On the trail of the jaguar: Population growth a success in Sonora. Can the U.S. do the same?

SAHUARIPA, SONORA — Miguel Gómez hovers his hands over the deep nail-scrapes on the fallen palm trunk. The nail-dragged furrows were etched into the wood by a jaguar. Quietly, patiently, Gómez studies the scratch marks. And then — nails down, fingers spread — he mimics the motion the cat made on the trunk.

Gómez has followed jaguar tracks, investigated their kill sites, heard them roar, and — on remote trail cameras — he’s captured them hundreds of times. But, outside of captivity, he’s never seen a living jaguar. “They’re smart,” Gómez said. “They know that it’s best for them to stay away from humans.”

As a wildlife biologist specializing in jaguars for 18 years, Gómez has spent the last 15 years at the Northern Jaguar Reserve in the southeastern part of the Mexican state of Sonora. Currently, at least a dozen jaguars, including two cubs and five or six females prowl the protected 56,000 acres managed by the Northern Jaguar Project.

Gómez works in the remote and jagged Zetasora mountains and the surrounding canyons of the Sierra Madre mountain chain in eastern Sonora. It’s a region where jaguars have roamed for thousands of years. They were hunted to the brink of extinction but now, thanks to the work of Gómez and others at the Northern Jaguar Project, there are about a dozen regular jaguars living in or near the reserve. That work, which began in 2002, shows ranchers it’s in their interest to protect instead of hunt the jaguar, and is changing the way people think of both jaguars and the natural environment.

Advocates consider the project a success and seek to expand jaguar protections to parts of Sonora and into Arizona and New Mexico. But federal regulators, a border wall completion and the cooperation of U.S. ranchers are all potential obstacles for growing the population on this side of the border.

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Fighting to protect the jaguar has been an up-and-down battle for decades. As individual jaguars have loped across the border and into Arizona from México in the past decade and a half, advocacy groups have been taking to the courts to make sure they can survive. After land was set aside as protected habitat for jaguars in 2014, the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity sought to expand land area and push for reintroducing the big cats.

After rejecting the center’s petition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in May, eliminated nearly 65,000 acres of the 640,124-acre protected jaguar habitat in Southern Arizona. The agency followed a court order that came after a decade-long legal battle set off by a mining company challenging a previous designation of protected jaguar habitat .

More recently, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to open roads in Arizona’s Chiricahua mountains, part of the Coronado National Forest. In response, the Center and four other environmental groups sued to give jaguars a chance to roam without vehicle traffic.

Despite what advocacy groups see as meager protections and ongoing threats, they’re pushing to convince judges, lawmakers, officials, ranchers, hikers and the public that it is in our interest to let the jaguar thrive.

Apex predator key for balance

The Sonoran portion of the Sierra Madres, a continental mountain range that runs from the U.S-México border south almost to Central America, has ocotillos — the iconic spindly shrub common to Arizona — but in and around the Northern Jaguar Preserve, ocotillos grow like trees, with a thick trunk from which the thorny fence-posts of branches sprout and spike.

The fauna in Sonora are similar to those found in Southern Arizona, too, except they’re more abundant. That bounty is due, in part, to fewer humans. Cattle roam the foothills and mountains in the area, but there are far fewer roads or cities compared to Arizona. That’s one of the reasons jaguars thrive on those slopes and canyons wedged between the Yaqui and Aros rivers.

In the last 25 years, Arizona has had between zero and two jaguars in the state at any given time. Experts believe they roamed up from Sonora to cross the international border. Meanwhile, just the area of the Northern Jaguar Project in Sonora has about a dozen jaguars, with around 4,000 throughout México. The last jaguar seen in Arizona was captured on camera on Dec. 23, 2023.

More than a century ago, before the U.S. government heeded the fears of ranchers and paid to exterminate jaguars, there were many more of the big cats in the United States. The U.S. Rocky Mountains are where jaguars initially evolved, and, a couple centuries ago, they once prowled from California to as far east as Louisiana .

“In the span of a generation, we’ve seen an incredible cultural shift in how many communities went from hunting the cats to celebrating their presence and working to protect them,” Laiken Jordahl, southwest conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Arizona Luminaria. “In many cases, the same families that used to hunt jaguars are now leading efforts to save them.”

