A woman living in Conwy called police for help after she spotted a “black panther” sitting on her garden fence back in July.
North Wales Police recently revealed details of the incident to Puma Watch under the Freedom of Information Act.
The incident log reads: “Informant states she saw a black panther on her fence on Saturday.
“Incident happened on Saturday – can be closed and tagged for the Rural Crime Team.”
Last year, police investigated reports of a “black panther with a head the size of a dinner plate” near Chirk. More recently and much closer to Conwy, a “big black cat” spooked a Pentrefelin resident’s two domestic cats.
A “massive black cat” has also been spotted on the Little Orme this summer.
Big cats have recently been spotted a few miles away in Abergele while back in 2012 a black panther was reported to police in Llandudno.
In the wider Conwy County, Len claims both himself and his wife have seen ‘black panthers’ living in the area for the last 25 years. The Pandy Tudur resident said his most recent sighting was in 2019, when he saw to ‘pups’, which his wife also witnessed two weeks later. Big cats were also spotted near Llansannan and Cyffylliog earlier this year.
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.
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.
Images: North Wales Police car + bikes by Terry Kearney used under CC BY NC 2.0
Conwy Castle: Adrian Evans Photography used under CC BY-SA 4.0