Earlier today, we shared a report from Georgia, who spotted a big cat at the far end of the car park at McDonald’s near Chirk. The black animal, which she believes was a puma, jumped over a fence into a wooded area and undergrowth adjacent to the car park, at around 8PM on Friday 16th April.
Telling us of her encounter at the restaurant, which is on the A5’s Halton Roundabout junction with the A483, Georgia told us: “I’m sure my partner & I cant be the only ones who saw this.”
Within an hour of us sharing her report, Dan got in touch to report another sighting of what could be the same animal. At about 1:30PM on Saturday 17th April, the day after Georgia’s sighting at McDonald’s, he was travelling along the A5 crossing the disused Oswestry level crossing, when he spotted a black, 3ft-tall ‘huge cat’ along the railway line.
The location is just over two miles from the previous sighting at McDonald’s.
Dan told us: “After a family day out we were travelling back from Telford to North Wales.
“I was driving approaching the roundabout on the A5 towards Oswestry where the railway track crossed I glanced down the track and saw what I can only describe as a very large black animal was sat 100 yards down the track between the rails.
“In all honesty my first thought was that’s a huge cat. I would estimate its height sat down to be 3-3.5ft high.
“I didn’t actually say anything at the time to my wife because I thought she’d laugh and dismiss it.”
Dan’s description of the animal is consistent with what Georgia reported at McDonald’s. She said: “An extremely large cat, the size of a dog, jumped over a fence at the back of McDonald’s car park into the wooded area.”
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.
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.