Ocelots are rare creatures, and even rarer in Arizona. Since 1982, the ocelot has been protected by the Endangered Species Act and fewer than 100 are thought to remain in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Most of those reside in southern Texas.
Before this ocelot showed up, only six ocelots had been detected in Arizona since 2009, according to Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.
It was McSpadden who caught the new ocelot footage. Last week, the 45-year-old hiked Southern Arizona’s Sky Islands mountain range to collect SD cards from several trail cameras he’d placed in the area. When he viewed their footage on his computer, here is what he saw:
BREAKING: We just released footage of a rare wild ocelot in a mountain range in Arizona, within the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
— Center for Biological Diversity (@CenterForBioDiv) October 3, 2024
For the safety of the cat, we’re not specifying the location. https://t.co/YGzXYMXNnA pic.twitter.com/v5fDUn9Ji8
“Seeing something so rare and so beautiful, knowing I’d been standing right there where this animal was sometime before me, it’s kind of an incomparable feeling,” he said.
McSpadden had never caught an ocelot on camera before. The ocelot is one of only two that have been spotted in Arizona in recent years. The other is an older ocelot — approximately 12 to 14 years of age — that Tucson school children have lovingly named “Lil’ Jefe.”
The younger ocelot — who needs a nickname — has been spotted once before. In early July, researchers from the Phoenix Zoo discovered that the same animal had been detected on June 14 in the Atascosa Highlands west of Nogales, around 30 miles southeast of where McSpadden’s camera captured it.
Those researchers were just as awed, said Phoenix Zoo field conservation department project manager Kinley Ragan. She and a college had driven 45 minutes off-road and hiked another 40 minutes to check their trail cameras.
“It was incredibly thrilling,” Ragan said. “I was in complete disbelief.”
How do they know it was the same cat? By the spots. An ocelot’s markings are like a fingerprint, and comparing the footage confirmed that McSpaddden’s and Ragan’s cats were “indeed the same cat,” McSpadden said.
For the cat to be found so far away from its first spotting was “really amazing, he added. The animal had to cross over or go under Interstate 19, the large freeway system that spans from Nogales north into Tucson. The distance also shows either location — east or west of I-19 — could serve as an ocelot habitat.
“It’s a really intrepid cat that would make such an effort,” he said.
While the rarest, the ocelot wasn’t the only creature McSpadden captured on his motion-detected camera that day. He also nabbed footage of a bobcat, gray fox, three species of skunk, some bears and the endangered Mexican spotted owl.
“This is just one of the many really wonderful animals to show up on camera,” McSpadden said. “They're not all so elusive and elegant but still important.”
