From the Los Angeles Times, A Southwestern legend returns:
“WHAT DO I DO about a leopard in my yard?”
My mom is on the phone, and I’m not sure how to answer. She lives in the Catalina Mountain foothills north of Tucson where mountain lions can occasionally cause a stir. But a leopard?
She tells me that it all began with the barking of her Maltese dog, and when she looked out the window, she saw a large cat moving along the inside wall of her courtyard. The cat, which measured nearly 5 feet long — with a tail of comparable length — leapt over the wall and disappeared. I told her to call Arizona Game and Fish.
Tim Snow, a specialist with the department, arrived at her home a few minutes before I did, and although we searched, we couldn’t locate any tracks in the dry ground. Tim told me that he gets a few reports like this every year from the Catalina foothills. What my mom had seen in her yard, identified from a lineup of various photographs, was a jaguar, the dappled cat, the world’s third largest and the only one in the New World that roars.