SIGHTING: Dad leaves BBQ on Pwllheli beach when ‘puma’ appears

A man has reported that his 9-year-old son and himself both saw a brown or tawny puma while setting up a barbeque on the beach at Pwllheli. It comes just weeks after a group of fishermen at the same beach spotted an animal matching the same description.

Their encounter took place near Gimblet Rock at around 7 PM on Thursday 12th May. The dad was forced to make noises to scare the animal away, before immediately leaving the beach in such a hurry they had to leave their barbeque behind.

Jimmy Butler told Puma Watch: “Me and my son who is 9 were about to light a small bbq and stay for a few hours stargazing. My lad grabbed me and said ‘what is that? is it a dog?’

“When I looked I first thought ‘yeah’ but quickly realised this weren’t the case. I panicked and made a bit of noise to which the cat quickly disappeared.

“We left straight away. Apologies for leaving the bbq on the beach but was no way I was hanging around.

“We got back to the car and there was a local about to go fishing and I told him what happened and he said he’d heard of 4 or 5 sightings of the same description in the last few weeks.

“A very surreal experience, I didn’t think they were even in this country!”

The previous encounter on this beach occurred around the same time, at around 8 PM one Friday evening. After we shared the report of fishermen spotting a “brown or tawny puma” at one end of the beach on Gimblet Rock, the sighting was first made headlines in The North Wales Chronicle. It was then reported by other publications including the Daily Post, The Sun and ITV News.

Then, a member of the public contacted the Daily Post with images of a decimated animal carcass found on the same beach, thought to be that of a seal. Locals say it’s likely to have been left there by a big cat, adding that there have been multiple encounters in this area over the years.

Any further sightings can be reported to us via this form.

The recent Pwllheli sightings are the first reported to us from the Llyn Peninsula, though we’ve had multiple reports of pumas in sand dunes from elsewhere in North Wales. Most recently, a black panther was spotted hunting for rabbits and birds in dunes at Prestatyn beach. In September 2021, an animal matching the same description was spotted on the golf course adjacent to the beach in Rhyl.

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 during the pandemic are 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.