Got an account on conceptart.org to try and get my portfolio reviewed, found out about their “Character of the Week” contest, and was really interested in the current prompt (Horsemen of the Apocalypse as non-standard centaurs).
Here’s the initial exploratory sketches. I really hope bird-taurs are allowed, because I quite like vulture!Death. But I guess if not, jaguar!War (JagWar? LOL) might be who I go with.
Caption reads: “These photos of a male jaguar were captured by a trail camera Jan. 6 [2021] in the Dos Cabezas-Chiricahua region of southern Arizona. […].”
Caption reads: “The only known ocelot in Arizona, dubbed little Jefe, capture on video […].”
Excerpt:
Two of the desert’s rarest animals, a jaguar and an ocelot, showed up again on trail cameras in the rugged southern Arizona mountains. […]
The jaguar was spotted on Jan. 6 [2021] in the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains near the U.S.-Mexico border in southeast Arizona. On Jan. 14 [2021], the ocelot was photographed less than 100 miles west in the Huachuca Mountains.
The male jaguar is the only one of its kind known to be in the U.S. It was first photographed in 2016 and has been observed on 45 separate occasions, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department. The male ocelot, the only known one in Arizona, has been observed 94 times since 2012. Both cats are listed as endangered […].
Only seven jaguars […] have been documented in the U.S. since 1996, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. All of them have been in southern Arizona or southwestern New Mexico.
El Jefe, a jaguar that was famously photographed in Arizona’s Whetstone Mountains in 2011, was last seen in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson around September 2015. His whereabouts are now unknown. […]
Only 1% of the jaguar’s total range is in Arizona […]. Since the 1880s, the endangered cats have lost more than half of their original territory, which once spanned from the southern U.S to Argentina. Today, the northernmost known breeding population of jaguars is about 100 miles south of the border town of Douglas. At that site, there are about 150 animals. The jaguar in Arizona is likely from this population[…].
Jaguars have long faced threats on both sides of the border. In the 1800s, as ranchers expanded westward and brought their cattle to what is now southeast Arizona, the U.S. government subsidized campaigns to eradicate predators, including the jaguar and ocelot. […] In Mexico, the cat now faces many of the same threats its ancestors did more than a century ago in the United States, […]. Ranchers see the jaguar as a threat to their livestock. […] Roads and development are fragmenting their habitat. […]
The Huachuca and Chiricahua mountains, two important migratory corridors for jaguars and ocelots, were blasted through to make way for wall construction. At the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and the San Pedro River, 30-foot bollard-style fencing now cuts animals off from southern populations […].
Headline, all photos, all captions, and text published by: Erin Stone. “Elusive jaguar and ocelot captured on Southern Arizona trail cameras.” Arizona Republic, also posted at AZ Central. 3 February 2021.
Little Jefe. Caption reads: “This male ocelot was photographed by a trail camera Jan. 11 [2021] in the Huachuca Mountains […].”
