A member of the public has reported spotting what they believe to be a puma on the outskirts of Chester, at around 8:45pm on Friday 16th April.
Alan Standing was crossing Chester Canal while walking home from work, near the police station in Blacon, when he encountered the animal.
He told Puma Watch: “[I was] walking home from work over the canal bridge when I spotted a black, sleek, long-tailed animal coming out of the bushes alongside the canal.
“[It was] too big to be a dog [and was] heading upwards along the canal.
“[It was] too far away for a mobile phone picture, maybe [it was] looking for food.”
The location is 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.
The 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.
Big cat sightings are now so commonplace in Chester they have been immortalised in the ‘Lego Chester’ display within Chester Market. Just last week, 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.
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.