How El Jefe, the Lone Arizona Jaguar Who Captivated a Nation in 2016, Became a 'Rock Star'
Once called “America’s last jaguar,” the solitary male wandered across the southern border in 2011 and became the centerpiece of a campaign to protect habitat in the Santa Rita Mountains
How El Jefe, the Lone Arizona Jaguar Who Captivated a Nation in 2016, Became a ‘Rock Star’
Once called “America’s last jaguar,” the solitary male wandered across the southern border in 2011 and became the centerpiece of a campaign to protect habitat in the Santa Rita Mountains
James Campbell
- Author, Heart of the Jaguar
November 4, 2025 8:00 a.m.
A camera trap image of El Jefe, a male jaguar who made international news as the only known jaguar in the United States.
USFWS
When the jaguar who came to be known as El Jefe crossed the United States-Mexico border in 2011 and entered Arizona, he had no idea he was walking onto a stage where he would be the star performer.
He had been on the move for days, or possibly weeks, having left his home 125 miles south of the border, in the 90-square-mile Northern Jaguar Reserve in the Sierra Madres of northwestern Mexico, where teams of American and Mexican conservationists were struggling to protect a waning population of the world’s northernmost jaguars. El Jefe had likely fled to save his life. At 2 years of age, and weighing just 120 pounds, staying put had become dangerous. Larger, more territorial males, unwilling to tolerate an adolescent intruder, prowled the countryside. But unlike the others, who escaped with their lives by traveling south, El Jefe responded to the magnetic pull of his internal compass by fleeing north, becoming just the fourth documented male jaguar in two decades to make the border crossing into Arizona and what was once jaguar country. There, he was utterly alone—perhaps the loneliest jaguar in the history of the species—but content for a time.
In 1963, the last known female jaguar in the U.S. was killed by a hunter at 9,000 feet in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests of eastern Arizona. The hunter, who thought he was zeroing in on a big bobcat, shot her at 80 yards in the evening’s dwindling light. Two years later, the last legally killed jaguar, a male, was shot by a hunter in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. In 1969, Arizona finally outlawed most jaguar hunting, but with no known females roaming the state, the prospects for a rebounding population of indigenous big cats were exceedingly dim.
No one knows exactly when El Jefe entered the U.S., but it’s possible that a Border Patrol helicopter pilot who had reported seeing a jaguar in the Santa Rita Mountains in June 2011 was the first one to spot him. The first clearly documented sighting of El Jefe was in November 2011, east of the Santa Ritas in the Whetstone Mountains, 25 miles north of the Mexican border, by an Arizona man named Donnie Fenn. Fenn ran a part-time business, Chasin’ Tail Guide Service, that specialized in mountain lion hunts. He and his 10-year-old daughter, Alyson, already an accomplished horsewoman, left their home on a Saturday morning bound for the Whetstones.
Once they saddled their mules, they rode with a pack of eight dogs up ahead singing. They were about to call it a day when the strike hound cut a trail. The Fenns followed the dogs as they ran through the canyon in full cry. After a short chase, Fenn saw his hounds 200 yards ahead, bellowing frantically. Calming his mule, he approached slowly. Assuming his dogs had treed a mountain lion, he used his telephoto lens to zoom in on the tree. As he got closer, he saw it. He was astounded by its size. He guessed that it was twice as big as a mountain lion. Then he dismounted. His heart was pounding, but he was mesmerized. He could sense the jaguar’s power. He watched as the big cat slowly climbed down the tree. When its feet hit the ground, he thought for a moment it might turn to pounce on him. Instead, it took off at a high speed in the opposite direction, and his dogs gave chase.
About two miles down the trail, the hounds brought the jaguar to bay. It was growling in a raw and aggressive way, making sounds Fenn had never heard from an animal. His hounds, excited to the point of frenzy, had encircled the jaguar, and it was swiping at them. He worried that the big cat would tear his dogs apart. But the jaguar made its final escape, and Fenn shouted to his crazed hounds, commanding them to hold hard.
