A commuter has reported spotting a “black, fairly large animal” they believe could have been a puma while driving home from work along Sealand Road, near Chester.
The sighting occurred near the Texaco petrol station around 12:30am on the morning of Saturday 18th June. The animal ran into fields on the Blacon side of the road, next to Dandy’s Topsoil and relatively close to previous encounters on the Sealand Road retail parks, at Chester FC’s Deva Stadium, and in Blacon itself.
Davidson Drakes-Jarrett told Puma Watch: “I was driving home from Chester my place of work heading towards A494 when on Sealand Road about 30 metres after Texaco garage and 120 metres ahead of me a black fairly large animal ran across the road into the farm.
“It definitely wasn’t a fox and it ran across so quick I couldn’t really pick out any features or have time to catch a photo.
“All I could make out was its body that was fairly big and streamlined.”
Any further sightings can be reported to us via this form.
Chester has become a hotspot for big cat sightings, with multiple clusters occurring over the last year. This includes one occasion where an animal was caught on camera on Chester Meadows by a delivery driver.
Last year, we shared a report of another motorist spotting a suspected panther stalking sheep, just a few miles away near the M56’s Chester Services. Additionally, a lorry driver spotted a big cat crossing the same road behind Costco Chester.
Also last year and not far from the sighting reported today, someone spotted what could have been a puma near Blacon, at a location well under a mile from four other recent sightings. Just along the canal to the North, a large, black animal with a very long tail was spotted twice within a week, around the abandoned Old Oaks Golf Course and the Countess of Chester Country Park.
These sightings followed a 4ft-long cat “with a great big tail” being spotted twice in one night in fields bordering Blacon, behind Sealand Road Asda.
Prior to this, on the other side of the city centre, a member of the public reported an encounter with a “growing and snarling” creature in Huntington’s Caldy Valley Nature Park, while in December, a big cat was caught on camera prowling Chester Meadows.
Big cats have also been spotted across the Wirral.
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.
Recently, we shared reports of a big cat in Leamington Spa and at the Glastonbury Festival. 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 over the last year is 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.
