Will border wall doom return of state’s big cats?
Keeping border-crossers out of the U.S. would also affect jaguars, symbols of a strong Southwestern ecosystem. Is it worth it?
Since last fall, two new endangered jaguars have been found in Arizona, giving conservationists hope that the big cat is migrating northward, returning to the state it once roamed. That hope, however, hangs on the proposed border wall.
At least seven crucial wilderness crossings along the border now would allow a migrating Mexican jaguar to meet a mate in Arizona.
But sealing the border could seal the fate of the region’s apex predator in this country.
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 cat, female or male, 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.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the jaguar as endangered and is completing a species-recovery plan. 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.
But, he adds, “the wall would eliminate that possibility.”