By Peter Friederici
Defender's Magazine
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.
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