An endangered ocelot that made its film debut in Southern Arizona earlier this year has already returned with a sequel.
The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity released a new video on Thursday showing the rare spotted cat hopping onto rock and drinking from a pool of water in an undisclosed mountain range east of Interstate 19.
A motion-activated wildlife camera captured the footage on July 24.
An endangered ocelot is caught in trail camera footage in southern Arizona on July 24.
“I shouted with joy when I realized what I was seeing on the trail cam,” said Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “This incredible footage shows us that ocelots belong in our sky islands, despite all the threats they face.” Southern Arizona’s sky islands are mountain ranges towering above the desert floor.
Based on the animal’s distinctive markings, experts believe it is the same ocelot that was recorded for the first time on June 12 in the Atascosa Highlands west of Nogales by a camera operated by researchers at the Phoenix Zoo.
To protect the cat, McSpadden and company declined to specify where the video was captured. All they would say is that sometime between June and July, the ocelot crossed Interstate 19 and the Santa Cruz River, covering a distance of at least 30 miles in the six weeks between detections.
To confirm the ocelot’s identity, the center said it consulted with several experts, including Carmina Gutiérrez González, research coordinator for the Northern Jaguar Project.
A comparison of the spots and rosette markings shows the same wild ocelot caught on camera at two different locations in southern Arizona on June 12 (right) and July 24.
Ocelots have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1982. Fewer than 100 of the bobcat-sized animals are thought to remain in the U.S., nearly all of them in southern Texas.
In Arizona, at the northernmost part of the species’ range, only six ocelots have been documented since 2009, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
This new ocelot and an older male cat in the Huachuca Mountains near Sierra Vista are the only two currently known to be living in the state.
The ocelot in the Huachucas was first spotted in 2012 and has been caught on camera more than 160 times since then, according to Game and Fish.
In 2019, the Tucson-based nonprofit group Conservation CATalyst teamed up with students at Tucson Unified School District’s Manzo Elementary to give the well-documented ocelot a nickname: Lil’ Jefe, a play on El Jefe, the name given to the famous Southern Arizona jaguar recorded in the Santa Ritas, the Whetstone mountains and, most recently, back in Mexico in November 2021.
An ocelot drinks from a watering hole in an undisclosed southern Arizona mountain range in a screen capture from a July 24 trail camera video.
Like jaguars, McSpadden said, the survival of ocelots in the U.S. is threatened by the fragmentation of their sky island habitat by roads, mines, border barriers and urban sprawl.
In Sonora, Mexico, a new freight rail line under construction between Imurís and Nogales is disrupting crucial ocelot breeding habitat, he said.
So far, though, at least one small cat is finding a way to survive and move between the mountain ranges south of Tucson.
“These elegant, elusive and fiercely resilient felines are an important part of what makes Southern Arizona so special,” McSpadden said. “Capturing footage of this cat in the wild gives me hope for their survival.”
An ocelot stands on a tree branch above a southern Arizona watering hole in a screen capture from a July 24 trail camera video released Thursday by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.
