Jaguars Are Returning to Southern Arizona—Will Trump's Wall Stop Them? |
Across the world, efforts to reintroduce imperiled animals to their natural habitats have gained momentum, but in the Madrean Sky Islands of Arizona, jaguars are doing it on their own.
Less than a month ago, Chris Schnaufer, a citizen scientist volunteer with the University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center, and another volunteer, were checking one of their remote trail cameras. Schnaufer, a long-distance hiker, often got the center’s toughest assignments, and both men were tired when they reached the mountain camera site. They replaced batteries and collected the SD card and hiked back to the trailhead. That night, at home, Schnaufer scrolled through the images of deer, bear, bobcats, mountain lions, foxes, owls, skunks, and a coatimundi. And then, there it was, in the semidarkness of early morning, the striking image of a jaguar drinking from a waterhole. The photos showed its muscular shoulder and its distinctive inky-black rosettes.
When the University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center released the photographs of the jaguar roaming the rugged mountains of southern Arizona, it confirmed that it was a never-before-recorded big cat. Jaguars have their own unique markings, as singular as a human’s fingerprint, and this was one new to the center’s database. Though it has not yet identified its sex, the center is calling it Jaguar No. 5, dubbed Cinco, the fifth jaguar to be photographed in the Sky Islands since 2011, the second one discovered since 2023, and the ninth one spotted in the US since 1996.
Jaguar No. 5. (Photo by UA Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center)
When the photos were made public, and news agencies across the country buzzed with excitement about the future of the state’s wild jaguar population, Schnaufer still felt the existential thrill of knowing he had been hiking in jaguar country.
Three-quarters of a century ago, Aldo Leopold penned his essay “The Green Lagoons,” which chronicles a 1923 canoeing adventure in the Delta region of the Colorado River. He and his brother Carl hoped to “find sign of the… the great mottled jaguar, el tigre.” They “saw neither hide nor hair of him, but his personality pervaded the wilderness.”
While I was researching my book, Heart of the Jaguar, and backpacking sections of the Sky Islands, three jaguars called the Sky Islands home—Cochise, Sombra, and O:ṣhad Ñu:kudam. I never saw so much as a track, but what mattered most to me was what the presence of a big, spotted cat prowling the mountains of southern Arizona implied: a kind of wildness.
A jaguar and cubs are........