State wildlife officials are trying to confirm the details surrounding a trail camera video that appears to show a new jaguar in Southern Arizona.
Vail wildlife videographer Jason Miller posted the video to his YouTube channel late Wednesday, after teasing it on his Facebook page earlier in the week.
The rare spotted cat appears briefly but clearly in the black-and-white footage captured at night in an undisclosed mountain range.
Jason Miller posted the trail camera footage from Southern Arizona on his YouTube channel, Jason Miller Outdoors.
In the video, Miller says the footage was captured on Dec. 20 in "a deep canyon" just north of the Mexico border, but he offers no other information about the jaguar’s location.
That's by design, Miller said when reached for comment Thursday night.
He doesn't plan to publicly disclose where he filmed the jaguar — or even reveal what mountain range it was in — "for the sake of the animal," he said.
Earlier Thursday, Arizona Game and Fish Department spokesman Mark Hart said agency officials had seen the video and were "attempting to verify its authenticity."
Hart said officials hoped to interview Miller and confirm where the jaguar was spotted to make sure there aren’t any traps or other “research activities” underway in the area that might need to be halted.
In a written statement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it was also “aware of the newly posted footage. With the limited information available at this time, the agency is not able to make any conclusive statements about the individual in the footage.”
The video will be examined by experts to determine if the animal’s distinctive spots match any jaguars that have been caught on camera before or if it is a new cat not previously documented in the wild.
A screen shot from a trail camera video shows the distinctive spots on a jaguar that a wildlife videographer documented in Southern Arizona on Dec. 20.
Aletris Neils, founder and executive director of the Tucson-based nonprofit group Conservation CATalyst, thinks she already knows the answer to that question.
“It appears to be a new jaguar, a jaguar not currently known to the public,” Neils said.
When asked how she knew that, she said there is a strong possibility that the cat in Miller’s video is one her organization was already tracking. Neils declined to elaborate because she said she didn’t want to put the jaguar at risk.
Miller said he set up the camera that caught the jaguar on Dec. 2, positioning it near a "scrape" on the forest floor where a mountain lion had left its scent. When he went back on Dec. 30 and saw the jaguar footage, he said, "it blew me away."
"I was so on cloud nine, I was shaking. I could barely hold the camera steady" to shoot the rest of the YouTube video, he said.
This isn't the first newsworthy video for Miller. He made headlines in July, after two of his motion-activated wildlife cameras in the Huachuca Mountains caught footage of the only known ocelot in Arizona.
At the time, he told the Star that he started placing trail cameras on public land across Southern Arizona about five years ago with the goal of one day filming a jaguar.
He said he used to be a hunter, but he now prefers to use cameras to experience nature because they let him see how animals behave when no one is around.
As of Thursday, his YouTube channel, Jason Miller Outdoors, had just over 7,000 subscribers, but that number is likely to climb as a result of his latest release.
The video begins with Miller walking through the forest where he placed his cameras and discussing the footage with a big smile on his face. Then it cuts to clips of the other animals he caught on camera, including javelinas, a mountain lion, a ringtail and several bears.
The jaguar shows up for about 15 seconds in the bottom right corner of the frame, its mouth open as it sniffs at the rocks and dried leaves on the forest floor.
“What a magnificent creature,” Miller says. “If unnamed, I will name it Cochise.”
Since 1996, just seven individual jaguars have been documented in the Southwestern U.S., all of them males, including five in Arizona, one in New Mexico and one seen in both states. No females have been recorded in the U.S. since an Arizona hunter killed one in the White Mountains in 1963.
The new footage captured by Miller comes just a few months after the Fish and Wildlife Service disclosed two grainy images of a jaguar that was filmed in the Huachucas in the spring of 2023 by remote cameras operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The CBP footage represented the first confirmed sightings of the endangered cat in that mountain range since 2017, though the images were not clear enough to identify the specific animal.
Conservation CATalyst helped document the only other jaguar recorded in the Huachuca range. That young male — nicknamed Yo’oko, the Yaqui word for jaguar, by students at Hiaki High School in Tucson — was caught on camera in the mountains southwest of Sierra Vista in 2016 and 2017 before turning up dead in Sonora, Mexico, in 2018.
During his short life, Yo’oko moved freely between the mountain ranges of northern Mexico and Southern Arizona "as cats always would have done," Neils said. "That arbitrary line on a map means nothing to a jaguar."
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