Jaguar on Trail Camera

I came to Kaa-Iya in hopes of seeing a jaguar in the wild, but never saw one. The park did produce various signs of their presence: paw prints in the dust of the pipeline road, crunched tortoise shells, and the remains of tapir kills. Jaguars had passed about half of the dozen trail cameras we checked.

Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco is where jaguar camera trapping in the Neotropics began. Between May 2001 and June 2003, researchers adapted a survey method developed for counting tigers in India, identified 26 individual jaguars by their rosette patterns, and produced two of the first published jaguar density studies anywhere. The Chaco is dense, thorny scrub with few natural openings, so a cleared pipeline route is one of the easier ways through it. Jaguars use cut lines readily.