‘I was thrilled and shocked’: images raise hopes of return of wild jaguars to the US
The young, muscular male approached from the east at about 4am. He paused briefly in front of the motionsensor camera, seemingly posing for the photo. “It was overall a moment of euphoria,” says Emily Burns, programme director at the Sky Island Alliance conservation group in Arizona, as she walks along a rutted forest service road towards a canyon framed by lichen-covered cliffs.
“I was equal parts thrilled and shocked that there was a jaguar here.”
Jaguars once roamed throughout the American south-west, but they were hunted to local extinction by the 1960s. In the 1990s, the elusive cat began to occasionally reappear in the rugged Sky Islands mountain ranges in New Mexico and Arizona. Now, a series of sightings in the region over the past year marks the endangered predators’ tentative return.
Yet numerous obstacles remain to re-establishing a jaguar population in the US. The wide-ranging cat faces growing climate extremes, habitat loss – and the continued impact of the Trump administration’s border wall, which has severed wildlife corridors and fragmented ecosystems throughout the region.
In November 2023, Sky Island Alliance captured an image of a large jaguar walking along a wooded hillside in the remote Whetstone mountains of southern Arizona. The photo – taken by the organisation’s wildlife camera network and released to the Guardian exclusively – represents the fifth recorded jaguar sighting in the US last year. In December, a wildlife camera captured a video of the same jaguar in the
Huachuca mountains to the south, as it likely made its way towards the border with Mexico.
The Whetstone and Huachuca mountains are part of the Sky Islands, a series of rugged peaks rising from the desert floor of northern Mexico and the US south-west, so-called because of the radical difference between their habitats and that of the surrounding lowland. Their peaks and valleys boast some of the highest biodiversity in the US – and are a plentiful habitat for jaguars.
“You can just imagine a jaguar stopping somewhere like this for a drink,” says Burns as we make our way up a rocky dry creek bed to a spot where the underground river surfaces, creating a series of freshwater pools. Jaguars’ primary prey, the pig-like javelina, lives here, and springs provide year-round water.
“I often think of these mountain ranges as stepping stones, providing different habitats, different food sources, often more abundant water,” says Burns. Another jaguar was detected here by Sky Island Alliancein May 2023, but it is not known if it is the same cat as photographed in December. “If these mountains can support jaguar, it means it is a great habitat for so many other species as well.”
Half of jaguars in the US have probably come through this crucial corridor according to Myles Traphagen, the borderlands programme coordinator for the Wildlands Network.
Louise Misztal, executive director at Sky Island Alliance, says: “We know the western flank of the Huachuca mountains and the San Rafael valley provide one of the last open corridors for the northernmost population of jaguars to move between habitat in the US and Mexico. To recover these cats in the US, it’s vital that we protect this pathway.”
But that freedom – and the animal’s return to this region – is threatened by the construction of the border wall, begun under Donald Trump’s presidency and continued under Joe Biden’s, despite the latter’s opposition to the policy.
This region hosts numerous endangered species such as the sub-tropical ocelot, Mexican grey wolves and sonoran pronghorns, as well as jaguars. These animals, and many others, have been adversely affected by the wall that extends nearly 226 miles (364km) along the Arizona border.
“The border wall is nearly insurmountable to anything much larger than a badger,” says Russ McSpadden, south-west conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona.
The barrier forces jaguars to expend more energy to reach critical habitat, prey and water – an increasingly unstable resource in the warming southwest.
“A jaguar is accustomed to going to certain water sources known throughout its life,” says Traphagen, who has coauthored a study on the border wall’s impact on jaguar energy expenditures. “With the border wall, they must travel much greater distances to find that water.”
Krista Schlyer, a photographer and author who has spent 15 years documenting the human and environmental toll of the border wall, has witnessed, time and again, animals dead or stranded along the barrier. In 2007, Schlyer was walking along a new section of wall near the San Pedro River when she noticed javelinas sniffing and anxiously pacing back and forth.
