A border wall could drive the jaguar extinct in America

SAHUARIPA, Mexico — Somewhere in the remote crags of the Sierra Madre Occidental of eastern Sonora, a female jaguar stalks a Mexican deer or a band of tree-climbing coatis.

She could be the one.

Her stomach and nose could lead her north a few dozen frontier miles to join one of the solitary males that have skulked the southern Arizona mountains in recent years.

Biologists and wildlife advocates think jaguars could pair off north of the border someday, if Americans leave the trail open and if a female follows it.

At least seven male jaguars have ventured into U.S. territory since 1996 — five in southern Arizona and two in southwestern New Mexico, places where their kind effectively had been extinct for decades.

Automated trail cameras have detected two new Arizona jaguars since last fall, raising hopes among conservationists for the big cat's return.

The jaguar's fate could hinge on the fate of President Donald Trump's border-wall proposal. Build an impenetrable wall and no female or male cat will make it into the United States. The species will go extinct in this country.

But the jaguar's story is bigger than a wall. In Mexico, the cat faces many of the same threats its ancestors did in the United States a century ago. Ranchers see the jaguar as a livestock-killing predator. Roads and development are fragmenting the habitat. The food chain weakens as people alter the landscape.

Before the jaguar can return to Arizona and New Mexico, it will have to survive south of the border. Conservationists are trying to protect the cat's hunting grounds, trying to persuade ranchers to share the land. And biologists say if the habitat can sustain the jaguar, the rest of the ecosystem will have a better shot at survival.

READ MORE:

Ocelots try to survive as habitat disappears



In this country, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the jaguar as endangered and is completing a species-recovery plan. Within the U.S., the agency’s draft plan — proposed a month before Trump took office — focuses on maintaining connections to Mexico.

Without a wall, there are currently at least seven crucial wilderness crossings that a migrating Mexican jaguar could pad along to meet her mate.

But any structure impervious to humans would also turn back big cats. For the jaguar — the region’s “apex predator” — sealing the border would seal its fate in this country.

Conservation biologists don’t usually speak with such black-and-white clarity about individual threats to wildlife, but on this point there is broad consensus. Jaguars and people are known to cross the border in the same mountains. Building an unbroken barrier to stop the people means extinction in America for the jaguar.

An American dilemma

America’s borderlands are surprisingly diverse environments, with mountainous “sky island” forests looming above an arid sea of grasslands and cactus crusts, cut through with a few improbable river oases. It’s a series of interconnected ecosystems supporting some of the country’s richest animal varieties, all in a delicate balance that humans love but also change.

The jaguar's precarious frontier wanderings remain a hint of what's still possible on both sides of the border. Its place atop the region's wildland hierarchy is undisputed, but unsecured.

Increasing protections for Mexico’s jaguars and their mountainous paths to old stalking grounds in Arizona and New Mexico could eventually cause the big cats to expand their turf, said big-cat expert Howard Quigley, who advised the government on its recovery plan and directs jaguar and mountain lion programs for the international cat conservation group Panthera.

There is “no doubt in my mind” they could then resume breeding in the country that hounded them to oblivion last century, he said.

"The wall would eliminate that possibility."

That’s a tradeoff some border residents want.

Arivaca rancher Jim Chilton said motion-sensing cameras photographed 350 migrants carrying bundles — presumably drugs — across his ranch northwest of Nogales last year. Americans must choose between national security and wildlife crossings, he believes.

“You can’t have both,” he said.

SPECIAL REPORT | THE WALL

2,000-mile journey in shadow of border wall

The wall that will make a human smuggler rich

Border crossers, and the wall that won't stop them

No fence has stopped drug traffickers at border

Border ranchers, in a world without a wall

It’s not exactly a global existential question for a rippling, human-size spotted cat with jaws that can crush a mountain lion’s skull. The jaguar inhabits a more or less continuous band from the Sonoran Desert’s sky island mountains through Central and South American tropical jungles and into northern Argentina.

The species, Panthera onca, can survive without Arizona’s oak woodlands fringe.

The question is whether the United States is a lesser country without “el tigre,” its original bad hombre.

