Two members of the public have reported spotting big cats in Cheshire this month, at Bickerton Hill and at Bunbury. The animals are believed to be black pumas on both occasions.
Around 9am on Tuesday July 12th, April spotted a small big cat on a field in the middle of Bunbury village, behind some houses. She took the photo above which can be viewed full size here.
Then at around 11am on Sunday July 17th, Lee reported seeing an animal matching the same description at the National Trust’s Bickerton Hill car park. He told us: “As we were driving along the track to the car park the animal crossed the track in front of us.”
The sightings come just a couple of weeks since a commuter spotted a “black, fairly large animal” they believe could have been a puma dashing across Sealand Road near Chester in the dead of night.
Any further sightings can be reported to us via this form.
Chester has become a hotspot for big cat sightings, with multiple clusters occurring over the last year. This includes one occasion where an animal was caught on camera on Chester Meadows by a delivery driver.
Last year, we shared a report of another motorist spotting a suspected panther stalking sheep, just a few miles away near the M56’s Chester Services. Additionally, a lorry driver spotted a big cat crossing the same road behind Costco Chester.
Also last year, someone spotted what could have been a puma near Blacon, at a location well under a mile from four other recent sightings. Just along the canal to the North, a large, black animal with a very long tail was spotted twice within a week, around the abandoned Old Oaks Golf Course and the Countess of Chester Country Park.
These sightings followed a 4ft-long cat “with a great big tail” being spotted twice in one night in fields bordering Blacon, behind Sealand Road Asda.
Prior to this, on the other side of the city centre, a member of the public reported an encounter with a “growing and snarling” creature in Huntington’s Caldy Valley Nature Park, while in December, a big cat was caught on camera prowling Chester Meadows.
Big cats have also been spotted across the Wirral.
Big cats such as pumas are solitary with a hunting range of dozens of miles. They’re mostly spotted in Snowdonia and the Clwydian hills but reports of sightings in urban locations some distance from these areas are becoming more frequent.
Recently, we shared reports of a big cat in Leamington Spa and at the Glastonbury Festival. While we focus on North Wales and the surrounding areas, we often receive reports from further afield and have shared sightings from as far out as Scotland and Cornwall.
As seen with Llandundo’s now-famous goats, who have taken to roaming the town’s deserted streets during the coronavirus lockdowns, it’s likely that the reduced levels of human activity over the last year is encouraging big cats to roam further from the hills into more populated areas.
When big cats were banned as pets in the 1970s, it was legal to release them into the countryside to avoid expensive rehoming costs. Owners from across the UK travelled to areas like Wales to release their cats in the remote environment, where small but significant populations have thrived ever since.
Earlier this year, the Welsh Government responded to the recent spate of sightings and confirmed the steps they take to investigate any reported to them, including taking casts of paw prints.
A visitor to a Snowdonia animal rescue centre back in 1994 recently claimed he was introduced to four puma kittens. He said: “I strongly suspect that these were released into the wild as they had no paperwork and no money to feed or house them.
“They certainly weren’t there six months later.”
Any further sightings can be reported to us via this form.
Can you help Puma Watch manage its growth?
In autumn 2020, we started Puma Watch North Wales to raise awareness of big cat sightings in the local area. Since then, the project has gone from strength to strength and we now receive reports almost daily from the entire United Kingdom.
Unfortunately, we can’t keep up with the number of reports received, and currently have a backlog of over 100 sightings which we need to add to our database and map and share with the wider public.
Run on a voluntary basis, we’ve never made a profit from this project. The small amount of money raised from merchandise sales and ‘Google Adsense’ adverts comes to under £30/month and is always used to fund giveaways of stickers and badges etc to continue to raise awareness. We cover the hosting costs from our own pocket and will continue to do so.
We’ve previously refused to accept donations from the public but now feel this is the only way for Puma Watch to continue to grow.
Objectives:
- Pay a web developer to streamline our reporting system, so we can continue to share reports in a timely manner without a backlog building up. At present, everything is done manually, which takes us around 30 minutes for each sighting to create a blog post with images and add the information to our map and database. This means our current backlog would take over 60 hours of work to process, meaning we’re only able to share a small selection of reports received at present. We’d still manually approve or decline submissions before they go public to avoid pranks.
- Fund the distribution of stickers and leaflets to those who submit sighting reports and other interested parties. Our ‘big cat spotted in this area, please report any sightings‘ warning stickers are an incredibly useful tool and placing them in areas where big cats have recently been spotted helps us keep track of these animals by encouraging members of the public to report what they have seen.
- Fund an advertising campaign in areas of interest. Using digital advertisement boards at tourism hotspots like Snowdonia car parks and on public transport. This helps raise awareness among visitors to the area and ensures they know how to report any sightings.