“They were smelling for their family on the other side,” Schlyer says. The javelinas finally gave up, returning in the direction they had come.
That wall section now extends 70 contiguous miles, from the border with New Mexico, ending near the San Rafael valley.
McSpadden says: “It is critical that we actively protect [jaguars’] habitat and habitat connectivity in the southwest. Freedom to roam across vast territories is written into the DNA of jaguars.”
Traphagen says the resumption of border wall construction could mean the end of the jaguar in the US. “The drum beat to finish the wall is here,” he says of the growing support for the border wall. “If they walled off the San Rafael valley, jaguar recovery would come to a standstill.”
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Freedom to roam across vast territories is written into the DNA of jaguars
Russ McSpadden, of the Center for Biological Diversity
that “because she’s so beautiful, people think she looks like a Barbie anyway and just turned up, and that there was no particular skill in doing that”. But she resists the obvious, ironic conclusion, refraining from pinning the omission on the Kens. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t want to say it’s misogyny because I don’t know if it is. I don’t know what the logic is.”
Whatever the Oscars judges think, Barbie was the highest-grossing film of 2023 and painted a neon-pink streak on last summer the likes of which most other films can only dream of. “What I find hard is that if you make an arthouse film, they say, ‘Hollywood’s a business, it’s about making money.’ And if you make a blockbuster they say, ‘Yeah, but it isn’t art.’”
A highly respected costume designer, Durran has worked in both camps. She has frequently collaborated with director Joe Wright and received her first Academy Award nomination for his 2005 film Pride and Prejudice, then won the Oscar for Anna Karenina. Director Mike Leigh is another regular colleague – the pair have been collaborating since the late 90s and Durran is to thank for the costumes in many of his best-loved works, from Peterloo and Mr Turner (for which she received a Bafta nomination) to Vera Drake (for which she won one).
Her IMDb page reads like a module on modern film and TV, with credits including Sam Mendes’ 1917, Richard Ayoade’s surreal 2013 head-scratcher The Double, Kristen Stewart’s take on Lady Di in biopic Spencer, and the 2017 Beauty and the Beast. She worked with Steve McQueen on BBC series Small Axe (for which she received another Bafta) and recently rejoined his ranks for a film project called Blitz. She has dressed several characters, both real and imagined, who warrant being known on a mononymic basis: Churchill, Batman and (Mr) Darcy.
Having grown up in London, Durran studied at the Royal College of Art, before finding her way into costume design via selling vintage clothes at Camden and Portobello Road markets. The knowledge from those days helped her land a role at a costume house called Angels, a West End institution. Costume design was not something she had thought she could do until, one day while watching a soap – she refuses to say which one as “it would be too rude” – she felt galvanised by someone else’s dodgy designs. She explains: when you are watching the “best costumed film of all time, you will never think that you could do that”. Perfection, she says, “looks like an impenetrable shell. You can’t see the mechanics. Whereas with bad things you can.” It gave her what she describes as “a chink of insight into what I maybe could do”.
With vintage expertise and so many British period dramas under her belt, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-day beaching, all-American Barbie could be seen as a departure – and Durran is quick to note that, particularly as she had no particular nostalgia for the toy, she probably wouldn’t have said yes had it not been for Gerwig’s involvement. “For me, Greta Gerwig doing a Barbie film is a thing on its own,” she says. They had worked together before, on Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women, for which Durran won her second Oscar.
But even when working on period dramas, Durran’s playfulness with dress – her ability to run with a brief – is what makes her costumes so memorable. A perfect case in point is a particularly luxuriant duck-egg blue frock from Little Women worn by Amy, played by Florence Pugh – a costume that still lingers on the retina, four years on. The New Yorker at the time said she looked “like a cake, like a bisque doll, like a woman gallantly marching toward security”, and compared the dress to the contemporary designs of Alessandro Michele at Gucci. Playing hard and fast with period, it conjured that very modern quality – a vibe.