Wherever they live, jaguars are more than just a curiosity. They are a sign of health for all things, because they top their food chain. Requiring big and relatively wild country, abundant prey and clean water, their very existence indicates a landscape's continuing ecological integrity.

The government could build in wildlife crossings on remote stretches of the border, and evidence from farther south in jaguar range suggests the animals can negotiate human structures, Quigley said. If Arizona’s would-be pioneering female ran into a wall, she might probe it for an opening instead of turning back.

But anything big enough for a jaguar is also big enough for a human.

Gallery: Border wildlife

Missing a part of itself

Randy Young lives among the big cats about 120 miles south of the border, even if he only ever sees them via motion-triggered camera traps.

A dual citizen, he works there, in the heart of Sonora’s jaguar country. It’s a hideout in a hilly frontier of thornscrub and semi-arid tropical woodlands with twilight vistas of a dozen peaks that have never seen an electric light.

It is seclusion and abundance like this that make Arizona an afterthought in global jaguar conservation. Northwestern Mexico remains a jaguar breeding ground, with more than 500 of the cats living between Sonora and its southern neighbor, the Sinaloa state.

To Young, this a reservoir for recovery from which jaguars may multiply and move out, perhaps to the north. He manages the Northern Jaguar Reserve, a remote 55,000-acre Mexican conservation outpost that he manages for the Tucson-based Northern Jaguar Project.

He knows the jaguar’s powers.

He believes Arizona is missing a part of itself.

He recalls a night at the reserve when he heard the only New World cat that roars, a rasp often described as a quickening “uh-uh-uh” bellow. It was the predator that Mexicans know colloquially as el tigre, or the tiger, though it is not known to eat humans like its more feared and endangered Asian cousin.

That roar in the dark was a rare direct contact, the cat announcing his dominance.

During another visit, Young drove over a rise and spied a turkey vulture stooped over a bloodied and dead mountain lion, the back of its neck and head showing telltale jaguar crunches. The bone-smashing jaguar is the rare cat that does not usually go for the throat.

Young would eventually display the perforated skull at his home in Sahuaripa.

Big cat experts say such a territorial fight is rare, that rivals generally mark their turf to avoid run-ins that can be fatal even for the victor if a battle scar becomes infected. To Young, though, the skull symbolizes centuries of awe throughout the Americas.

Video: The last cat

An ambivalent homeland

For a long time, America was out to get jaguars and any other predators that threatened the lambs and calves that poured into the Southwest with the settlers.

As Arizona and New Mexico entered the Union in 1912, settlers viewed meat eaters as competition. By then, New Mexico already had killed the last jaguar it would confirm for nearly 90 years. Arizona at statehood had yet to extirpate some two dozen jaguars along a 200-mile highland arc.

Starting in 1915, the U.S. Biological Survey, a forerunner of today’s Fish and Wildlife Service, started helping ranchers and homesteaders protect their flocks from jaguars. Its agents hunted, trapped and poisoned cats, while the states paid bounty hunters.

SEE ALSO: How wall could silence endangered species

Agents worked under the motto “bring them in no matter how,” according to “Borderland Jaguars,” a 2001 science and pioneer literature review by Arizona State University biologist David Brown and Mexican jaguar expert Carlos Lopez Gonzalez.

The authors left it to readers to decide whether Arizona and New Mexico had hosted a thriving breeding population in the century before extirpation. They found the record unclear, and noted evidence that hunting guides may have captured a few of the jaguars in Sonora and released them in Arizona.

But their listing of cat killings from the border and the sky islands up through the Mogollon Rim to the Grand Canyon made clear a dwindling incidence of females before the last one succumbed more than half a century ago.

For years, wildlife managers believed the jaguar had gone extinct in this country, but in 1996 two houndsmen, one in New Mexico’s Peloncillo Mountains and one in Arizona’s Baboquivari Mountains, inadvertently treed separate male jaguars and photographed them before letting them go.

With evidence of the jaguar's continued survival, U.S. biologists sought to protect the cats under the Endangered Species Act.

