Trail cameras catch sight of rare predator thought to be extinct in US: 'Meant everything to me'

Trail cameras provide a fascinating way to document an area's wildlife without a human presence. Sometimes, they even capture a remarkable surprise on film.

In December, Jason Miller's hidden recorders in Arizona picked up a jaguar, which he told the Los Angeles Times was his "holy grail" of wild cats.

"That meant everything to me," Miller said. "I've been running cameras for just over five years in Southern Arizona and in the deserts hoping maybe one day I'd find a jaguar. It finally happened."

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Jaguars were once abundant in the southern United States, but a small number of sightings have led experts to believe that they are locally extinct. As Mark Hart from Arizona Game and Fish explained to the publication, they were driven out of Arizona by predator control agents as the state's population grew.

The sighting of Cochise — so named by Miller after the county the creature was spotted in, which takes its moniker from an Apache chief — is just the eighth wild jaguar seen in the United States since the 1990s, according to Hart.

One theory for sporadic jaguar sightings is that the cats are crossing the border from Mexico after being forced to leave by other males in breeding populations in Sonora, a Mexican state. However, only male jaguars have been spotted in the U.S. in recent years, with the last confirmed female seen in the 1940s.

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"They've got everything they need here in terms of food and space, just not females, so they eventually leave," Hart told the Times.

Jaguars are now mostly found in South America, although they are listed as "threatened" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "Red List." While the sighting in Arizona doesn't necessarily signify a permanent return to the state for the creature, any evidence of the rare cat's presence is cause for celebration.

In the Amazon rainforest, for example — where 90% of the population lives, according to the World Bank Group — jaguars are an apex predator, helping to control prey species in a service that is essential for biodiversity.

A healthy ecosystem has positive knock-on effects for the rest of the planet. That's especially true for the Amazon rainforest, which stabilizes the global climate by storing 150 billion to 200 billion tons of carbon, per the World Wildlife Fund.