A man wild camping in a Wirral park last year says he spotted a “black panther with a really long tail”, which had come within 15 feet of him while he was looking down and urinating.
The encounter took place in Port Sunlight River Park at 1:30 PM on Thursday 16th September 2021.
At the time, John told Puma Watch: “I went to check out a spot I’ve been wild camping in lately. It’s really out the way through thick bushes and woodlands.
“I was there about 10 minutes, had a quick wee, then as I looked up there was what I thought was a dog for a second in an opening.
“Then I realised it was a cat. It was a little bit shorter than a labrador, longer body and a really long tail.
“We both stood about 15 foot from each other for about 10 to 20 seconds then it walked off into the trees.
“By the time I got my phone out it was gone.”
John’s sighting follows countless others around the Wirral, including several in the last year. Just a few weeks before John’s sighting, Andy spotted what he called “the biggest black cat I have ever seen” in fields near Neston.
A day prior to Andy’s sighting, an animal matching the same description was spotted dashing across the slip roads from Moreton Road to the Upton Bypass roundabout. Another witness reported the same animal on Heswall High Street the day before.
We also shared reports of a large black cat seen limping down Kestrel Road at 2:30 am on 15th August and of an animal matching the same description being spotted on Whitfield Common on 1st September.
Big cats have also been spotted in Ellesmere Port’s Whitby Park and behind the nearby Costco store this year. A few miles away, Chester has become a big cat hotspot in its own right. This includes one occasion where an animal was caught on camera on Chester Meadows by a delivery driver.
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.
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.”
Official Puma Watch North Wales mugs are now available from our store
Five assorted FREE Puma Watch stickers with every order
Photo © Michael C (cc-by-sa/2.0)