Are there Jaguarundis (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) at Santa Lucía? The answer is: yes. Unfortunatly we have not been able to make them visible in our camera trapping project during the last five years. They are said to prefer habitats near water and since we don't have a lot of trails along rivers there isn't really a good spot for a camera traps near a stream. We had hope that maybe the camera trap near the Cock-of-the-Rock Lek or the lowest of our water falls would sooner or later yield in evidence of Jaguarundis as both spots are near rivers, but so far ... nothing!
But that doesn't mean that we haven't got any photographic evidence of Jaguarundis! We also regularly place cameras in our forest in order to film hummingbird / flower interactions and sometimes these cameras also have the near-by trails in the picture. A few days ago we checked some of the pictures that didn't show hummingbirds but other things, such as birds or mammals and ... there is was: a Jaguarundi walking on trail leading to the Cock-of-the-Rock lek. The camera trap near-by had not caught it. And here's the kicker: the camera was actually placed in 2019 by two volunteers who helped in the hummingbird project: Julia Koslowska and Nicolas Kurzweil. Them lucky bastards! :)
Shame on us - we had almost forgotten about that picture and kept claiming that there was no recent evidence of Jaguarundis out there.
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