ARIZONA, USA — >>Editor's note: The attached photo is from 2016 and not connected to the 2023 sightings.
There might be a new jaguar roaming southern Arizona, and activists say it was the removal of former Gov. Doug Ducey's shipping container wall that let the cat get here.
While we've played host to the famous big cats, El Jefe and Sombra, there's a chance that the latest sightings are a third jaguar checking out the state.
This male jaguar was spotted on motion-activated cameras operated by the Arizona Game and Fish Department in the Huachuca Mountains to the west of Sierra Vista. Unfortunately, the non-scientific cameras were only able to capture blurry images, and researchers were unable to identify the jaguar.
Jaguars are an incredible species that can roam across hundreds of miles during their adult lifespan. Native to Mexico and the American Southwest, they can range as far north as the Grand Canyon.
One of our jaguar visitors, El Jefe, was first recorded in the Whetstone mountains in 2011. He disappeared and was feared dead in 2015, but recently turned heads with a reappearance in Sonora, Mexico back in 2022. So... This latest sighting probably wasn't him.
What about Sombra? Sombra was another jaguar spotted in 2016 north of the Chiricahua Mountains, so there's a chance this could have been him.
"Jaguar spots, also called rosettes, they're actually sort of a pattern of spots are much like human fingerprints can be used to identify one individual from another," Russ McSpadden, a photographer with the Center for Biological Diversity explained. "Biologists will find a pattern that's easily recognizable, and name it."
For example, El Jefe has a rosette that looks like Pinocchio on his back hind quarter. Sadly, the latest photos are reportedly too blurry for such identification.
But whether or not this cat is Sombra, its presence here is due in part to a recent fiasco on the border.
Near the end of his term, Gov. Ducey stacked thousands of shipping containers on the U.S.-Mexico border to close perceived gaps. Instead, the stunt cost Arizona $2.1 million dollars in damages paid to the U.S. Forest Service and ended with the wall's removal.
But more than stopping people, activists were worried that these shipping containers blocked migratory wildlife. These containers were along the southern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains, McSpadden noted, which is a critical migratory corridor for jaguars.
He said that the jaguar being spotted here just months after the wall came down is no coincidence.
"We're always excited when there are new jaguar detections. But honestly, we're always anticipating it as well. The landscape in Arizona has always been part of the jaguar's native range. Arizona is their home," he said.
Since 1996, at least seven jaguars have been photographed by trail cameras in the U.S. AZGFD has not responded to a request for the new photos as of Friday.
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