Four hill walkers have reported being “stared at for a couple of minutes” by a black animal they believe could be a puma, before the creature disappeared into the gorse bushes on Moel Hiraddug, near Dyserth.
Mrs Smith told Puma Watch: “It stood staring at us for a couple of minutes then it ran into the gorse. There were four of us, two couples in our 70’s hill walking.”
Their encounter took place earlier this week, at around 12:30pm on Monday 28th March.
While it’s the first sighting reported to us from Dyserth, two sets of pawprints have previously been found in the immediate area. One set, shown in the video below, was found in Dyserth itself while another was found less than a mile away near Meliden.
In addition to Mrs Smith’s sighting and the pawprints in the immediate area, there have been other sightings of big cats only a few miles either side of Dyserth.
Towards the coast, a “black panther with a long tail” was spotted on the golf course adjacent to the beach in Rhyl, back in September 2021. A few months earlier, in May, police were called after a “huge jet black cat” was spotted lurking in the bushes near Prestatyn train station. There have also been multiple sightings a few miles along the coast in the Talacre area – as well as near Abergele.
In the opposite direction, just a few miles further inland from Dyserth, big cats have been spotted at Rhuallt Hill and in St Asaph.
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.
Just last month, we shared a report of a big cat in Leamington Spa. 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.
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Moel Hiraddug image: © Copyright Colin Park and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence