A member of the public has reported an encounter with a big cat which took place near St Asaph earlier this month.
Stephanie spotted the animal early on the morning of Friday 4th June, at around 8:30 AM.
Reporting the sighting via our website, she told Puma Watch: “In the distance I could see a large black cat figure jumping around in the long grass, running up and down in between the trees.”
Stephanie told us she believes the animal could have been a puma.
While this is the first reported sighting in St Asaph, a suspected puma was spotted just a few miles away in January, at the bottom of Rhuallt Hill.
Footprints were also found in Meliden over winter, with many other nearby sightings featured on our interactive map.
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.
St Asaph Cathedral image: Cadw, CC BY-SA 3.0