Published: 10.19.2004

Automated cameras spot jaguars in Southern Arizona

Rare cats could be residents or Mexican visitors

By Mitch Tobin

ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Automated cameras have filmed at least two jaguars creeping across Southern Arizona since late August, offering fresh evidence that the endangered cats at least visit here from Mexico.

The jaguars' full bodies and unmistakable spotted coats are visible in all four of the nighttime shots, taken near the border, south of Tucson, in oak woodlands. It's still unclear if the secretive species is residing permanently in the United States.

Commonly associated with the tropics, jaguars were regularly shot by hunters in the American Southwest in the 20th century. Biologists say a colony of 70 to 100 jaguars persists about 135 miles south of Douglas.

The Arizona Daily Star has agreed to the Arizona Game and Fish Department's request not to reveal the location of the sightings because of poaching concerns.

Each jaguar has a unique pattern of "rosettes," so Game and Fish officials and other experts have concluded that one of the cats filmed in late September is the same animal photographed nearby in 2001 and 2003 by an automatic camera. Environmentalists said the four recent photos possibly show a third cat that may be a female.

The flurry in sightings doesn't necessarily mean jaguar activity is on the rise - it may just be because more motion- and heat-activated cameras have been installed recently, bringing the total number of devices to 30.

A stealthy jaguar is caught on candid camera outside Tucson. The location is being withheld to prevent poaching.

Still, activists used the photos to call for habitat protection for the increasingly busy borderland region. In a joint statement, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sky Island Alliance said the photos "clearly indicate there may be a small population of jaguars residing in Arizona."

"This is the most jaguars that have been seen at one time, in one area, since the early 20th century," said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity.

It's certain that at least one jaguar has been able to make a living in Southern Arizona since 2001, said Bill Van Pelt, head of the Game and Fish Department's non-game mammals program. But a true population would have yielded more photos, and there still is no evidence of female jaguars north of the border, he said.

The new photos were taken along suspected migration routes with cameras set up by Tucsonan Jack Childs and Emil McCain, a gradate student at Humboldt State University in Northern California.

Childs, a lion hunter, photographed a jaguar in 1996 in the Baboquivari Mountains, southwest of Three Points. Rancher and lion hunter Warner Glenn photographed another jaguar that same year in the Peloncillo Mountains, near the New Mexico border.

Childs said there is some ambiguity about the cat in one of the shots, since the cat was filmed at the end of the flash's range. The other photos suggest the two adult males aren't going hungry.

"They look like good, healthy, mature, prime animals," Childs said. "That environment down there is in pretty good shape. . . . I'd say it's a pretty healthy environment for large carnivores right in there."

Opportunistic and adaptive, jaguars have been recorded eating more than 85 species. In Arizona, they are thought to survive by ambushing deer and javelina. The name "jaguar" means "eater of us" and "beast that kills with one leap" in indigenous languages of Latin America, but the odds of someone being attacked today by the stealthy cats are considered minuscule.

A single camera captured two separate jaguars on Sept. 25 and Sept. 26. The cats are territorial, and the two males may have been so close because they were sniffing around for each other's scent, Van Pelt said.

"It's not unusual to see territorial types of animals, in a sense, testing boundaries," he said.

At least 60 jaguars were killed in Arizona and New Mexico in the 20th century, including two in the Rincon and Catalina mountains in 1902. A female jaguar was shot as far north as the Grand Canyon in 1932, but the last female recorded in Arizona was in 1963 in the White Mountains. Cubs haven't been documented since the first decade of the 20th century, according to David Brown and Carlos Lopez Gonzalez's "Borderland Jaguars" (University of Utah, 2001).

Jaguars, the Western Hemisphere's biggest cat, may travel up to 500 miles searching for food or a mate, but the size of their territory may be as small as 10 square miles.

Once found throughout nearly all of Latin America and parts of the American Southwest, jaguars are now considered imperiled across two-thirds of their historic range, according to a 2002 study in the journal Conservation Biology.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the jaguar as endangered in 1987 after a lawsuit from the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. The center and other environmental groups sued the federal government in 2003 to force it to map "critical habitat" and create a recovery plan for the jaguar. In a settlement last month, the government agreed to decide by July 3, 2006, on critical habitat - areas considered important to a species' recovery that may face added regulation.

Because jaguars spotted in Arizona are thought to have come north from Mexico, activists and scientists have worried that the creatures will be excluded from the United States with the Border Patrol's increasing presence and infrastructure.

Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or mtobin@azstarnet.com.

All content copyright © 1999-2004 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily Star and its wire services and suppliers and may not be republished without permission. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the expressed written consent of Arizona Daily Star or AzStarNet is prohibited.