Arizona balked at the potential bureaucratic hindrances to land use that could come with new federal protections, but the following year the U.S. added jaguars to the list of animals it safeguards within its boundaries.

In a draft recovery plan, the Fish and Wildlife Service established jaguar “critical habitat” in the sky islands.

Arizona objected. While still protecting jaguars from hunting, state game officials argued in 2013 that nothing in the state could be considered “critical” to survival of a species that lives almost exclusively south of the border.

“Recovery of the jaguar is completely dependent on conservation within the 99% of its range that lie outside of the United States,” the Arizona Game and Fish Department wrote to its federal counterparts in 2013.

Man and myth

Many cultures celebrate the jaguar as a mythic creature symbolizing wildness and strength, Young said. “And possibly savagery.”

The Olmec culture on the Gulf of Mexico considered the jaguar a cave god controlling the land and earthquakes and, later, the cat figured in Aztec creation stories.

Young is the rare 21st century professional jack-of-all-trades, by turns professional auto mechanic, sculptor, homebuilder, inventor and outdoor adventure guide.

Over the last two years, he has parlayed each of these skills into a job he calls the most fulfilling of his 44 years. He is preserving wilderness for its animal and human inhabitants and fostering trans-border respect for a noble beast.

He’s also fixing roads by hand, maintaining equipment and creating art for the cause.

It’s a calling he didn’t know was beckoning until a friend invited him on a weeklong mountain-biking trip from Sahuaripa to the reserve with the jaguar project’s Tucson-based director, who happened to be looking for a reserve manager.

Young was tiring of his latest jobs in the city, contracting and metalworking, and wanted to get closer to nature.

He found himself pedaling past townsfolk selling vegetables from wheelbarrows, grinding up the dirt roads and peering over cliffs across rows of mountains with no one on them. He camped under the stars and pondered the privilege of living in a place where big cats of several species outnumbered people for miles around.

“This is way better,” he figured. “Way more of a purpose.”

It doesn’t pay so great, and he has to find occasional odd jobs when he’s back in Tucson.

“There’s lots of people that make life sacrifices for a job they hate,” he said. “I’m making job sacrifices for a life I love.”

He would replant native grass seeds to maximize deer health and would round up cattle trespassing onto the reserve to eat that grass. He would protect creeks and ponds from which jaguars rarely wander more than a dozen miles or so.

He would make it his passion to save the cat at the top of his home continent’s food chain, thereby saving everything under it — all the plants, animals and waters that any species, including humans, could need from their environment.

A worthy neighbor

Sahuaripa is a cow town of a few thousand people in low-slung adobe homes, some of which date to the 1600s, fortified with newer flagstone facades.

Ranch families with charcoal-stoked grill carts sling local beef tacos and tripe tostadas in the evenings. Life and commerce revolve around the cattle that share the surrounding mountains with jaguars and ocelots.

Young stands out around town, a strapping, bald figure with spangled sunglasses and mutton-chop sideburns. He knows he appears American, though his mother is Mexican and he grew up in both Chihuahua and New Mexico.

On street corners, he stops to engage people in Spanish about their families, their town government and their street’s potholes.

He wants them to know the jaguar man is part of the community, so that maybe they’ll consider the jaguar a worthy neighbor. The first step in establishing a jaguar population north of the border is to protect and grow the cat’s numbers here.

Around town, he has overseen mural paintings in homage to the majestic native cats and has guided summer camps teaching local kids about their ecology. He hopes to start an annual music and art festival blending the species and town names into “Jaguaripa” and invite musicians and artists from Tucson to show Mexicans how much Americans appreciate the animals.

Each fall, he returns to Tucson to lead a thousands-strong All Souls Procession of mourners celebrating the lives of the departed, always wearing a mask he has sculpted. Last year, he wore a jaguar head that he molded in clay and then cast in urethane and hung from a welder’s mask on his brow.

In Tucson, his goal is to stoke enthusiasm for a wild visitor that might recolonize Arizona if allowed. He wants them to imagine the day the female jaguar in Mexico sets out from his backyard, bound for theirs.

