SIGHTING: Black puma spotted on Scottish coast near Edinburgh

A caravaner staying near North Berwick has reported an encounter with a large black cat they believe could be a puma. It happened at around 9:15pm on Monday 8th August.

Though we usually focus on North Wales, we often receive reports from further afield, usually when people ask Google for how to report sightings. We welcome these reports and have previously shared encounters from Scotland, Cornwall, Manchester and Leamington Spa. We also pass them on to relevant local groups where they exist.

Stewart told Puma Watch: “My partner, myself and my son were walking back from North Berwick town to the caravan site, we saw rabbits between the caravans, then suddenly what we initially thought was a black dog appeared.

“But then it turned and looked at us, and we realised it was a large black cat, between knee and hip height.

“When it seen us it sped up its pace into the nearby bushes.

“We looked for it other nights around the same time, but never seen it again. We also reported it to the caravan site.

“We have cats at home and immediately recognised the way it moved and its shape was definitely a cat.”

The encounter took place on Tantallon Caravan Park in North Berwick, around 20 miles east of Edinburgh on the Scottish coast.

It’s not the first time we’ve shared a report from beyond the wall. Last summer, a woman who requested anonymity after publication claimed to have repeatedly seen a “growling puma” in a Glasgow park. She said the animal had jumped over her son and that the park was unsafe.

And while conservationists talk of reintroducing wild lynx to Scotland, last week we shared a report of a lynx sat at the side of a road near Chester.

Big cats such as pumas are solitary with a hunting range of dozens of miles. In North Wales, 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. It’s likely similar patterns of movement exist across the rest of the UK, with big cat populations centred on remote locations like national parks.

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.

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.

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.

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 sightings should be reported via this form on our website.