In November 2025, a camera network operated by the University of Arizona recorded a jaguar at a remote desert water source in southern Arizona. Several months later, in early 2026, the same animal returned and was filmed drinking at the water’s edge for nearly five minutes. Researchers have begun calling him Siniik.

The sighting is the latest in a series of recorded jaguar visits to the American Southwest over the past three decades. At least eight individual jaguars have been documented in the United States since 1996.

Jaguars were once native to the region. Their range extended across southern Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and reached into California. Early twentieth-century government predator control programs, which included shootings, poisoning, and hunting with dogs, eliminated them from the country. The last confirmed female jaguar in Arizona was killed in 1963 in the Apache National Forest. Another jaguar was killed by a government hunter in central Arizona the following year. New Mexico’s last known female was killed in 1986.

Arizona banned jaguar hunting in 1969, though by then no breeding females were known to remain in the state. The federal government listed the jaguar as endangered in 1972, removed that status for the United States in 1980, and restored full protection in 1997.

In 1996, a rancher named Warner Glenn was hunting mountain lions in the Peloncillo Mountains along the Arizona-New Mexico border when his dogs cornered an animal that was not a lion. Glenn photographed it instead of shooting it. Those images became the first photographs of a live wild jaguar in the United States.

In the same year, cameras in the Baboquivari Mountains recorded a different male jaguar later known as Macho B. Over more than a decade, he became the most documented and longest-lived wild jaguar in U.S. records. In February 2009, he was captured in a foot snare, fitted with a radio collar, and released. Within days, veterinarians at the Phoenix Zoo found his kidneys failing, and he was euthanized on March 2. A field biologist later pleaded guilty to a federal charge related to the capture operation.

Between 2011 and 2015, a young male settled in the Santa Rita Mountains, about 25 miles from downtown Tucson. A student naming contest called him El Jefe, meaning “the chief.” He stayed for roughly four years before moving south. In late 2016, another male appeared in the Huachuca Mountains and was named Sombra.

Researchers at the University of Arizona’s Jaguar Research and Conservation Center have collected more than 80 documented jaguar records dating back about 160 years, including museum specimens, newspaper clippings, and hunting trophies. Researcher Melanie Culver compiled the records. Center director Susan Malusa has spent 15 years reviewing night camera footage. Of the eight jaguars documented in the United States over three decades, five have appeared in the last 15 years.

The animals arriving in Arizona have been young males moving north from a breeding population in Sonora, Mexico. Researchers have identified more than 20 million acres of suitable jaguar habitat in the American Southwest, mostly on public land. One widely cited estimate suggests the area could eventually support 90 to 150 jaguars.

In December 2022, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a petition asking the federal government to reintroduce jaguars to the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. The petition cited a rewilding project in the Iberá wetlands of Argentina, where jaguars had been absent for about 70 years. The Argentine organization Rewilding Argentina bred and released jaguars into the marshlands, and within a few years the population grew from zero to more than 35 individuals.

In January 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected the petition. The agency said jaguars reproduce slowly and raise few cubs, making a reintroduced population unlikely to survive without ongoing help. The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish said there was little or no evidence that jaguars had a breeding population in the state. In the same year, in response to a legal challenge, the federal government reduced jaguar critical habitat to about 1,000 square miles across three Arizona counties.

Researchers have also warned that a 30-foot border wall cutting through the valleys jaguars use between Mexico and the United States could harm the species’ recovery. A formal analysis conducted as part of the wall project said it could contribute to the extinction of jaguars and ocelots on the American side.

In cattle-raising areas of Sonora, where jaguars and ranchers share the land, jaguars kill less than 2 percent of herds annually, according to researchers.

The camera network that has recorded most of the returning jaguars is maintained by more than 40 volunteers who hike into the mountains to replace memory cards and check the cameras.

As of 2026, every jaguar documented in the United States has been a solitary male. For a breeding population to become reestablished, a female would need to make the same journey north. No female has been recorded in the country since the 1980s.