Seeing a jaguar is rare in Arizona. Here's where the cats have been spotted
Jaguars are fascinating animals, and their presence has become more widely known in Arizona over the past few years.
With beautiful coats, spotted fur and impressive hunting abilities, these large cats stand out among some of the most rare in the United States.
In fact, Arizona is one of only three states in the entire country with a jaguar population — New Mexico and Texas being the others.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated hundreds of thousands of acres of critical protected habitat across Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. Critical habitats are areas where the group can specially manage or protect endangered and threatened species.
Here are the times there have been jaguar sightings over the past few years in Arizona.
Jaguar spotted in Arizona in December 2023
On Dec. 20, 2023, Jason Miller’s trail camera in the Huachuca Mountains detected motion at 8:27 p.m. He was shocked to discover a jaguar at the bottom of the frame.
It was the eighth jaguar photographed in the country since 1996.
Male jaguar seen twice in 2023 spotting
A male jaguar was captured twice between March and May 2023 by trail cameras operated by Customs and Border Protection, according to observations in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's database.
The motion-activated cameras, which are not used for scientific purposes, went off somewhere in the Huachuca mountain range, west of Sierra Vista.
Return of 'El Jefe' in 2022
A celebrated jaguar that roamed southern Arizona’s mountains for several years before disappearing in 2015 turned up more than 100 miles south in Mexico, conservation biologists said in August 2022.
The Mexican nonprofit group PROFAUNA said that the big cat, known as "El Jefe," had been photographed in an undisclosed mountain location of central Sonora as part of the Borderlands Linkages Initiative.
El Jefe, or “The Boss,” was named by Tucson middle schoolers. The jaguar was photographed numerous times in the mountains south of Tucson at a time when he was the only confirmed jaguar roaming wild in the United States.
Jaguar and ocelot sightings in 2021
Two of the desert's rarest animals, a jaguar and an ocelot, showed up on trail cameras in the rugged southern Arizona mountains in February 2021.
The jaguar was spotted on Jan. 6 in the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains near the U.S.-Mexico border. On Jan. 14, the ocelot was photographed less than 100 miles west in the Huachuca Mountains.
The male jaguar is the only one of its kind known to be in the U.S. It was first photographed in 2016 and has been observed on 45 separate occasions, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
The male ocelot, the only known one in Arizona, has been observed 94 times since 2012.
Are jaguars endangered?
No, jaguars are not currently endangered.
But they are near threatened, which means they are likely to become endangered in the near future, according to the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The WWF estimates jaguars have lost roughly 50% of their historic range.
In May, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed 64,797 acres of the jaguar critical habitat designation in southern Arizona in compliance with a court ruling vacating portions of the designation.
The remaining critical habitat acreage is approximately 640,124 acres in Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
Their habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented, meaning patches of habitat are decreasing in size and becoming increasingly isolated and less connected, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Lands once ruled by jaguars are being destroyed by logging, large-scale agriculture, ranchland and urban areas.
Habitat fragmentation makes it incredibly difficult for these felines to hunt and mate, which poses a major threat to their population numbers and survival.
Reach the reporter at zbradshaw@gannett.com or on X at @ZachBradshaw14.