Infusing the spirit of the cat

In Sahuaripa, the plan is to create a generation that might accept jaguars as the ultimate indicators of environmental health instead of fearing and persecuting them.

“If I can get the town to identify with Jaguaripa at all, that’s a big coup in guerrilla marketing,” Young said. “If I can get people to take pride and wear the (jaguar) shirts and stuff, I won.”

The county’s economic development director is on board. Carlos Martinez used another rare Sahuaripa resource to explain why preserving the environment is in everyone’s interest.

Old-timers made and sold barrel cactus candy, he said, until they hacked down practically every barrel cactus in the county doing it. Suddenly, candy production ceased. Then the deer and javelina that once enjoyed cactus fruit declined.

“That made the jaguar eat more cattle,” he said.

Younger residents see losing native plants and animals as a problem, he said.

In Sahuaripa and in Sonora’s metropolitan capital of Hermosillo, environmental educator Santa Napoles with the non-profit Conciencia works to build support for coexistence. In the jaguar hills, she tells tomorrow’s cowboys and cowgirls how saving their whole environment is the best way to reduce predator conflicts. In the big city, she preaches saving jaguars to protect a healthy environment for humans.

“When you find a jaguar in one place, that means that ecosystem is complete, it’s healthy,” she said. Jaguars need clean air, water and food, “all stuff we need also.”

Captive genes

A captive jaguar family at Hermosillo’s zoo, Centro Ecologico de Sonora, provides city dwellers with both a hint at their country’s wild majesty and a lesson in the conflicts on the ranches.

A rancher trapped a Sonoran jaguar years ago but took pity when he saw it and did not shoot it. The cat had ruined his teeth by gnawing on the trap’s steel cage and could not return to a life hunting wild prey.

For a time, the Phoenix Zoo fed and cared for him and then sent him to Hermosillo, where he has since bred with a female from Chiapas and produced two cubs. In March, Napoles, the educator, visited the youngest, a 6-month-old female named Tutu’uli, the Yaqui word for beautiful.

Her handlers turned her loose to romp in the grass and pounce at fish in a pond at a natural area behind the visitor exhibits. She crouched and launched herself at a zookeeper’s thigh, playing with claws retracted.

She’s being groomed as a people pleaser, but her genes may yet bolster the wild cats if breeders can isolate her cubs from human contact.

“She can be enthusiastic about the hunt,” Napoles said, something her older brother — a 110-pound juvenile who cuddles with his keepers — has lost. The hunting instinct, along with Tutu’uli’s fondness for water, make her a good candidate for breeding cubs for potential reintroduction to the mountains.

“They have a lot of hope that her descendants may be released in the wild,” Napoles said.

A plan for recovery

Maps in a U.S. courtroom can matter as much to species conservation as the habitat itself. Only a lawsuit and a federal judge could define the jaguar’s territory in a state where it scarcely lives anymore.

Arizona Game and Fish supports jaguar conservation and the Endangered Species Act, state officials told their federal counterparts, but calling unoccupied territory essential to recovery “will lead to erosion of current conservation efforts by confusing and alienating conservation partners” north and south of the border.

Federal biologists, on a judge’s order, nonetheless outlined nearly 1,200 square miles of critical jaguar habitat in wooded or scrubby mountains of southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. The designation gives Fish and Wildlife review powers for major projects occurring on those federal lands.

The draft plan that biologists are considering leaves unanswered a question that most such species goals address: It doesn’t say how many jaguars should live in the U.S. before the country can consider them no longer endangered.

Instead, the plan relies mostly on measuring population health and increasing numbers and distribution in Mexico, while maintaining at least two trans-border crossings free of barriers and with sufficient protected habitat to entice traversing jaguars.

A continuous wall, if that’s what the U.S. builds, would by definition kill the recovery.

“Fences designed to prevent the passage of humans across the border also prevent passage of jaguars,” according to the draft recovery plan. That “would likely adversely affect the presence and persistence of jaguars in the U.S.”

Normally, conservationists could use the Endangered Species Act in a legal fight to thwart big projects that a judge might decide imperils a listed species. But with the 2005 REAL ID Act, Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to override all competing laws in securing the border.

