers.

Aliens, like the mink which have escaped from mink farms in parts of England... fierce, cold-blooded little killers, like our native weasels and stoats, now successfully established as predators in our countryside. Perfectly welcome, once they’ve struck a balance with our native species... although I’m not sure if the voles and shrews and fledgling birds of East Anglia have happily embraced the invasion of mink into their eco-system. From the galumphing great reindeer in the Cairngorms of Scotland to the tiny edible dormouse dozing in the hedgerows of Dorset, there are quite a few newcomers – some people reckon they’re ‘invasive’, but in the long term they seem to be rubbing along quite comfortably.

Me, after years of living along the estuary just south of Caernarfon in the 1980s and 1990s, recently I’ve been excited to see the white egrets fishing in the shallows. Twenty years ago, walking the shoreline with my binoculars every day, I never saw an egret. I’d always loved the heron, stooped and grey like an old professor or gliding as effortlessly as an eagle... and one day I was thrilled to see a delicate white egret fishing alongside him. I’ve seen them in many sunny, hot countries – now I feel an extra shiver of joy to see egrets more and more often on the silvery-grey shores of the Menai Strait.

Nothing wrong with being an alien, although they’re portrayed as something horrific in films. I was an alien myself in Sudan, a young and feckless volunteer teacher in my 20’s, and one night I went to an open-air cinema on the outskirts of Khartoum, to see the original Alien movie. A huge jet was roaring overhead and coming in to land at the international airport, so close you could see the rivets on its underbelly ¬–just as the alien monster was erupting from John Hurt’s chest.

So I’ve been a ‘gringo’ in South America, an ‘orang puteh’ (literally a ‘white man’) in Borneo, a ‘limey’ in USA, a ‘farang’ in Thailand... in France I’m a ‘biftek’, nicknamed after an Englishman’s favourite beefsteak. And although I’ve lived in

Wales most of my life, including ten years of my schooldays, I was born in Derby so I’ll always be ‘saesneg’.

What about my favourite little alien, a perfectly miniature black panther called Smokey who wakes me with a kiss every morning? Yes, I’m coming back to the panthers. In the last few years since 2020 there have been more than 40 sightings of black panthers and pumas in North Wales. Down the Llŷn Peninsula, beyond Trefor and onwards towards the well-heeled seaside towns of Aberdaron and Abersoch, people have had unnerving encounters with big cats. Most of the reports describe black or tawny creatures a good deal bigger than a Labrador, swift and sleek with a long black tail – unmistakably feline, disturbingly big. In Snowdonia too, detailed descriptions of panthers and evidence of the sheep they’ve killed as prey. Even in the wooded hillsides above Colwyn Bay, people have seen big cats.

The so-called experts have theorised that these animals were released into North Wales from private collections or zoos and they predate successfully on the abundant livestock. It’s even been suggested that they’ve thrived during the lockdowns of the pandemic, when there were fewer hikers and dogwalkers out and about. What an extraordinary ‘unexpected consequence’ of Covid! Imagine the press conference from No. 10... Matt Hancock, before he snuck away to the jungle and ‘I’m a Celebrity’, warning the public that another life threatening side-effect of coronavirus may be the risk of confronting a puma on the outskirts of Pwllheli or Rhos-on-Sea.

Grey squirrels, egrets, black panthers... invasive, or rubbing along quite comfortably? A gentle pat on the nose in the morning and I’m back to sleep again, dreaming about aliens... n refined elegance of our KODO design language woven into the toughness of an SUV Carefully curated materials like real maple wood, high-quality leather, Japanese textiles and chrome details are combined in perfect harmony in a car completely designed around its driver If this is how we craft the details,

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.

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