Rarely seen jaguar reported in 2016 shows up again on camera in southeast Arizona

A rare jaguar sighting was recorded by trail cameras in the southern Arizona mountains earlier this month.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department/Tucson shared photos on Facebook on Thursday, confirming it to be the reappearance of a jaguar that has appeared intermittently over the past 5 years.

An equally rare ocelot also showed up recently on trail cameras, but not in the same place, the state said.

The jaguar was photographed Jan. 6 in the Dos Cabezas/Chiricahua Mountains, in the southeast corner of Arizona, officials said. “This is the same individual photographed in this area since November 2016,” the department said.

Only seven male jaguars have been documented in the U.S. since 1996, “all in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports.

While the big cats were once more prominent in the area, “by 1990, jaguars were thought to have been eliminated from the United States,” Arizona Game & Fish reports.

“That changed in 1996 when two different male jaguars were photographed in southwestern New Mexico and Arizona. Today, the northern-most known population of jaguars is centered about 140 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Sonora. Any jaguars that occur in the AZ-NM/Mexico borderlands almost certainly belong to that population.”

The Associated Press reported in 2018 that a well-documented Arizona jaguar known as “El Jefe” (Spanish for “the boss’) was believed to have been killed after straying into Mexico. It had been seen multiple times on cameras in Arizona’s Whetstone Mountains since 2011, the AP said.

Jaguars are the biggest species of wild cat the Western Hemisphere, growing to 6 feet in length and about 250 pounds, according to the San Diego Zoo.

“Jaguars stalk and ambush their ground-dwelling prey at night, instead of chasing prey,” according to the zoo. “Their large jaw muscles allow them to kill their prey by piercing the skull with their sharp teeth.”

The ocelot seen on trail cameras was photographed Jan. 14 in the Huachuca Mountains near the Mexico border, and experts say it is “the same individual photographed in this area since May 2012.”

“Ocelots are medium-sized cats native to tropical and subtropical regions of North to South America,” Conservation CATalyst reports.

“Sonoran ocelots do occur in Arizona, and thus represent the northernmost subspecies of ocelot. ... Since 2009, five individual ocelots have been verified in Arizona,” according to the organization’s site.

This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 6:53 AM with the headline "Rarely seen jaguar reported in 2016 shows up again on camera in southeast Arizona."