ARIZONA, USA — Jason Miller is a full-time landscaper and a part-time trail cam hobbyist. After five years of filming Arizona’s wildlife, he hit the holy grail—he filmed a jaguar.
But it wasn’t something he set out to capture when he first began.
“In the back of my head I was thinking, one day I’ll be lucky to get an ocelot or a jaguar,” Miller told 12News. “I didn’t set out for them, I just hoped one day it would happen, and it did.”
On Dec. 20 at 8:27 p.m. one of his cameras in the Huachuca Mountains captured the endangered cat. The animal walks into the bottom right of the frame and after a few seconds, lifts his head right into the camera and opens its mouth, as if it was making a sound, but no audio is captured.
Miller had initially put up the trail camera facing a mountain lion scat, hoping to film it. When he picked up his camera on Dec. 30 to examine the footage, he was happy a lion did indeed show up, but sad that the camera’s angle cut off part of his body.
As he was lamenting the angle and kept watching, the jaguar appeared. He realized had it not been for this angle, maybe the jaguar would not have been sighted.
“I was in awe, I couldn’t believe it,” Miller said. “I just screamed ‘I got a jaguar’… I think I said two or three more times.”
On Jan. 3, Miller uploaded his footage on his YouTube channel, Jason Miller Outdoors, where he shares the wildlife videos he captures.
Two days later, the Center for Biological Diversity confirmed the jaguar Miller capture was a new jaguar, never documented to roam the United States before.
When the confirmation was announced, 12News attempted to contact Miller, but he was out in a remote location with no cellphone service, his wife said.
It wasn’t until late that Friday that Miller called his wife he was on the way home when she broke the news.
“I had no idea,” the wildlife videographer said. “I was just on cloud nine. At that point I just couldn’t believe I got a jaguar, let alone a new one.”
Experts determined the cat was a new jaguar by conducting a rosette analysis—comparing its pattern of spots to those of other documented jaguars; Sombra and El Jefe.
It’s still unclear how old the new jaguar is, and whether it’s a female or male.
The last female spotted in the U.S. was killed by an Arizona hunter in 1963.
Miller used to be a hunter, but now enjoys filming wildlife.
“This actually gets me in the outdoors more,” he said.
He would like to name the new jaguar Cochise, to give honor to the native land.
Miller’s footage came months after the Arizona Game and Fish Department released two low-quality images of a jaguar that was filmed in the Huachuca Mountains last spring.
That video was captured by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the first sighting of a jaguar in that mountain range since 2017. The grainy images made it difficult for experts to positively identify a specific animal.
Jaguars are the largest cats in the Americas. They used to roam as far as Colorado and Northern California, and as far east as Louisiana before they were wiped out in the U.S. by the middle of the 20th century.
The jaguar was added to the Endangered Species list in 1997 after the Center for Biological Diversity took legal action.
Sombra has been captured dozens of times over the past seven years in the Chiricahuas. He is believed to be about 10 years old.
El Jefe is about 15 years old. He has been filmed more than 100 times between 2012 and 2015 in the Santa Rita and Whetstone Mountains. He was been documented to have traveled more than 100 miles south of the U.S.- Mexico border.
The new jaguar sighting came months after shipping containers were removed after being illegally installed by former Governor Doug Ducey as a border wall.
Miller hopes he doesn’t have to wait too long to capture the jaguar again.
“If I do, so be it,” he chuckled. “I’ll get a lot of beautiful wildlife in the meantime.”
In the last two years, Miller has captured a rare ocelot five times. It’s the only known mini jaguar in the state. Other videos of his have caught bears with their cubs, a javelina giving birth, a mountain lion ‘screaming in heat’, and countless other creatures across his 18 trail cameras.
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