Jaguars Captured on Candid Camera

Nov. 28 -- Jaguars may be among the most elusive animals in the world, but it turns out that they aren't a bit camera shy.

Marcella Kelly, assistant wildlife professor at Virginia Tech, has spent the last couple of years capturing photos of these majestic cats in Central America and some of them apparently love hamming it up for the camera. The fact that the pictures are taken at night, with a flash mounted on an automated camera that lights up the forest, doesn't even seem to bother the jaguars.

"I get a number of photographs where the animal walks by the camera, and I get a picture of their side, and the next photograph is a picture of their face," she says. "So they've obviously come back to check it out."

Camera Hogs

Like all cats are supposed to be, they apparently are just curious.

Each jaguar has a very distinct pattern in its coat, so Kelly and her colleagues can tell instantly if the same cat keeps showing up.

"I photographed one of them about 40 times now," she says, and that's a bit surprising since these animals are normally so standoffish that they are rarely seen by humans. Kelly herself has only seen one in the wilds.

"We were driving out from our research station [the Las Cuevas Research Station in the Chiquibul Forest Reserve in Belize] when the driver yelled `jaguar,'" she recalls. "I looked up and there it was, just laying there in the middle of the road in broad daylight. He just got up and kind of looked over his shoulder as he walked off into the bushes. He didn't seem frightened or anything."

Of course, Kelly didn't literally hack her way through the dense forest, lugging what seemed at times like tons of photographic equipment, just to take a few snapshots. Her research, sponsored mainly by the Wildlife Conservation Society and other organizations, is part of an attempt to measure population densities of jaguars in the rain forests of Central America.

Mysterious Predators

She hopes ultimately to fill in some of the enormous gaps in our understanding of these carnivores. There's precious little known about them aside from the name "jaguar," which comes from the Tupi-Guarani Indians of Amazonia, whose word "yaguara" means "a beast that kills with one bound," Kelly says.