Many who doubt a wall’s effectiveness in stopping human movements say wildlife is collateral damage in a pointless border war.

“I’m super concerned,” said Tadeo Pfister, who grew up in Nogales and is a Sky Island Alliance program manager working with Mexican organizations to help preserve border wildlife corridors. “And I don’t think it’s going to do anything for our national security.

“We could work together with (Mexico) for a fraction of what it costs, this silly wall.”

A friend or a foe?

Sahuaripa County’s ranches are rustic by American standards. They lack electricity and running water. Cowboys ride them on horseback and corral cattle in pens woven from mesquite trunks and limbs.

Until the Northern Jaguar Project’s hired hands started trucking in latrines — a sight that led skeptical cowboys to accuse them of transplanting and releasing jaguars from the boxes — there were few outhouses. The program offers them as a favor to ranchers and as an environmental upgrade for the arroyos that send water toward its own reserve.

The Northern Jaguar Project also makes coexistence financially rewarding for participating ranchers. It pays for evidence of prowlers on their land.

A rancher’s first instinct has long been to trap or shoot a jaguar before it can kill a calf. It’s the same instinct that led U.S. agents to hunt and essentially eradicate jaguars from the Southwest from the early- to mid-20th century.

For nearly a decade, the Northern Jaguar Project has worked to reverse the instinct.

The group’s biologists have strapped motion-sensing trail cameras to trees on lands owned by willing Mexican ranchers and rewarded them for every jaguar, ocelot, mountain lion or bobcat photographed in any given 24-hour period.

A jaguar photo is worth most: 5,000 pesos, or about $260. Bobcats are worth a tenth that, while the others are valued in between.

The reward is meant to approximate what a rancher might otherwise pay a trapper to remove a cat. Trapping jaguars is illegal but not strictly enforced in Mexico.

Recipients must agree to stop any hunting of deer or javelina on their land so the cats will have sufficient prey and won’t need to stalk cattle.

Richar Vasquez has seen the results, both in his pocket and on the land.

The slender, middle-aged cowboy runs nearly 300 cattle for a ranch owner in the mountains east of Sahuaripa and has another 180 on his own place about two hours down the winding dirt roads. Both ranches protect cats and their prey, causing a notable surge in deer numbers, he said.

It means jaguars are less of a threat to people’s livelihoods, he said.

“What are you going to do with them anyway?” he said. He has no intention of staying up nights to shoot or trap jaguars when they’re active.

Risks and rewards

Young’s crew in March was digging a latrine pit when he stopped by to check on the ranch where Vasquez works. The cowboy offered instant coffee from a kettle on his fire and sat on a plastic chair under the half-enclosed, palm-thatched palapa where he cooks and sleeps.

He praised the jaguar program that has rewarded him monthly for seven years.

A jaguar recently killed one of his horses, crushing the back of its skull and likely costing him 15,000 pesos to replace, he acknowledged. But the cameras on his property had netted him nearly that much — 14,500 — last December alone.

That was an exceptional month, with eight mountain lions, four bobcats and three ocelots, but he said the cats pay something every month, year-round. It helps him buy animal feed during dry months.

Some other ranchers still despise jaguars, he said. They verbally “throw punches” at him because he cooperates with the conservationists. If anyone loses a calf to one of the predators, he said, “In their eyes, I killed the cow.”

Vasquez accepts as a neighbor the elusive spotted cat, which he has never actually seen in his 43 years of life in these mountains. He has affixed a smoke-tinged picture of one on a mesquite post supporting his shelter.

“That animal is just like the rest of us,” he said. “When it is hungry, it has to find food.”

Lessons learned

Biologists who worry about splitting and isolating animals have been here before.

A border security buildup after the 2001 terrorist attacks threatened to cut off numerous species who carried their bloodlines north and south through the ages, preventing the Southwest’s black bears, pronghorns, big cats and others from becoming inbred or dying out locally.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Every mile of U.S.-Mexico border

Animals with a narrower range of genes are less able to adapt to change and more likely to go extinct.

