PHOENIX: Photos of an extremely rare jaguar roaming Forest Service land near Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains have been published by the Arizona Daily Star, which got the images from the US Fish & Wildlife Service. The male jaguar, believed to be the lone known unconfined jaguar in the US, has been in the area since at least September 2012, when its image was captured by a hunter’s motion-detector camera.
Jeff Humphrey, public outreach specialist with the Fish & Wildlife Service, said that around the time the hunter captured the photo, experts began using funds supplied by the Department of Homeland Security to monitor the movement of jaguars along the Mexico border. The mission of that project is to learn how border patrols affect jaguars, Humphrey explained. As part of the project, the university installed motion-activated cameras.
Extremely rare jaguar spotted near Arizona mountains
