An adult male jaguar — the only known wild jaguar in the United States — found a home in the Santa Rita Mountains and didn’t just visit from Mexico, a new study concludes.

Remote cameras put into the wild for a research project photographed the jaguar — later dubbed El Jefe — 118 times over 34 months, says the study, done by University of Arizona and U.S. Geological Survey researchers. On average, the jaguar was photographed once every 7.9 days in the Santa Ritas southeast of Tucson.

After the federally funded research ended last June, the jaguar, now believed to be about age 7, continued to show up regularly through mid-October of last year on photos. Those were taken by remote cameras operated separately under the direction of UA and the nonprofit group Conservation CATalyst, with support from the activist Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.

Since then, El Jefe has gone AWOL. Authorities and environmentalists say they don’t know where it went. One heavily discussed possibility is that the animal headed south to breed in Sonora, where female jaguars are known to live, although Melanie Culver, lead investigator of the UA/federal study, said it’s possible it went elsewhere in Arizona.

No female jaguars have been documented in this country since one was shot in the White Mountains in 1963. Jaguars are listed as an endangered species.

Researchers presume this jaguar is a resident in the Santa Ritas “because he was photographed by our cameras every month of the year from November 2012 to February 2015,” the study said.