Defenders Magazine

Is the Big Cat Back?

Against long odds, jaguars are crossing from Mexico into the United States—and new conservation efforts aim to help these animals prosper on both sides of the border.

By Peter Friederici

© Gerry Ellis/ Minden Pictures

It’s only 65 miles from the nearest small town to northern Mexico’s greatest jaguar stronghold. But even without the torrential spring rains, it still takes the better part of a day to navigate the rocky, four-wheel-drive-only road.

What you’ll reach, eventually, is Los Pavos, a 10,000-acre ranch where you can climb the arid ridges and see more than 15 other mountain ranges winding off blue in the distance. “You really feel like you’re out in the wild, says Juan Carlos Bravo, who manages the ranch for the Mexican conservation group Naturalia—and for the local jaguars. “That remoteness really gets into you."

It’s that same “remoteness” that has been the saving grace for jaguars in Sonora—and the United States. Here, in the rugged heart of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range, a small population of jaguars has withstood many decades of hunting and persecution by ranchers. The area has likely served as the source for a handful of the big cats that have, against long odds, shown up in Arizona over the last decade.

With new conservation initiatives now taking hold in Sonora, there’s hope that the continent’s largest wild cat will persist here and on the northern frontier of its range. But to be successful, the work undertaken in places like Los Pavos will have to be linked to progressive management strategies in the more heavily peopled areas to the north—and to the idea that the imaginary line between the two countries shouldn’t be a real boundary for wildlife.

Green with evergreen oaks and pinyon pines, the forested borderlands that stretch in all directions from the meeting points of Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua are home to many wildlife species—cougars, black bears, coatimundis and numerous bird species—precisely because they’re so rugged.

That point was underscored in 1996, when the hounds of cougar hunters cornered two jaguars in two southern Arizona mountain ranges more than 125 miles apart. Rugged and forested, the Peloncillos and the Baboquivaris both extend north from Sonora into Arizona like rocky spines, providing excellent wildlife corridors rich with water, cover and prey.

Breaking with long-standing tradition—such encounters in the American Southwest usually resulted in dead cats—both hunters shot their quarry with a camera instead of a gun. Prior to the 1960s, jaguars were periodically shot or trapped just north of the border, where a handful of jaguars roamed. Numbers thinned farther north, although some jaguars were found as far as the Grand Canyon.

Over the decades, hunters, trappers and predator-control agents did their job too well: When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed jaguars as endangered only south of the border—assuming the big cats no longer roamed farther north.

The 1996 sightings proved that assumption false and presented state and federal agencies with a new dilemma: How do you manage a large, charismatic predator that everyone had assumed was long gone?

In an effort to avert endangered species listing in the United States, the state of Arizona, ranchers, hunters and conservation groups—including Defenders of Wildlife—joined together to address jaguar conservation issues. FWS, under pressure, still listed the species the following year. But the newly created Jaguar Conservation Team took on a life of its own and met with some positive results.

For example, to uncover the big cat’s current numbers on this side of the border, Jack Childs, the hunter who spotted the jaguar in the Baboquivari range and a member of the conservation team, helped found the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project, which placed about 40 automatic cameras in the mountains. In the last four years, they have snapped photos of two and possibly three jaguars.

The task force also helped persuade the states of Arizona and New Mexico to increase legal protections for jaguars. One member, the Arizona Houndsmen hunters’ group, began a reward program to prevent illegal killing, and the Malpais Borderlands Group, a local organization working toward sustainable ranching, created a fund to compensate ranchers who lose livestock to jaguars. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, an agency that controls predators for ranchers, has even agreed to suspend the use of certain lethal control measures in the border region.

“I think we’ve reduced the possibility of killing a jaguar for depredation or by poaching,” says Childs. “It would be pretty hard now for someone to kill one of our jaguars in the United States and get away with it.” Although he does note that a jaguar—likely one of those photographed by his remote cameras—was killed in Mexico not far from the border about a year ago. Whether this cooperative approach can resolve the stickiest issues in U.S. jaguar conservation remains uncertain.

