Environmentalists from the Center for Biological Diversity have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce jaguars to New Mexico so the big cats can live in their “ideal habitat.”
“We want to see these big cats thrive once more,” said the group in a Facebook post this week. Right now, just one jaguar lives in the U.S. Its name is Sombra.
“Over 50 years since the jaguar was placed on the endangered species list, we should not be facing the realistic prospect that this sole jaguar in Arizona will be the last,” Michael J. Robinson, senior conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote to Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, according to the Associated Press.
According to the center, jaguars are the largest cat native to North America. At an average of eight feet in length and 140 to 300 pounds, they are also the third largest in the world, after lions and tigers.
“Jaguars have brownish-yellow fur with dark rosettes,” said the center. “Often confused with leopards, jaguars may be distinguished by the additional marks in the center of these rosettes. Jaguars also have stockier bodies, shorter limbs, and larger paws than leopards.”
While jaguars in California used to range as far as Monterey Bay, only small numbers live in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands today, including Sombra. Generally, these big cats live in a range of habitats and gravitate to areas near rivers and streams. They live for about 12 to 16 years.
“People forget or don’t know that the jaguar actually evolved in North America, ranging from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and then spread to the south,” Robinson said.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, “deforestation is a major threat to jaguars in Central and South America, while in the northern part of their range, jaguars have been impacted more by development and hunting.”
Around 30,000 total jaguars exist in the wild today.
As of 2017 – the same year the center posted a video of Sombra – the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List identified jaguars as a near threatened species “due to a suspected 20-25% decline over the past three generations (21 years) in area of occupancy, extent of occurrence, and habitat quality, along with actual or potential levels of exploitation.”
In addition to the letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calling for a reintroduction of jaguars in the southwestern U.S., the center is also asking Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to stop building a wall of shipping containers along the Arizona-Mexico border.
“This dangerous obstruction runs down the southwestern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains across the San Rafael Valley to the west in the Coronado National Forest,” and has blocked “critical migratory paths for endangered jaguars and ocelots,” it said.
“As a top-level carnivore, the big cat helps maintain a diversity of species by regulating prey numbers and competing with other, smaller carnivores,” said the Defenders of Wildlife, another group that advocates for jaguar restoration in the U.S. “Jaguars are also important in human culture, frequently playing a central role in stories, songs and prayers of indigenous people.”
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