Over the course of several days last month, photographer Jason Miller recorded wild creatures in Arizona through hidden surveillance cameras.
On Dec. 11, video cameras captured a cougar sniffing, followed on Dec. 14 by a mother and her calf foraging for food, two javelins on Dec. 18, and a sad-eyed ring-tailed cat the next day. They were all recorded through a pair of abandoned cameras in a rocky, wooded domain in southern Arizona, just off the Mexican border.
The photographs were “stunning but routine” for Miller, 54, of nearby Vail, Arizona, whose day job involves working as a landscaper.
His most recent discoveries, however, were fascinating.
Miller admitted he “gasped” when he saw what he described as the elusive “holy grail” of big cats — a jaguar — roaming around about six feet away from his camera the night of Dec. 20.
It’s around 8:30 p. m. when the spotted beast gave the impression and stopped to sniff the cougar’s droppings before opening its jaw. The jaguar showed his dogs to the camera as gentleness was reflected in his bright eyes.
“That meant everything to me,” Miller said of the find. “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.”
Miller’s video showed a jaguar in the Huachuca Mountains south of Tucson, wildlife biologists with the Arizona Game and Fish Department confirmed Monday.
Game and Fish also concluded that the jaguar had been photographed or filmed before.
Miller’s discovery is beyond impressive; It’s weird.
Mark Hart, public manager of Tucson-based Arizona Game and Fish, said the discovery marks the eighth jaguar observed in the wild in the U. S. Since the 1990s.
“Historically, on average, there are 3 to 5 jaguars in this state every 10 years, for the last hundred years,” Hart said.
One of the last jaguars to capture the minds of Arizonans, “El Jefe,” was last seen near Tucson in 2022, according to AZCentral. Another, called Sombra, was also spotted in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains later that year.
“There’s a lot of press and attention around ‘The Boss’ and there’s fear of his disappearance,” Hart said.
The cat was first seen in 2011 and was regularly spotted up until 2015, when Hart said the animal disappeared.
The 2022 sighting “brought relief to many of his fans,” Hart said. “El Jefe” allegedly returned to the northern Mexican state of Sonora to Hart.
Though the gender and age of Miller’s jaguar are unknown, Hart believes the creature is male.
“So far, all recent jaguar sightings have been of a male,” he said. “The last female recorded in the wild in the 1940s. “
The presence of Miller’s cat is consistent with a migratory trend in Arizona, toward Hart.
He said a popular theory proposed by jaguar experts is that the cats showing up in Arizona come from a breeding population in Sonora that has been hunted by other males.
“They’ve got everything they need here in terms of food and space,” he said, “just not females, so they eventually leave.”
Jaguars were once plentiful in the American Southwest, but they were hunted by hunters, especially predator officials in Arizona, as the state grew, Hart said.
Hart noted that Miller’s discovery highlighted the usefulness of photographic equipment.
“The first sightings of jaguars were all made through hunters” who observed the animals in the wild, he said. “The last 3 are by surveillance cameras. “
Miller said he was a lifelong bowhunter, retiring only two years ago.
Now, his task is to nominate new creatures. He named his discovery “Cochise,” the county named after the prominent Apache leader in which the discovery took place.
“I was looking for a name that symbolized the Southwest,” Miller said, “and that ‘Cochise. ‘
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