Seven volunteers, ten cameras, and the cat nobody has ever seen in a zoo

Seven or eight times a year, Hernán García and six neighbours climb the rocky slopes of the Cajón del Maipo, two hours from Santiago, to swap batteries and memory cards in ten camera traps. They are looking for Leopardus jacobita, the Andean cat — fewer than 1,400 of them are thought to remain. What their cameras have found is changing where Chile thinks the animal lives.

The Andean cat is the most threatened feline in the Americas, and it has spent most of its recorded existence as an absence. A naturalist documented the species here in 1891. The next photographic confirmation in this part of Chile came in 2014, at Valle Nevado — a gap of 123 years. In 2022, climbers at Plutón La Gloria found an adult pair with two kittens.

Density is the reason for the silence. Published camera-trap studies report detection rates so low that a site may need thousands of trap-nights for a single confirmed record. A one-off survey passes through and finds nothing. A small array, serviced again and again by people who live nearby, accumulates what the large expeditions miss. That is the quiet logic of Guardianes del Gato Andino del Cajón del Maipo.

The group's data carry an argument. Conservation attention has gravitated towards high peaks, but the cameras show that low valleys such as Las Arenas matter too. These valleys work as biological corridors, keeping populations from drifting into genetic isolation, and their wetland vegetation feeds the vizcachas on which the cats almost entirely depend. Protect only the summits and you protect a fragment.

Around the volunteers stands a wider network. Rodrigo Villalobos, a veterinarian who directs the NGO Seeking the Andean Wild Cats, provides training. Nicolás Lagos coordinates the Andean Cat Alliance for Chile. The citizens' campaign Queremos Tupungato, led by Pilar Delpiano, has been running for seven years. In the valleys upstream, Anglo American's Los Bronces and Codelco's Andina division work the same mountains — terrain of rock glaciers and permafrost that feeds the Maipo river, and with it most of Santiago's drinking water.

The decree establishing the conservation area was withdrawn from the Comptroller General in March and resubmitted in May. It rests, in part, on images gathered by seven people carrying batteries uphill.

The volunteers also build cat-shaped educational displays and take them out to the public — an odd, homemade gesture for an animal most Chileans will never encounter. But that is the point. The cat cannot be shown in a cage, only photographed in the place it belongs, by people who go back for the memory cards.

No Andean cat has ever been kept in captivity. There is not one in any zoo in the world.