“In reality,” University of Arizona biologist Melanie Culver said, “our worries were never realized.”

That’s because the hundreds of miles of barriers built during the ensuing Bush and Obama administrations weren’t really impervious to big mammals. Impassable fences sprang up at urban or high-traffic crossings. Elsewhere, the government let mountains and desert provide natural barriers or built vehicle blockades that animals could easily squeeze through or leap over.

A solid wall of 30 feet or higher, as the current administration has sometimes suggested, would end migrations.

None of the species Culver studies — including jaguars, mountain lions, ocelots and bears — have a “natural break” in their populations at the border, she said. All have individuals who traverse the border and could become stranded in one mountain range or another.

“Now we may have cause to be worried again,” Culver said. “An impervious barrier is not what you want to have.”

A wild frontier

The Northern Jaguar Reserve needs no gate or toll booth to separate people from its coatis and cactuses.

The mountain drive from Sahuaripa to its base camp covers less than 50 miles but takes six hours in a 4-wheel-drive pickup.

On his first trip up, Young had eagerly watched for all the “eagles” that residents back in town had told him lined the road. They were teasing him: The only eagles, and practically the only signs of human life, were the stylized birds on roadside cans of Tecate Light beer.

He visits for weeks at a time, sometimes alone and sometimes with a crew. When not repairing his truck or delivering supplies to cowboys, he might stack rocks into erosion-stopping road gabions or fix fences through which cattle have wandered onto the reserve.

He’s a caretaker with time to wander and learn the land, where it’s recovering from years of overgrazing when it was a ranch, and where it might need help with native grass seed. The ultimate plan is to buy land to grow the reserve and reinvent the healthiest possible environment for the dozens of jaguars roaming the region.

This part of Sonora gets around 20 inches of rain a year, making it more than twice as wet as Phoenix but not radically wetter than Patagonia or other Arizona mountain areas where cameras periodically detect male jaguars.

A ridge of organ pipe cactuses ascends from camp and intersects with a line of paloverde and ocotillo trees. Short palm trees and yuccas line a creek dribbling past the cabins, and in spring the hills explode with yellow brittlebrush.

Coatis scamper down trees and up rock cliffs when startled. Gray hawks screech. The reserve is a slice of nature fit for a national park, which the program is petitioning Mexico to create. That wouldn’t mean the same sort of public access as it would in the U.S, but a layer of protection from future mining claims underlying the private land.

“I don’t see this as for tourists,” Young said. “This is for the jaguar.”

Among arid landscapes, this is as good as it gets for el tigre.

Moving in the shadows

Aside from abundant prey, jaguars need water they can access every day. The mountains have it, in streams that flow seasonally and maintain watering holes in dry months. It also borders the Rio Aros — big water in solitude.

Now, with a dozen ranchers accepting camera payments for the cause, the jaguars have an expanding safe zone.

Here and in Arizona, biologists say, jaguars prefer to move under cover of vegetation. It often means following either an oak-lined ridge top or a shaded canyon. At the reserve, one particular dry wash deep in an orange canyon and shaded by palms and big mesquites has proven the most productive spot for trail cameras.

There, project staffers have opened the cameras to find video of a jaguar couple, sometimes strolling up the wash, sometimes mating. The vegetation is not so much thick as it is a continuous strand of limbs overhead, filtering dappled light that melds with a jaguar’s spots to conceal it.

It’s the same effect that oaks and pinyons have farther north in the Patagonia and Santa Rita Mountains, two Arizona ranges that have delivered jaguars from Mexico almost to Tucson’s doorstep in this decade.

When a jaguar lurked in the Santa Rita Mountains for three years earlier this decade, almost nobody saw it in person. Numerous trail-cam snapshots confirmed its movements, but among the tens of thousands of days that hunters chased the deer and Montezuma quail there, only one person reported laying eyes on it.

Thriving in the Southwest?

No one knows how many jaguars could ever live in Arizona or the border region.

The federal draft jaguar plan takes a stab at it by listing biologists’ modeling of the borderlands habitat potential: 42, with six of those on the U.S. side, a figure based on observed cat densities in Sonora.

