ANGLERS Peter Jones and Nigel Meehan were after nothing more dangerous than a few fish - when they spotted a puma up a tree.

The pair got the fright of their lives when they went for a fishing trip to a lake at Oday Hill, between Abingdon and Drayton, on Friday evening.

Nigel, 28, of Gainsborough Gardens, Abingdon, said: "We were walking along beside the lake when we heard a noise but we couldn't see anything. I was cracking jokes, like 'This is like something out of a B movie - any minute now it's going to jump out and get us'.

"There was a tree overhanging the water and we could see something. We thought it was someone's teddy bear because we could see a head with two little round ears. Then it turned its head and licked its paw - it was like a large, black cat.

"We didn't hang around, we ran. Not the most manly thing to do but we didn't even speak to each other, we just ran back to the car and then said 'What was that'?" There were large paw prints by the lake on Sunday afternoon - and a lot of feathers where there had been a family of geese.

Nigel said: "We were laying bait up and down the lake and looking for these geese and there were all these feathers - they had obviously been lunch for something."

Peter, 26, of Luca Drive, Abingdon, said they thought the noise they had heard must have been the creature breathing. He estimated the animal was not as tall as a German Shepherd, but probably longer.

"It was hard to tell because it was lying on the tree branch - and we ran," he added.

Albert Honey, animal welfare officer for Thames Valley Police, said every sighting was logged and taken seriously.

But, he added, no-one had ever managed to take a picture of these animals and they did crop up across the county.

"I'm surprised at the number of sightings of these animals," he said. "If you believed all the reports it could be quite frightening because there are dozens of them."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.