Members of the public have reporting spotted a “massive cat like a panther” near Tŷ Mawr Country Park, prowling the short section of the River Dee between the Cefn Mawr viaduct and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.
At around 6:15 PM on Friday 16th April, Nicole Wynne was sitting on the banks of the river when her partner took the photo below, showing a creature Nicole describes as: “jet black and built differently to any kind of dog”.
Nicole told Puma Watch: “We were sitting down the river and while there we didn’t notice anyone go past. It was very quiet and no one was around.
“We took some pictures and last night looked back through them and noticed this thing that looks like some sort of animal, it’s jet black and it seems to be built differently to any kind of dog, no cows can get to that part of the river either.
“It’s not a tree or anything like that as on the other pictures (below) we took it’s not there. We didn’t notice anything at the time. We were about 100 yards away from it.
“A friend that lives nearby has also seen something down there which she described as a massive cat like a panther.”
Nicole provided another photo of the same location without the animal to show that, whatever the creature or object may be, there is no possibility it could be a tree, bush or another inanimate object.
Less than two hours after these photos were taken, an animal, then believed to be a puma, was seen jumping over a fence in Chirk McDonald’s car park, only around one mile away from this earlier sighting caught on camera.
The next day, an animal matching the same description was spotted a few miles along the A5 near Oswestry.
The location is near one the end of the Dee Valley, where big cat sightings are not uncommon. Upstream towards Llangollen, we’ve shared reports of a big cat spotted from a canal boat, at Valle Crucis Abbey and on the Horseshoe Pass towards Llandegla.
On the other side of this Cefn Mawr sighting, a “black animal” with a “long tail and orange eyes” was spotted in Wrexham just last month. Big cats have also been spotted in Wrexham County’s village of Penley.
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.