In Search of the Jaguar: Up Close and Rare

"60 Minutes" Cameras Capture Nature's Most Elusive Big Cats in Brazil

Play CBS Video Video Preview: In Search of the Jaguar "60 Minutes" went in search of the most elusive of all of nature's big cats, the jaguar, and captured amazing footage of them in the Brazilian jungle. Bob Simon reports this Sunday, Jan. 30, 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Jaguar conservationist Alan Rabinowitz, who has made the animals his life's work, has gone months without seeing one. A wildlife photographer known for his jaguar pictures went three months with nothing but paw prints to shoot. But when "60 Minutes" went to Brazil in search of the most elusive of all of nature's big cats, they came out of the jungle on cue for their close-ups, one even swimming by the film crew's boat - a sight never encountered by Rabinowitz over decades of studying jaguars. The result is a Bob Simon story that takes viewers as close as humanly possible to the nocturnal cats in the jungles of Brazil that will be broadcast on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, Jan. 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. "Even though this is the densest, highest concentration of jaguars matching any place on Earth, there's still a limited number of jaguars here," says Rabinowitz, who has studied the animals for 30 years and is the CEO of a new conservation group, Panthera. He tells Simon that "60 Minutes" will have to get lucky. Jaguars in the wild are much more difficult to find than other big cats like lions or tigers. Just ask nature photographer Steve Winter. "I spent the first three months in the jungle and got a big fat zero…I felt like my career was over," he says.
Simon and the crew went out on the Cuiaba River at night with Rabinowitz and Winter and had no trouble getting wonderful, close-up shots of the jaguars - luck Rabinowitz marveled at. "Look at her, God, she's beautiful, oh man and then she looks right at you," he says. "This one was a great sighting." And then Rabinowitz saw a sight he had never seen in all his years: a jaguar swimming right by their boats. "That was spectacular. I've never seen that before. What luck, what unbelievable luck, just as it's swimming across," he tells Simon. "There was no fear there. There was just pure curiosity. Like, 'What are you guys bothering me about?'" says Rabinowitz. The same jaguar stuck around to be videotaped again as it watched the crew on their boats from the shoreline. "Look at that, it's just sitting there on the mound, yes, just sitting there it's phenomenal," says Rabinowitz.