A Rare ‘Cloud Jaguar’ Was Spotted in Honduran Mountains for the First Time in a Decade, Representing a Win for Conservationists

The big cats are rarely seen at high elevations, so the sighting suggests that efforts to protect a wildlife corridor in the region are working

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 23, 2026

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A jaguar has been recorded roaming through the Sierra del Merendón mountain range in Honduras for the first time in a decade, offering hope for the animal’s conservation and showing that protected wildlife corridors are working.

The young male—dubbed a “cloud jaguar” because it was at a high elevation—was spotted on February 6 in a forest at an altitude of about 7,200 feet, reports CNN’s Tom Page.

“Jaguar sightings at this elevation are very rare,” says Allison Devlin, director of the jaguar program at Panthera, the wild cat conservation organization that recorded the feline, in a statement to People. What’s more, the occasion marks the highest elevation at which one of these big cats has been observed, Franklin Castañeda, Panthera’s Honduras country director, tells the outlet.

The hefty felines can grow to eight feet long from nose to tail tip and weigh up to about 350 pounds. Jaguars have stocky, heavy bodies with short—but massive—limbs, as well as big heads and teeth that make for a powerful bite. They’re the third-largest cats in the world and the largest in the Americas.

However, the big cats have lost an estimated 20 to 25 percent of their adult population over the past 21 years, or in three generations, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The organization considered the species to be “near threatened,” and the wild feline’s numbers continue to shrink.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are among the biggest threats. The animals currently wander from Mexico to central South America, but the wild felines have lost about 50 percent of their historic range, according to Panthera. They’re also subject to poaching and retaliatory killings in response to harming livestock and out of fear for human safety. 

Various conservation strategies have been under way to protect these big cats, and somewhat coincidentally, “cloud forests”—typically at altitudes of 3,000 to 8,000 feet—have been protected in Honduras since 1987 after policymakers recognized their key role in providing drinking water to nearby communities.

“They didn’t know then, but now we know they were also protecting a very important habitat for jaguars,” Castañeda tells CNN.

The last time a jaguar was spotted in the Honduran Merendón range was in 2016, and even then, the sighting spurred “joyful roars, laughs, hugs and smiles” among the field team, Castañeda wrote at the time in a blog post. The region serves as a vital bridge allowing jaguars to travel between Honduras and Guatemala, and that jaguar observation prompted Panthera and its partners to create a protected wildlife corridor there, according to CNN. The recently spotted jaguar was likely moving from one of the countries to the other to search for females, Castañeda says.

“For jaguars, connectivity is paramount,” Devlin tells Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American. “The Merendón range functions as a stepping stone in the Jaguar Corridor stretching from Mexico to Argentina, meaning one thriving individual there signals the corridor’s potential viability.” The broader corridor has 30 conservation landscapes across its entire area.

The new sighting shows “that protection of habitat across all elevations, including those people might not readily consider to support wild cat passage or territories, are in need of conservation for adaptable and wide-ranging species like the jaguar and puma,” Devlin tells CNN.

It also means that the anti-poaching ranger patrols, wildlife monitoring technologies, prey introduction work and other efforts by Panthera and its partners have “momentum behind them,” Castañeda tells People.

“This record of the return of the cloud jaguar is a positive sign that a decade of dedicated conservation work in this region … is creating real results,” he says.  

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.