The only known wild jaguar in the United States is seen roaming around a creek and other parts of a mountain range just south of Tucson in the first publicly released video of the giant cat.
“El Jefe” — Spanish for “the boss” — has been living in the Santa Rita Mountains 25 miles south of downtown Tucson for over three years, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
El Jefe is about 7 years old and is the only documented wild jaguar in the country. He is one of only four or five jaguars that have been spotted in the U.S. in the last 20 years.
“A lot of people have no idea that we have jaguars in the United States or that they belong here,” said Randy Serraglio of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “In bringing this video, we hope to inspire people to care about these animals and support protection for their homes.”
Conservationists say El Jefe’s habitat is threatened by a proposed open-pit copper mine in the Santa Ritas. The proposed Rosemont Mine has been in the works for several years but is tied up in the permitting phase. A spokeswoman for the company that owns the mine, Hudbay Minerals, said she was working on a statement on Wednesday.
The videos of El Jefe were captured by Conservation CATalyst, an organization focused on conserving cats that The Center for Biological Diversity contracts with. Conservation CATalyst has about a dozen cameras in the areas where El Jefe lives and plans to add more, Serraglio said.
“We’re getting a good sense of where he likes to go and what areas he likes to use, and travel corridors and that sort of thing,” he said.
Jaguars roamed the Southwest, but they disappeared 150 years ago because of habitat loss and predator control programs aimed at protecting livestock. A hunter shot and killed the last verified female jaguar in the U.S. in 1963 in northern Arizona.
Conservationists don’t know where El Jefe’s mom may be, but they say he first popped up in the Whetstone Mountains in 2011 when he was about 3 years old.
“She must be somewhere not too far away,” Serraglio said.
See the video on The Center for Biological Diversity’s Facebook page here.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel sometime in 67 or 68 a 250 lb. female was killed by a trapper in Central Florida at that time. I had just moved to FL in Dec. 66 and it was not long after that. I remember it explicitly because I have always been interested in hunting and the outdoors, and had read a lot of hunting magazines with articles of jaguar kills in the southwest in the early 1900’s. I knew that jaguars had once roomed across the southern USA but were all supposed to be gone by then so it was very interesting to me and I never forgot the article.
Sounds like another reason to keep us off our own land. Animals adapt very well to their surroundings. I live in Montana. Live to hunt, fish, and some trapping. Getting a little older and can’t get to a lot of the public land that my family and friends used to enjoy the outdoors. Because the tree huggers, we call them here. Have gotten so many roads closed off. And more and more every year. Time to put a stop to it too.
The tree huggers and other groups may be the only ones to protect engangered species. Do you own the land? Public lands are public and can’t be turned into “private lands” for ones own leisure. Get with the picture and you might not be so aggrevated. I am not a tree hugger or activist. Out wild life and public lands have to be protected! Take a look at South America for what is happening. They are going nuts down there destroying land and habitats just to make some quick money . And what about the indiginous natives that still live in the primitive areas and do not have contact with modern civilization?