Another species whose border crossings have been making news lately is the jaguar. The largest cat in the Western Hemisphere once ranged from Patagonia to the Grand Canyon. But by the 1960s, jaguars were largely gone from the U.S., killed by hunters and ranchers protecting livestock. The nearest breeding population was a small one in northern Sonora.
Lone male jaguars were killed by hunters in Arizona in 1971 and 1986. In 1996, a rancher named Warner Glenn was hunting mountain lions in New Mexico’s Peloncillo Mountains when his dogs treed a jaguar instead. He chose to shoot the cat with a camera instead of a rifle—the first time a jaguar had been left alive in the U.S. in decades.
Since then, more have been spotted north of the border, where they have received a decidedly mixed welcome. In 2009 a male jaguar, called “Macho B,” was trapped south of Tucson by a biologist working for the Arizona Game & Fish Department. Estimated to be 16 years old, Macho B was the oldest known wild jaguar, and had been documented on trail cameras crossing the border in both directions for five years.
The animal was sedated, radio-collared and released but eventually had to be recaptured when it became clear something was wrong. Veterinarians found the cat’s kidneys were failing, possibly from the sedative (a drug meant for bears). Eventually Macho B had to be euthanized. The public was outraged and the events became a major scandal, complete with accusations of agency misconduct and criminal prosecutions of whistleblowers.
Two years later another male, dubbed “El Jefe” (The Boss) by local school kids, showed up on trail cameras in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. Wildlife biologist Chris Bugbee studied El Jefe for four years. Bugbee and his wife, Aletris Neils, also a biologist, run Conservation CATalyst, a small nonprofit dedicated to protecting wild cats, out of their home in Tucson.
El Jefe. Photograph courtesy of University of Arizona and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Bugbee got to know the cat better than anyone. Sometimes El Jefe turned the tables. “I know he followed me,” Bugbee says. “More than once he was the first animal to appear on the camera traps after I left. Once it was only 16 minutes later.” After appearing in hundreds of trail camera images, El Jefe disappeared in late 2015. “He was behaving differently toward the end, staying out in the daylight,” Bugbee says. He thinks the cat probably returned to Mexico to breed.
Biologists like Bugbee and Neils think solo males like El Jefe and Macho B are dispersing north from a population of 125 to 150 animals in northern Sonora, searching for new territories, and possibly mates, at the fringes of their range. (This is one reason the Sky Islands region is so diverse; all these adjoining habitats bring together many species at the edge of their ranges—the biological equivalent of the cantina in Star Wars.) While the increase in sightings is partly because researchers are using more trail cameras, detecting animals they would have missed in the past, Bugbee says, it’s clear that jaguars are starting to push back north across the border. He, Neils, and other experts agree that Trump’s wall would mean the end of jaguars on the U.S. side.
“It’s absolutely essential that the jaguars in northern Mexico be able to expand their range and numbers, to build resilience in the population,” says Randy Serraglio of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator). “They’re extremely vulnerable because they’re pinned into these small, fragmented areas.” Individuals who push out into new territories can be the most important of all to a species’ survival, he says. “Those are the pioneers who develop new skills, adapt to new habitats.”
Public support is overwhelmingly on the side of bringing the big cats back, Serraglio says. “All of Tucson went nuts when El Jefe became this rock star.” Yet conservationists have found themselves at odds with government agencies and interest groups representing ranchers and farmers, many of whom aren’t thrilled by the idea of bringing back a large predator. After the Macho B debacle, “jaguar recovery is a political nightmare for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service,” Serraglio says. The Center has had to sue the agency to get the cats listed under the Endangered Species Act and to declare critical habitat for their survival and recovery as the law requires. The species was listed in 1997.
In March 2014, the Department of the Interior designated 3,092 square kilometers (764,207 acres) of southern Arizona and New Mexico as critical jaguar habitat. In response, the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau and the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association filed suit, arguing the decision was “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious.” The key point of contention is whether jaguar habitat north of the border is critical to the species’ recovery. The Fish & Wildlife Service and Arizona Game & Fish Department have both argued that it isn’t, and that jaguar conservation efforts should instead be focused in Mexico.
In December 2016, the Fish & Wildlife Service and a bi-national Jaguar Recovery Team released a 508-page draft recovery plan that lays out a 50-year, $606 million strategy to bring the big cats back in all 19 countries they inhabit. It identifies an area including parts of Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico as one of two critical recovery zones—the other stretches from Mexico to Argentina—but doesn’t include reintroducing females into the U.S. Southwest. Neils says the opportunity to breed is critical. “Once we have a female here, I think we’ll have cats permanently.”
The existing border walls probably don’t affect jaguar movement much, Neils says, since they prefer to stick to higher-elevation routes where there currently aren’t any barriers. The irony is that the animals are already beginning to repopulate their historic range in the U.S. on their own, she says, compared to expensive species restoration projects that can drag on for years. “They’re solving the problem for us. We can bring them back for free, just by doing nothing!”