Skeptics used that estimate to blast the federal proposal for spending millions of dollars and undermining national security for a half-dozen cats.

Patagonia resident, attorney and consultant Dennis Parker in March submitted comments on behalf of southern Arizona cattle interests and counties calling the plan “unlawful, scientifically baseless, irresponsible, outrageously wasteful of taxpayer dollars, and insidiously threatening to both the future of the Endangered Species Act and national and citizen security.”

SEE ALSO: Roaming Arizona jaguar is a male after all

Parker argues the plan is legally flawed in part because it treats a handful of U.S. jaguars as “essential” and relies on an international nongovernmental agency — the International Union for Conservation of Nature — to approve any downgrade in U.S. protections based on jaguar populations throughout their range.

There’s nothing illegal about consulting the IUCN, said Steve Spangle, field supervisor for U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Arizona Ecological Services Office. The Endangered Species Act requires use of the best available science, and the organization is “highly regarded in scientific circles.”

He added that his agency initially declined to designate critical jaguar zones in the U.S. until a judge sided with conservationists who sued to require it. Jaguars continue to arrive and stay in Arizona, he said, because they have found something of value in the U.S. portion of the range.

Arizona officials still doubt the importance of their state to the species.

“We’re at the very fringe of historical range, and then, even in the absence of any type of effective barrier to movement, we’re not seeing a lot of movement across the border,” said Jim deVos, the Game and Fish Department’s assistant director for wildlife manager. “A single male every couple years doesn’t make a population.”

On the jaguar's trail

Quigley, the Panthera cat conservationist, and his colleague Alan Rabinowitz, a leading expert and lifelong student of jaguars, were saddling up for a March mule ride through the Santa Ritas, a range pointing north from the Patagonias toward Tucson.

They had followed a jaguar to Arizona, a male called El Jefe, who repeatedly triggered trail cams in the Santa Rita over three years — long enough that Tucson school kids gave him the name, meaning “the boss.”

It hadn’t tripped a camera in a year, but its long foray into what the two biologists considered hostile territory for a water-loving species fascinated them. To a jaguar, Quigley said, Arizona’s sparse woods must look the way Alaska does to most Americans: livable, but not for everyone.

“This isn’t jaguar habitat, to me,” Quigley said.

“This looks harsh,” Rabinowitz later agreed. He more often studies jaguars in lusher climates such as Central America or Brazil’s Pantanal, where they make a show of their unfeline affinity for water by swimming after abundant prey.

The Southwest’s oak woodlands are suitably remote and preserved, he said, but drier and sparser than most of the species’ haunts.

Jaguars started out around the Caspian Sea before moving to the Americas, and they evolved through shifting climates and a mass extinction that killed 80 percent of large mammals during the Pleistocene.

“They’re unbelievably resilient animals,” Rabinowitz said.

“They’re survivors,” Quigley said, “as El Jefe showed us.”

El Jefe went off radar in the fall of 2015 — possibly dead, or to another range, or back to Mexico — but the cat researchers used his former haunts as a launching point for a multi-year awareness campaign that will take them to various points along the “jaguar trail” from Arizona to Argentina.

Without a wall, Quigley said, jaguars would recolonize the U.S., as long as Mexico can nurture and expand the Sonoran population of hundreds.

Rabinowitz bristles at the political backlash he sometimes attracts from fellow conservationists for not focusing on Arizona jaguars or calling the proposed wall a life-or-death prospect for the species. He said he thinks the habitat and chances are better south of the border, and so that’s where conservationists should focus.

Even if a breeding population establishes itself in the U.S., he said, its long-term survival would depend on its connections to a healthy Mexican core.

“I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to save jaguars,” said the author of best-selling non-fiction about the species and children’s book called “A Boy and a Jaguar.”

“I would love to see jaguars in the United States.”

The border wall would end that possibility, he agreed, but for species conservation, that means little next to the poaching that occurs in Latin America.

“To me,” he said, “this (wall debate) is a fight about Americans wanting an American jaguar.”