“It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me,” Fenn later told the Arizona Daily Star. “I got to see it in real life, my daughter got to see it, but I hope never to encounter it again.”
James Campbell tells the story of the extraordinary undertaking to save the jaguar, as well as the impassioned conservationist Alan Rabinowitz, who dedicated his life to the species.
Fenn alerted Arizona Game and Fish Department officials, who found hair samples left behind by the animal and obligingly told his tale to the media.
What El Jefe did after encountering Fenn and his hounds, no one really knows. Having learned from his experience in the Whetstones, he likely grew even more stealthy, moving largely at night. He wasn’t seen again until late 2012, when some of the hundreds of remote wireless infrared cameras operated by the University of Arizona’s Jaguar Survey and Monitoring Project captured photos of a male jaguar lurking in the Santa Rita Mountains—the perfect hiding place for a lone jaguar.
A wildlife camera automatically snapped this photo of El Jefe on October 25, 2012.
USFWS / UA / DHS
The wild Santa Ritas, just 28 miles southeast of Tucson, had everything El Jefe needed: high country, with its narrow ridges and steep slopes, swathed in pine forests, where he could move unseen; mid-elevations scattered with live oaks, Gambel oaks and junipers; and fecund washes thick with walnuts, hackberry, willows and cottonwoods. And an impressive array of wild game was there for the taking—deer, javelinas, coatis, skunks, turkeys, jackrabbits and raccoons. He was able to find water in streams, ephemeral ponds and springs. Mountain lions inhabited the area, but they seemed to know, instinctively, who the boss was.
The primary danger for El Jefe was that he was fond of space and was partial to wandering. In his next encounter with people—or perhaps a busy highway—he might not be so lucky.
Among the handful who knew of El Jefe’s presence, no one was better acquainted with the jaguar than wildlife biologist Chris Bugbee. Along with his 65-pound Belgian Malinois Mayke—who had failed as a Border Patrol drugs and explosives dog and whom he had carefully trained to be a jaguar scent detection dog—the burly and rugged Bugbee had been steadily tracking El Jefe’s movements across the Santa Ritas for the University of Arizona.
It took a long time for Bugbee to turn the skittish canine into a dependable jaguar scat detection dog. But at some point, Mayke blossomed. She’d scent over puma scat and would drive off impudent black bears, but when she found jaguar scat, she would stand over it and bark repeatedly. The longer Bugbee and Mayke tracked El Jefe, the more curious the big cat became. Often, when they would return to a camera that they had checked days before, the time code would show that El Jefe had visited that same camera just minutes after they had. In other words, the big cat was tracking them. At first, it made Bugbee break out in an anxious sweat, but he told me that as they became more familiar with each other, it turned into a “special relationship,” one that Bugbee came to “cherish”—just him, his faithful dog and the United States’ only wild jaguar.
Fun fact: A jaguar’s spots
A jaguar’s tan-and-black spots are called “rosettes,” and each animal has its own unique pattern of these markings. That’s how scientists can recognize an individual jaguar in camera trap images, even years later.
By 2015, El Jefe—though not yet enmeshed in a thicket of complicated and conflicting human ambitions—was becoming a local legend and something of a household name as media attention to the “Santa Rita jaguar” or “America’s last jaguar” intensified. But the charismatic big cat was still an anonymous jaguar who had taken up residence some 200 miles north of where he was born. For some biologists, his presence was a thrilling development, signifying the auspicious return of jaguars to an area where for millennia big cats had thrived. However, Alan Rabinowitz, an American zoologist and big cat expert, was not especially impressed and went on record saying that a lone big cat, especially a male, wandering the mountains of southern Arizona, was nothing more than a fortuitous exception and had little or no ecological significance. If anything, he argued, jaguars dispersing from a fragile population in Sonora, Mexico, were acting as desperate organisms might, searching for a way to survive.
