El Jefe

“This was a young adult female about 230 pounds”

The Return of the Great American Jaguar

Removing the bear skull from its zip-lock bag, he shows it to Neils, an expert on black bears from her years studying them in Florida. “This was a young adult female about 230 pounds,” she says. Bugbee then removes the suspected jaguar scat, spritzes it with water, and reseals it in the plastic bag. He waits for an hour and then hides the moistened scat among the cactuses in the front yard. Then he fetches Mayke from her kennel and gives her the command, “Find the scat! Find the scat!”

Mayke systematically searches the yard, zigzagging back and forth with her nose to the ground, until a breeze gets up and wafts the scent toward her. She trots directly to the scat, sniffs it, sits down, looks at Bugbee and barks twice.

“It’s jaguar!” exclaims Neils. The hairs in the scat are later confirmed in the lab as black bear. This is the first recorded predation by a jaguar on a black bear, and as Neils points out, it occurred where the northern limit of the jaguar’s range reached the southern limit of the black bear’s range. “It was north against south, and south won.”

Bugbee sits down at his laptop, and finds the last photographs and videos of El Jefe. Where is he now? He could have been shot, or killed by a vehicle. An injury could have lessened his hunting powers, leading to death by starvation. He could be in another Sky Island mountain range. There have been rumors and several unconfirmed sightings of a jaguar in the Patagonia Mountains, not far from the Santa Ritas. It could be El Jefe, or the next young dispersing male from Mexico.