America’s celebrity jaguar ‘El Jefe’ is a bear hunter
A male jaguar called El Jefe (“The Boss”) has been in the news a lot lately. He’s the only known wild representative of his kind in the United States, and his turf – the Santa Rita Mountains of southeastern Arizona – is being considered for a hugely contentious open-pit copper mine.
And according to a recent Smithsonian Magazine profile, America’s celebrity jaguar is also a bear killer.
El Jefe, the only known wild jaguar in the United States, wandering the Santa Rita Mountains. Image: Conservation CATalyst
While shadowing El Jefe in the Santa Rita backcountry, biologist Chris Bugbee discovered the strewn bones of a black bear, including a crushed, tooth-punctured skull (photographer Bill Hatcher was able to capture several snapshots of the remains). Assisting with the El Jefe-tracking task was Bugbee’s dog Mayke, a Belgian Malinois specially trained to sniff out jaguar and ocelot poop.
Back at the lab, analysis later confirmed that jaguar scat collected at the scene contained bear hairs. According to Bugbee’s colleague (and wife) Aletris Neils, with whom he runs the nonprofit Conservation CATalyst, the bear skeleton likely belonged to a young adult sow.
The unusual find, Bugbee suggests, marks the first known instance of a jaguar preying on a black bear. Such an event could only occur in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, where the stomping grounds of the mainly temperate black bear and the mainly tropical/subtropical jaguar overlap. “It was north against south, and south won,” Neils tells Smithsonian.
As El Jefe’s bear lunch suggests, jaguars are opportunistic hunters. They often actively prowl in search of prey, then attempt to stalk and kill any they encounter. More comfortable getting their paws wet than most felines, they’ll also cruise riverbanks and wetland fringes questing for huge capybaras, as well as caimans, which can make up nearly 50 percent of jaguar diets in water-logged habitats. And as this footage plainly shows, the bigs cats are not afraid to pounce on full-sized caimans in their watery element, showing some mind-boggling strength hauling the reptiles ashore.