A motorist has reported a “brown and tawny” animal they believe could have been a puma “bolting out across the road” from trees in the middle of the Vicars Cross A55 roundabout, at around 6:45 AM on Sunday morning.
Shelley was approaching Chester having travelled from Nantwich to drop her son off at work when she encountered the creature, which was seen to be “bigger than a fox” but “definitely not a fox or a dog.”
She told Puma Watch: “I was driving my son to work in Chester from the direction of Nantwich.
“I was at Vicars Cross Island with the A55 and a large reddish animal, the size of a Labrador, bolted from out of the trees on the island and across the road in front of me.
“It was bigger than a fox and had long powerful legs. It wasn’t a dog or a fox.”
Last week, we shared a report of another motorist spotting a suspected panther stalking sheep, just a few miles away near the M56’s Chester Services. Back in April, a lorry driver spotted a big cat crossing the same road behind Costco Chester.
Closer to Vicars Cross, a big cat was spotted on residential streets near Chester Zoo back in February. This sighting occurred in the dead of night, around 2:30 AM, with the Zoo quickly confirming the cat reportedly prowling suburbia “is not from Chester Zoo”.
Chester has become a hotspot for big cat sightings, and earlier this year there was a succession of sightings in the Western half of the city. On Friday 16th April, 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.
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.
Image: Google
Puma photo Luis Miguel Bugallo Sanchez (cc-by-sa/3.0)