The Center for Biological Diversity wasn’t buying Rabinowitz’s indifference. The gutsy and contentious Tucson-based nonprofit environmental organization, with a reputation for filing lawsuits based on the Endangered Species Act since its founding in 1989, began a campaign in May 2015, focusing on the big cat and on Arizona jaguars in general. Not long afterward, Mike Stark and Russ McSpadden, from the center’s communication department, and Randy Serraglio, a magnetic and outspoken conservation advocate for the center, began laying plans for a considerably more aggressive publicity campaign with the ambitious goal of branding jaguars as icons of wildness in southern Arizona. But perhaps their greatest dream, one they were reluctant even to whisper about outside the confines of the conference room, was to turn the Santa Ritas jaguar into a national cynosure and, dare they hope, even a rock star.
While brainstorming, Serraglio, McFadden and Stark hit on the notion of holding a naming contest for the big cat. An anonymous apex predator on the loose in Tucson’s remote outskirts was exciting, but a jaguar with a resonant moniker could be a powerful symbol. Further refining the idea, they decided to enlist the help of local schoolkids. They settled on Valencia Middle School in Tucson, composed largely of Indigenous and Mexican American students, which had a jaguar as its mascot. Serraglio took the lead, contacting Valencia’s principal, who embraced the idea. Together she and Serraglio established a jaguar curriculum. Following the study unit, their plan was to hold a schoolwide vote to determine the jaguar’s name. Simultaneously, the center ran an online vote for their members and supporters across the country, using the teaser: “Cast your vote: ProtectOurJaguars.org.”
The program was even more successful than Serraglio imagined. On the final day of the study unit, the school staged a huge pep rally, replete with a large, 12-by-14-foot Chinese-dragon-style jaguar puppet, operated by five people; music and singing; and a relay race where kids, emulating jaguars, had to secure “resources” around the school grounds while avoiding “threats” (a mine, roads and the border wall). Serraglio described the celebration as a “jaguar frenzy.” McFadden filmed and did interviews with the students about what name they chose and why. Later he spliced together the video clips, which the center used on its website.
In early October 2015, Serraglio tallied all the votes from the school and the online campaign. The top five names were: O’oshad (the Tohono O’odham word for jaguar); Rito, in honor of the Santa Ritas; Scout; Spirit; and El Jefe. The winner was El Jefe, Spanish for “the Boss,” by a whisker. One month later, on November 2, Serraglio and the center staged a live press event at the school to announce El Jefe as the winner of the jaguar naming contest.
Meanwhile, in the months leading up to November 2, Chris Bugbee had grown frustrated with the University of Arizona’s resistance to making public his stirring and unprecedented footage of El Jefe. From his perspective, the footage was “gold” for jaguar conservation in the U.S. that the directors of the project refused to use. He’d also become deeply upset with the Forest Service, which had issued a preliminary permit for a copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains that would challenge the inviolability of the Endangered Species Act, which protected jaguars like El Jefe and their habitat. One of Bugbee’s videos showed El Jefe just a half-mile from the proposed mine site.
“We wanted to show the world that we still have jaguars in Arizona,” Bugbee told the Arizona Daily Star. “We wanted to get the American public involved in this question: Do we want to recover jaguars, or do we want them to just become a piece of local history?” Bugbee later spoke of his frustration: “Nobody wanted to do any advocacy for jaguars or say a word against this mine … not the university, not the wildlife agencies. El Jefe was like a dirty little secret they wanted to keep quiet. It didn’t sit right with me. It kept me up at night.”
El Jefe, caught on camera in 2013
United States Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons
So Bugbee and his wife, Aletris Neils, a fellow biologist who had studied black bears in Florida, contemplated going public with the photos and the video footage of El Jefe that Bugbee had collected under the aegis of the University of Arizona’s Jaguar Survey and Monitoring Project. Though Bugbee hadn’t intended to mix science with advocacy, both he and Neils sensed that the big cat could be a galvanizing publicity tool in the fight against the copper mine. They also feared for him. Rural Arizona could be hostile territory for a jaguar. Someone filled with hate might try to track down El Jefe and shoot him.
