A hidden camera bolted to a boulder in the Argentine highlands caught something researchers wait years to see: the spotted, ringed tail of an Andean cat, one of the rarest wild felines on Earth.

  • 2,100 mature Andean cats estimated to remain across the entire Andes range
  • 3 consecutive years the species has now been photographed at this same site
  • 112,000+ acres of habitat protected here since 2014
  • Only wild cat in the Americas listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List

The sighting happened a few kilometres east of Argentina's La Payunia Protected Natural Area in Mendoza province, where Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Argentina has run camera traps for two decades. It's the third confirmed sighting since 2024 at this particular stretch of the reserve, which conservationists say is no coincidence.

Why camera traps matter here

The Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita) is notoriously hard to study. It lives at high altitude, moves mostly at dawn and dusk, and its population is so sparse that most wildlife biologists spend entire careers without seeing one in person.

That makes repeated camera-trap confirmations at La Payunia unusually valuable. Each image adds hard data to a species the IUCN Red List still classifies with wide uncertainty, since there is no reliable range-wide population count — only regional estimates built from exactly this kind of fieldwork.

WCS Argentina has anchored its monitoring program in La Payunia since securing a 2014 grant from Greater Good Charities to help the province of Mendoza purchase and protect more than 112,000 acres of the reserve. That funding paid for land acquisition, reduced livestock grazing pressure, and ongoing wildlife-corridor restoration between neighboring ranches.

A landscape recovering species by species

The cat's return isn't happening in isolation. Researchers say it's tracking alongside a broader rebound in the food web that supports it.

As grazing has eased, native vegetation has recovered, and prey species like the viscacha — a rabbit-sized relative of the chinchilla that makes up a large share of the Andean cat's diet — have become more common across the landscape. Monitoring at a nearby site called Lonco Vaca has also recorded a jump in mara sightings, a large native rodent related to guinea pigs.

"Spotting Andean cats is just one of the positive changes we are observing across the La Payunia landscape," said Andrés Novaro, land conservation director of WCS Argentina.

Novaro's team notes that as human disturbance has dropped and habitat has recovered, prey populations are rebuilding throughout the reserve — which in turn is what keeps apex predators like the Andean cat returning to the same patch of mountainside year after year.

What happens next

WCS Argentina plans to keep its camera-trap network running at La Payunia indefinitely, both to track the Andean cat and to document how the wider recovery of the reserve's wildlife corridors is playing out over time.

For a species this elusive, "boring" repeat sightings are exactly the goal. A camera that catches the same ghost cat three years running means the habitat underneath it is still doing its job — and that a 2014 land deal is still paying dividends for one of the world's rarest wild cats more than a decade later.