Elusive Wild Dog Caught on Camera in Surprising Place
New camera trap pictures reveal bush dogs north of Panama for the first time.
What the biologist saw instead floored him: A short, stocky carnivore that is rarely seen and wasn’t even known to live in the country.
He had captured the first images of the bush dog north of Panama—and at the highest elevation ever, more than 4,900 feet above sea level. (See a rare Amazon jungle dog caught on video.)
“We had been putting so much effort into finding something that was incredibly rare that when we finally got the image, it was like Christmas,” says Schipper, field conservation research director at the Phoenix Zoo.
About the size of a house cat, the bush dog (Speothos venaticus) lives in forests from southern Brazil to Panama. Although records exist of bush dog sightings in Costa