Bugbee and Neils agonized over the decision, knowing, too, the kind of discord it could create in the academic and conservation community. Some would applaud it, but most would regard the move as roguish, and it would alienate colleagues who believed that the university had proprietary rights to the footage or that under no circumstances should a vulnerable jaguar’s movements ever be made public. The University of Arizona and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) would eventually employ a federal agent and a prosecutor to investigate Bugbee’s and Neils’ conduct for allegedly stealing intellectual property and cameras; five years later, it ended with no convictions.
At the same time, the University of Arizona’s money for Bugbee’s camera program ran out. Bugbee tried to convince the FWS, the Arizona Game and Fish Department and even the Forest Service to pick up the funding, but when they balked, he approached the Center for Biological Diversity. The center ponied up the money to keep Bugbee’s research going, but it negotiated a promise from him that he would provide footage it could use in its ongoing PR campaign for jaguars.
Bugbee and Mayke then resumed tracking El Jefe, using an expired university research permit. By the fall of 2015, Bugbee realized that after appearing regularly and reliably on cameras for several years, El Jefe was nowhere to be found. Mayke hadn’t barked in months.
In late January 2016, Serraglio alerted Bugbee that McSpadden had cut a 41-second video clip, which the center was planning to release on the Conservation CATalyst website, an organization Bugbee and Neils had established hoping to educate the public about big cats and promote their protection. The center had picked a day that would precede the local Barrio Brewing Company’s much-anticipated rollout of its El Jefe Hefeweizen, infused with catnip. Bugbee and Neils held their breath.
On February 3, according to plan, the center released the video—actually a compilation of three separate videos—showing El Jefe, now a robust 150-pound male in his prime, moving like a ghost through the forest and up a creek bed. Midway through, El Jefe walks, broad-shouldered and muscular, right into the camera.
El Jefe: Americas Only Known Wild Jaguar
According to Bugbee, once the video hit and legend merged with reality, “all hell broke loose.” The following weeks were nothing but a “blur.” The press coverage was preponderantly positive, but the FWS field supervisor for the Southwest, unaware that El Jefe had likely decamped for new territory, accused Bugbee of blatantly violating the terms of the research permit and endangering the big cat’s life.
The video went viral. Twenty-one million television viewers in the U.S. saw it, and El Jefe, the incarnation of beauty and wildness, became an object of adoration and admiration, a national—and international—sensation. He was Arizona’s version of the iconic Yellowstone wolf, O-Six, or Los Angeles’ beloved puma, P-22, and as close to a natural cause célèbre as the state had ever seen. Within just 48 hours, the video had reportedly appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today Show,” CBS “This Morning” and nearly 830 other TV segments in the U.S. Millions more saw the video on national newspaper websites. The center’s rough estimate was that 100 million people globally viewed the video. El Jefe was indeed a rock star.
But by the time El Jefe became famous, he was already gone. He likely did what jaguars sometimes do—disappear. Some claimed he went east into the Patagonia Mountains. Others said he followed his sun compass hundreds of miles back into the foothills of the Sierra Madres. Bugbee, who in almost four years of tracking El Jefe never had the good fortune of laying his eyes on the big cat, recalls some of the last photos of El Jefe, in the fall of 2015, his testicles bulging. He thinks the big lusty cat, obeying a biological imperative, went south in search of a mate, knowing that his sojourn in Arizona was reproductively doomed.
What exactly happened to El Jefe, no one knows. But for a few years he graced Arizona with his presence, and for a brief time, he captivated a nation.
Excerpted from Heart of the Jaguar: The Extraordinary Conservation Effort to Save the Americas’ Legendary Cat. Copyright ©2025 by James Campbell. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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