Jaguars in Arizona

Automated cameras spot jaguars in Southern Arizona By Mitch Tobin, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

photo of jaguarAutomated 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. …

Rancher and lion hunter Warner Glenn photographed another jaguar [in 1996] in the Peloncillo Mountains, near the New Mexico border.

Opportunistic and adaptive, jaguars have been recorded eating more than 85 species. In Arizona, they are thought to survive by ambushing deer and javelina. …

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.

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