These days the biggest threat to the persistence of jaguars in the United States today may come not from land-use questions but from the border itself. In the wake of 9/11, congressional representatives and federal agencies alike have proposed walls, lights and new roads along the border that have the potential to seriously impede the movements of jaguars and other wildlife. To date, the Department of Homeland Security and its subsidiary agencies have refused to participate in the Jaguar Conservation Team.

So far, the cat crossings continue. Most biologists agree that they’re juvenile males coming from a Mexican population near the rugged headwaters of the Rio Yaqui in east-central Sonora, about 130 miles south of the border. In the 1990s, Mexican biologist Carlos Lopez Gonzalez heard about historical accounts of jaguar hunts there. Upon investigation, he found that jaguars still claimed this territory—although ranchers were killing them at an alarming rate. Mexico officially protected jaguars in 1987, but rumor had it that some ranchers still paid their vaqueros a bounty for killing a jaguar.

But Lopez Gonzalez felt that the area held promise, estimating that it held 100 to 120 jaguars that interacted with populations farther south in Sinaloa. Best of all, the region is extremely rugged and sees little human activity apart from limited cattle grazing. “Some of the best populations of jaguars for long-term protection in Mexico are the ones in Sonora and Sinaloa,” he says, “because the human impacts are and will remain lower than farther south.”

In 2003 the Mexican conservation organization Naturalia bought Los Pavos, 10,000 acres of subtropical woodland and thornscrub along the Rio Aros in the heart of jaguar territory. Under the banner of the Northern Jaguar Project (NJP), a new Tucson-based nonprofit coalition that includes Defenders of Wildlife, Naturalia and others, the ranch was fenced, cattle were removed and “jaguar guardians,” who live on-site to conduct field studies of jaguars and other animals, were hired.

However remote, a 10,000-acre sanctuary is hardly sufficient for jaguars. Males in arid lands need as much as 50 square miles of territory or more—four or five times what they require in wetter places. To that end, NJP is currently raising funds to purchase another 40,000 acres of ranchland adjacent to Los Pavos—which would protect not only jaguars but also other wildlife heavyweights such as eared trogons, military macaws, ocelots, river otters and the southernmost-known nesting bald eagles.

Still, even with the addition, the area can only shelter a few jaguars—perhaps one male and a few females. “We plan to manage Los Pavos as a core for a broader area—as a sanctuary—where these animals can live and not be hunted,” says Juan Carlos Bravo. “But we know that it and the other ranches we’d like to purchase will not be sufficient for jaguars and other large predators. We know we will need to work with other ranchers in the area.”

Naturalia and NJP considered establishing a compensation fund in the area, modeled on those Defenders established in wolf habitat in the United States. But the area is so remote that it is almost impossible to find dead cattle or verify what predator killed them.

For that reason, the three groups are raising funds for what amounts to a bounty program—except this one isn’t lethal. The plan is to set up automatic cameras on nearby ranches and hire ranch workers to maintain them. Whenever a camera photographs a jaguar, the ranch owner will receive a payment of as much as $500—so that wildlife will be worth more alive than dead. “You have to involve the surrounding ranchers in a way that they have some economic benefit, and become wildlife-friendly ranchers,” says Diana Hadley, president of NJP.

Already, says Lopez Gonzalez, ranchers in the area are less likely to kill jaguars than only a few years ago. The old ranchers’ attitude that the only good jaguar is a dead jaguar seems to be changing on both sides of the border. Increasingly, people who live in the rugged border region appear more willing to share their habitat with other large, wide-ranging mammals.

“I was pleasantly surprised to find a higher-than-expected level of environmental consciousness among ranch owners in the local municipality,” says Rick Williams, a Sonora-based wildlife photographer who helped found NJP with Hadley. “I think most are willing to work with us if we can demonstrate some economic benefit to them and the community.”

Peter Friederici is an Arizona-based journalist. His latest book is Nature’s Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation. For information on efforts to conserve the world’s northernmost jaguar population and how you can help, visit www.northernjaguarproject.org.