Trail cameras catch “holy grail” jaguar in Arizona
Photographer Jason Miller witnessed the “holy grail” of big cats, after capturing a jaguar on trail cameras in Arizona. Throughout December, Miller’s cameras caught various creatures including a bear and her cubs, peccaries, and a mountain lion.
The Arizona native who works as a landscaper described the footage as “stunning but routine” until his latest finding. Miller said he “gasped” after catching the elusive “holy grail” of big cats, a jaguar, roaming little more than six feet from the trail cameras.
It was late in the evening when the animal appeared, stopped to sniff at a mountain lion’s droppings, and opened its jaws, showing its powerful canines to the camera with the light reflecting from its eyes.
“That meant everything to me,” Miller said. “I’ve been running cameras for just over five years in southern Arizona and in the deserts hoping maybe one day I’d find a jaguar. It finally happened.”
The video showed the animal in the Huachuca Mountains near Tucson in Arizona, wildlife biologists confirmed with the state’s Game and Fish Department. They also concluded that the jaguar had not been previously photographed or filmed, making this a very rare find.
Mark Hart, the department’s public information officer said that it is only the eighth individual jaguar sighted in the wild in the US since the 1990s.
“On average historically, there are three to five jaguars in this state every 10 years, for the past 100 years,” Hart said. Among the last to make headlines was named El Jefe (meaning “the boss” in Spanish), last seen near Tucson in 2022. “There was a lot of press and attention for ‘El Jefe’ and concern when he went missing,” Hart said. El Jefe was first seen in 2011 and regularly by 2015 when it disappeared, Hart said.
Every documented Jaguar in the US has been male with the last female spotted in the 1940s.
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