An HGV driver has reported spotting a “large cat” crossing the M56 entry slip road behind the Chester Costco store, near Ellesmere Port.
The encounter took place in the dead of night at around 2 AM on Monday 5th April.
Dom was joining the motorway from the roundabout when the “slim, speckled brown” animal darted out from the back of Costco, across the road ahead of him into the “wasteland” within the road junction.
He told Puma Watch: “I was joining the M56 Eastbound from the slip road off the A494 next to the VOSA checkpoint.
“I was driving my artic lorry and as I left the roundabout to join the slip road a large cat crossed the slip road left to right, from the back of Costco towards the wasteland in the centre of the motorway junction.
“The cat looked young, it was speckled brown in colour, about the height of a fox, slim-bodied but with very large legs and paws and a long bushy tail.”
It comes after a series of sightings in Chester, Ellesmere Port and Frodsham. A few weeks earlier, a big cat was caught on camera in Frodsham, then another sighting occurred on the outskirts of the town.
The sightings follow others nearby in Ellesmere Port, at Ince Marshes and Whitby Park.
In Chester, on Friday 16th April, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Costco photo © John Firth (cc-by-sa/2.0)