New Mexico lies north of where jaguars maintain an established breeding population today, so the state’s 63 recorded sightings need to be read carefully. All of them come from GBIF rather than iNaturalist, and most appear to be older specimen or survey records rather than recent photographs, clustered loosely around the Rio Grande corridor and the Bosque del Apache and Bitter Lake refuges.
NatureServe ranks the jaguar S1, Critically Imperiled, in New Mexico, its most severe state category, even though the IUCN lists the species Near Threatened worldwide, a reminder that a species can be globally stable while functionally gone from one state. Records show small upticks in January and June, but with so few sightings spread across 26 years, that pattern isn’t a reliable seasonal signal, just noise in a very short list.
Full species profile