The Center for Biological Diversity is pushing for a reintroduction of jaguars. Wildlife experts say the apex predators are key for keeping ecosystems in balance , for keeping in check (by hunting and eating) disruptive overabundances of prey animals, and for maintaining biodiversity.

Except for cattle fences, the reserve is not walled off, which means jaguars venture into the adjacent ranchlands. Some of those ranches are under agreements managed through Viviendo con Felinos — or Living with Felines, a group run by the Northern Jaguar Project — not to hunt, trap or kill any of the large cats: Mountain lions, bobcats, ocelots, and jaguars. The area under control of Viviendo is about 125,000 acres, more than twice the size of the reserve, giving the cats extra room to roam.

Through the program, the Northern Jaguar Project pays ranchers for photos of jaguars, as well as ocelots and mountain lions. For each jaguar photograph a rancher hands over, they can earn 5,000 pesos, or about $260. Previously, the only way for ranchers to make money off of a jaguar was by killing it and selling its pelt.

It’s taken nearly two decades, but wildlife defenders have changed the culture around jaguars in Sonora, Roberto Wolf, director of the Northern Jaguar Project, told Arizona Luminaria. The animals have gone from being a prized hunting trophy and sometimes a feared nuisance, to a respected co-inhabitant and perhaps a mascot.

“First you have to make the public aware that they belong here, that they evolved here,” Jordahl said.

“Jaguars have always been a part of both the physical and cultural landscape of this region,” he said. “When you look at Indigenous tribes around the Southwest, many have deep cultural connections to jaguars. They have words in their languages for jaguars. Many have ceremonies or dances that include jaguars.”

Channing Moore is a rancher and also the executive director of Malpai Borderlands Group, a nonprofit organization based in Southern Arizona and New Mexico focused on establishing healthy and natural ecosystems. The group is made up of ranchers, scientists and environmental activists.

Moore told Arizona Luminaria that Malpai is “very supportive of jaguar protection efforts and are as intrigued as everyone else when a sighting occurs.”

While there is more work to do to educate the public, Jordahl said wildlife officials need the most convincing. Federal wildlife officials drag their feet every step of the way to intentionally undercut recovery efforts, he said.

Fish and Wildlife officials say they are working to support jaguars, but not expand their habitat.

“The Service will continue working with state and local partners, conservation groups and the Mexican government to support jaguar recovery,” Al Barrus, public affairs specialist for Fish and Wildlife, told Arizona Luminaria. “There are no plans for jaguar reintroductions in the U.S., but this bi-national team remains focused on sustaining potential habitat.”

The wall

Jaguars, especially males, need space. Studies estimate male jaguars need sometimes as much as hundreds of square kilometers to avoid rivals and find sufficient prey.

But experts say those open ranges have been compromised by ongoing development and, critically, the border wall. Currently, along the most remote crossing corridors between the United States and México, in the most mountainous areas of Southern Arizona, there is no wall. But that could change, and former President Donald Trump promises the wall will be completed if he is reelected.

Wolf said that’s a serious threat. “The dream would be that [existing portions of the border wall] would be removed,” Wolf said. The wall directly threatens jaguars’ health and threatens their prey — especially deer and javelina — as well as the general ecosystem, Wolf explained.

“Humans aren’t threatened by jaguars,” Gómez said. “It’s the reverse.”

While mountain lions have been known to stalk and, occasionally, attack humans, Gómez says, jaguars keep away from humans. They also avoid roads, homes and almost any sign of human civilization.

Gómez says jaguars have learned to avoid wildlife cameras, which are the primary contact — he sometimes refers to it as “communication” — between him and jaguars.

The largest cats in the hemisphere are so stealthy and well-camouflaged that they can sometimes walk across half the camera’s field of vision before their quiet, almost invisible motion is detected by the camera’s sensors.

“The ultimate goal is to have populations on both sides of the border that intermix, bolstering the genetic diversity of each of those populations,” Jordahl said. He hopes to see 30 jaguars in the U.S. by 2030, he said.

“The land is there, the prey base is there. All the ingredients are here. We’re just missing the cats,” he said.