A true nature encounter

The riders passed yuccas and spindly ocotillos rising through a canyon where El Jefe had regularly roamed and tripped cameras. They rose past old prospector pits and the piled tailings of an abandoned mine, topping out on a ridge shaded by oaks and pinyons.

Jack Childs, a former mountain lion hunter, rode along with them. At one point the group spooked a group of deer that bounded over a ridge — cat food the old hunter said is abundant in the area.

El Jefe tripped many cameras in these mountains, from desert lowlands to snowy peaks. He seemed to favor small cliff bands near the mountaintops, from which he could spring down on deer, Childs said.

“It’s a testimony to the habitat,” he said. “He made a good living here for three years.”

Childs traded his gun for cameras after he and his wife treed a male jaguar in 1996, an awe-inspiring run-in with a rare cat he would eventually name Macho B.

The massive male had a bulging stomach from a recent meal, and it lay on a limb calmly as if waiting for the nuisance dogs to move on. It gave Childs time to film and soak it in. “We just figured we had been blessed with a true nature encounter,” he recalled.

The jaguar his dogs treed went on to live more than a decade in Arizona — sometimes crossing the border past his trail cams, Childs said — before a researcher who said he was acting at the state’s request bungled a capture attempt. Macho B, then the only known jaguar in America, had to be euthanized.

But Childs remained engaged in jaguar tracking and was part of a team that installed and checked cameras tracking El Jefe in recent years for Culver’s team at the University of Arizona.

Childs, now 75, is a retired land surveyor and not a biologist. He admits he doesn’t know the technical definition of a resident species or critical habitat.

To him, though, the jaguars keep proving they can make a living in Arizona and that they belong.

“If they live here for five years and they have fairly defined home ranges," he said, "I call them a resident animal."

Childs’s work has helped document seven jaguar border crossings. If El Jefe doesn’t come again, some other jaguar might. They should have the option, he said.

“If this is the kind of habitat they can colonize, they will colonize it,” he said. “I just think they should be allowed to live here if they choose to do so.”

Painful losses, then help

Young sped on the bumpy drive back from the reserve to the civilization of Sahuaripa, occasionally noticing his truck’s careen near a cliff edge.

He was heading home from the wild side of his job to focus on the people part: building relationships in town and working with a visiting scientist who was flying in to help assess the jaguar range’s health.

After stopping for tacos that evening, he headed for a rancher’s Sahuaripa home to talk about his experience in the program and buy some Bacanora, the smoky agave moonshine that many locals ferment, for colleagues he would visit in Hermosillo.

The 72-year-old rancher, Rogelio Armando Aguayo, said in his lifetime here he had seen two jaguars, both crossing a road. But jaguars killed three large calves he owned.

“It hurt a lot,” he said.

In years past, he wanted to strike them from the land, he said. Now he sees them as part of his environment and sometimes helpful, when they scare away coyotes and mountain lions.

North of the border, the predator itself isn’t what scares ranchers. It’s the bureaucratic impediments that emanate from the Endangered Species Act.

“It means much of my land — my private land — is now subject to the zoning requirements of the federal government,” said Chilton, the Arivaca rancher.

The idea of a wall is “devastating,” Young said. It cuts off the flow of jaguars just when Arizonans were beginning to celebrate their return.

THE WALL NEWSLETTER: Sign up to receive a free weekly email roundup of news about the border, immigration and the proposed border wall.

Just like the Tucson school kids who named El Jefe when cameras caught him prowling the Santa Ritas, Yaqui students from Hiaki High School south of Tucson named the latest interloper Yo’oko, or “Jaguar Warrior,” and studied his role in their heritage.

“So many people have gotten so happy and so passionate,” Young said. “It really redefined wildness to have (jaguars) there.”

For Young, extending the wall along all of the wild frontier would mean blocking Southwestern life in the same way that Northwestern reservoirs have blocked endangered salmon.

“You’re basically building the longest dam ever built,” he said.

It would limit the options for the jaguars he’s protecting in the Sierra.

And it might block an adventurous female from a date in Arizona.

READ THE REST OF THE SERIES:

Ocelots try to survive as habitat disappears



Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.