Another lasting – and lusted after – costume is the emerald green dress that Keira Knightley wore in Atonement in 2007. Backless, with a deep V and an unashamedly anachronistic design, it spawned replicas that have sold for tens of thousands of pounds. Entertainment Weekly even celebrated its 10th anniversary. “Still going strong!” says Durran, smiling.
Cut to the present day and, with Ken, Durran once again demonstrates her ability to go hell for leather on a brief and come up with surprising, zeitgeist-defining looks. When, in the second part of the film, the patriarchy bleeds into Barbieland, Ken’s outfits start to be inspired by “iconic images of masculinity”, including one of Sylvester Stallone in a fur coat. “That one is so fantastic,” Durran says gleefully. “It became my guiding image because I wasn’t really sure how far to go with Ken and I just thought, ‘That is the best thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Not that Durran can take all the credit – “Ryan loves clothes,” she says. “We would do all of these fittings and it would all be great, then he’d go, ‘What about if …?’. Take the Ken underwear, which riffed on the iconic Calvin Klein design: “One of the greatest things in the film for Kens is the Ken pants, and that was Ryan’s idea. He sent me a message asking, ‘Do you think I could have Ken pants?’ Obviously yes.”
So Ken did have some agency – and what Stallone and underwear were to his wardrobe, feminism apparently was to Barbie’s. It was, says Durran, fundamental to the costumes. Unlike other characters she has dressed, Barbie dresses purely with what she is doing in mind. What Barbie isn’t doing, Durran says, is “dressing for another person – she’s not dressing for the male gaze”. That many of her outfits are quote unquote sexy is, she would argue, by-theby; they are “inadvertently sexy”.
While you may not characterise her looks as practical, per se, she always dresses for the occasion. If she is off to the beach, she will wear beachwear; if she is off to a party, she will wear a jazzy jumpsuit; if she is off to do some social justice, she will wear a boilersuit. When she heads to the real world for the first time, she wears what she thinks the most appropriate thing to wear for arriving in the real world is. It took them ages to come up with what that was, though, discounting jeans and “an all-American Malibu beach girl kind of thing”, before landing on the outlandish “faintly country, faintly western”, very pink outfit that appears in the film. “It was all about asking what is a defining American look, because that’s what Barbie would choose to blend in. And the great thing about Barbie is that what she thinks will blend in actually just makes her stand out.”
It must have been strange to see so much of the real world succumb to Barbiemania – besides the obvious pink takeover, sales of Barbie’s signature hair accessory, the scrunchie, jumped by more than 1,000%, and ponytails crept higher on people’s heads. Since Durran’s first movie gig, designing costumes for Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing in 2002, has there been a change in the impact which the costumes we see on screen has on the clothes we wear in the real world? “I think it has reached new heights [with Barbie] but I do think it has always existed,” she says. “I don’t know enough about, say, 1930s and 40s movie stars, but I feel they always had an influence on fashion. But I think probably the social media makes it faster and more all-pervasive.”
As someone who cut their teeth in secondhand markets, though, Durran must feel conflicted about all the new clothes being bought in the quest to look like on-screen characters. Around the release of Barbie, Durran partnered with resale platform Thredup to offer sustainable alternatives for those hoping to get the Barbie look. One of the big cultural quirks of last summer was the phenomenon of cinemagoers dressed in Barbie-inspired costumes. Durran loved to see it – “the fact that people engaged with it to such a degree”. But, she says, “it’s just awful to go out and buy fast fashion just to be a Barbie for a night.”
We are running out of time but I want to put one last thing to Durran: a comment Steve McQueen made about costume designers being the brightest people on set. She laughs: “I love Steve.” But she won’t be drawn into self-congratulation: “We’re a team. The reason I love working on film is because I’m part of a group and we’re all pulling in the same direction.”
Barbie is inadvertently sexy – she isn’t dressing for men