A thermometer and a flag

Randy Young, former director of the Northern Jaguar Project, now runs the organization La Tierra del Jaguar, which takes a holistic approach to conservation.

“The health of the jaguar begins with healthy soil,” Young said.

On La Tierra del Jaguar’s plot of land, just a few miles south of Sahuaripa, Young and his partner Allison Kreis have worked for years to model sustainable and native agriculture. They are building a house/barn/workshop area and inviting local community members to see what possibilities the land can offer when it’s respected.

“That’s the whole thing about a whole cyclical system,” Young said. “The soil is so important for healthy plants, which makes for healthy herbivores, which makes healthy predators. And it goes the other way too.”

Young purchased the land in 2016 to make a demonstration site and to model “regenerative agricultural systems.” He says a huge part of land restoration in the west is just “keeping cattle off of it.”

His focus is to “apply the principles of regenerative agriculture where people are.” “In order to believe the system works they have to see it work, they have to see that it feels like home,” he said.

The project is still in its early stages, but Young hopes within five years the land will be transformed. He also hopes that other locals, including ranchers, will recognize what healthy and prosperous ecosystems can look like.

The goal is to transform the ways humans live in and with the natural environment.

Young said the models and concepts he’s proving in Sonora are also applicable north of the border. He mentioned the problems with monoculture agriculture and large scale cattle ranches, which deplete the soil, suck up resources, and take repeated artificial interventions to keep the land producing.

“It’s important you have these keystones,” Young said. “The microbes in the soil and the jaguar.”

The direction is not, he said, protecting only some lands in their more natural state and overworking the rest of them. “We need to let biodiversity adapt. If you don’t allow for adaptation, you basically have a big botanical garden, and that’s cute, but it’s not sustainable for the long term. We need to allow for these species to migrate. Adaptability for future changes will allow all these species to flourish.”

Both Young and Wolf see jaguars as key to building those healthier ecosystems for all of its inhabitants. The jaguar is “a thermometer and also a flag,” Wolf said. Meaning that the health of a jaguar population is a sign of the health of the overall ecosystem. And the jaguar — as a marquee species — turns heads.

“Jaguar protection has an effect on all the other species,” Wolf said. “When a jaguar is present, it shows that all the other species are in a good situation.”

Reintroduction

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition in 2022 to the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to begin reintroducing jaguars into the wild. On Jan. 24 of this year, that request was officially denied .

“It’s so easy to get mired down by the bureaucracy and the politics, but the physical reality of reintroducing the cats is pretty simple science,” Jordahl said.

But helicoptering jaguars into Arizona isn’t ideal. Jordahl and other proponents hope for a more “organic reintroduction.”

Gómez explained that ideally jaguars in México would proliferate enough that they would naturally extend north into Arizona and México.

To succeed, a female or a breeding pair of jaguars must establish themselves in Arizona. The last known female jaguar in Arizona was seen in 1963.

El Guapo

In the rolling landscape of igneous rock in the jaguar reserve is an area called La Hielería. In an arroyo dotted with stunted palms growing out of the cracked seams of boulders, Gómez leans down to the trunk of a mesquite and checks a trail camera.

The camera is aimed at a fallen palm trunk he had set up to attract large cats to use as a scratching post.

Flipping through the camera, Gómez spots El Guapo, the reserve’s largest cat. El Guapo is 4 years old, and is Gómez’s favorite cat. There are about 150 cameras between the reserve and the lands protected by Viviendo. Since the early 2000s, they have bagged about 2,400 photos or videos of jaguars.

He said there’s currently a list for ranchers who want to sign up with Viviendo.

“The majority of people” in the area “are convinced that the jaguar is good. They’re proud of the jaguar. They’re proud of protecting the environment,” he said.

“If you have jaguars on the landscape, your ecology is healthy,” Gómez said. “Things work better when they’re here.”

Though he’s never seen one in the wild, jaguars appear in Gómez’s dreams. “I see them running,” he said, “Running in my dreams. Sometimes they’re chasing me, but they’re no threat.”

The post On the trail of the jaguar: Population growth a success in Sonora. Can the U.S. do the same? appeared first on AZ Luminaria .