A member of the public has reported seeing a brown lynx sat at the side of the A550 Welsh Road at its junction with Ledsham Hall Lane, between Little Sutton and the A540 traffic lights at Two Mills.
The encounter took place around 12:30pm on Sunday 21st August.
Izzy told Puma Watch: “I was a passenger in a car and as we turned onto the Welsh Road I saw the big cat sat in the road against the bushes.
“I held my view for about 5 seconds and the animal looked just a bit bigger than a Dalmatian.
“It was brown with hints of black and pointy ears. It was sat about 15 meters away from any cars.”
The location is only a few miles from previous sightings on the Wirral and in Ellesmere Port.
Nearby 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 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.
