Jaguars could return to the US Southwest – but only if they have pathways to move north

 

Jaguars are the only species of big cat found on the American continent. They range as far south as Argentina, and once roamed as far north as the Grand Canyon in the U.S. Today the northernmost breeding population is in the northwest Mexican state of Sonora, just south of the border with Arizona.

In the Americas, the jaguar has long been an icon and symbol of power and connection to the spiritual world in mythology, philosophies, culture and art. Jaguars are apex predators with diverse diets that include more than 85 different prey species. This gives them a specific but prominent role in each ecosystem where they are found.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature classifies jaguars as “near threatened,” with total population estimates ranging between 64,000 and 173,000. But evidence shows that local populations across the continent are decreasing at alarming rates. Jaguars’ total range has shrunk by more than half in the past 70 years, mainly because of hunting and habitat loss.

Could jaguars return to the Southwest U.S.? Some experts think it’s possible. Jaguars from southern populations in Mexico could recolonize their former territories in Arizona and New Mexico, or humans could reintroduce them there...MORE

Jaguars No Longer Have Protected Land in New Mexico

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that two sections of land in New Mexico should no longer be designated as critical habitat for jaguars. In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated six areas as critical habitat for jaguars, including portions of Arizona and New Mexico, based on sightings of jaguars in those areas. Wild jaguars have been spotted and photographed in Southern Arizona and Hidalgo County, New Mexico, though the species is generally associated with tropical climates. In 2015, New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau, New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association and New Mexico Federal Lands Council sued the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They challenged the government’s designation of critical habitat, claiming there are no proven breeding populations in the United States and that the open, dry areas of New Mexico would be of marginal benefit to jaguars, at the extreme edges of their known range. The ranchers complained that sections of land set aside for the jaguars in New Mexico and Arizona is privately owned grazing land. The livestock groups argued that the designation limited their use of the land for cattle and hurt them financially. In 2017, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Gonzales denied the ranchers’ request for an injunction. Though he noted that most American jaguars live in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America. Gonzales ruled that, “at the northernmost portion of the jaguar’s range, a small population has adapted to occupy more arid forest and open grass ecosystems. The ecosystems in the United States are considered suitable only as a secondary habitat, which has little to no evidence of reproduction but which may provide important dispersal habitat for the species.” The ranchers appealed the decision in December 2018, and in March 2020, the Tenth Circuit reversed the decision, finding “that the lack of jaguar sightings at the time the species was listed as endangered in 1972…suggest[ed] that jaguars in the United States had declined to such an extent by that point as to be effectively eliminated.” The Tenth Circuit also found that the Fish and Wildlife Service did not “make findings about whether any individual unit designated as unoccupied was essential for the conservation of the species. Rather, it addressed all the units together, finding that to the extent they were not occupied, they were essential for the conservation of the species.” For these reasons, the Tenth Circuit remanded the case back to federal court. In the meantime, jaguars and their habitats became a part of the fight against the border wall. A May 2020 lawsuit filed in Washington D.C. argued that the planned U.S.-Mexico border wall would completely kill off the population of jaguars. “These areas are home to some of the last remaining undisturbed habitat for wildlife and walling them off would push these species to the brink of extinction,” Jason Rylander, senior counsel for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement at the time of the lawsuit’s filing. Due in part to the very few sightings of jaguars in New Mexico, Judge Gonzales found on Wednesday that the Wildlife Service’s designation of the land in New Mexico as unoccupied critical habitat for jaguars was inappropriate. “Although vacating the critical habitat designations for Units 5 and 6 will undoubtedly harm the jaguar to some degree as Defendant-Intervenors describe,” Gonzales wrote, “the Court finds that such harm is minimal at best.” Gonzales further judged that, “the jaguar is not at risk of irreversible extinction if the Court should vacate the critical habitat designations.”...MORE

What's Killing Jaguars in Central and South America?

In May 2019, a headless jaguar carcass turned up at a garbage dump in southern Belize. The killing, one in a series of similar incidents, added to local outrage and inspired authorities, private citizens and companies to offer a combined $8,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the jaguar killer. More than just a national issue, the graphic killing in Belize seemed indicative of a rise in jaguar poaching across the species’ range, from Mexico to Argentina...Now, a study published this month in Conservation Biology provides a more complete overview of the illegal trade, bringing together data from all of Central and South America. The findings confirm that seizures of jaguar parts have increased tremendously throughout the region, and that private investment from China is significantly correlated with trafficking of the species. “For the very first time, we have a big picture of what is happening in Central and South America regarding trade in jaguar body parts,” said Thaís Morcatty, a doctoral student in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in England, and lead author of the study. The findings suggest a parallel with poaching patterns seen in Southeast Asia and Africa, in which an increasing presence of businesses from China working on large development projects coincides with increasing legal and illegal wildlife trade, including of big cats. “What we can learn from this is that the patterns we saw in Asia and then in Africa are now starting to emerge in South America,” said Vincent Nijman, a co-author also at Oxford Brookes University. “If there is demand, it will be fulfilled, even if you go to another continent on the other side of the world.”...MORE

Protecting Jaguars Across Borders

Lucy EJ Woods

In early April the mutilated body of a jaguar was discovered in Mexico’s Yaxchilán Natural Monument. Researchers investigating the death quickly concluded that the animal, which had been tracked in neighboring Guatemala since 2015, had crossed the border and fallen prey to wildlife traffickers, who may have taken its head for sale on the black market. Deaths like this, when a jaguar crossed the border from a protected area into a different country, may have something to do with the big cats’ plummeting populations, experts worry. “The males have to move across long distances and sometimes go outside of reserves or protected areas to buffer zones and areas populated by people,” says Rony García-Anleu, director of the biological research department for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Guatemala. Today the wide-ranging jaguar (Panthera onca), which once lived throughout South America and north into the United States, is considered a threatened species. Conservation groups estimate there are only 15,000 wild jaguars left, mostly due to poaching and deforestation. As García-Anleu explains, the boundaries between countries are important for humans, but they don’t exist for animals. Jaguars require vast amounts of barrier-free land and don’t care about man-marked territories. While females stay in one area, males roam across continents in search of food and mates. They crisscross borders throughout the Americas, traveling as far south as Argentina and as far north as Arizona and New Mexico in the United States...MORE

NM Ranchers push court to recognize their land has no jaguars

Lewis Carroll had Humpty Dumpty famously declare, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” According to a lawsuit, that seems to have been the federal government’s attitude when it determined that parts of New Mexico that had been determined to be “marginal,” “secondary” and even “peripheral” habitats for jaguars suddenly became “critical.” A lower court ruling has been appealed to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents New Mexico ranchers whose lands have been impacted by the Department of the Interior decision to protect jaguars. PLF attorney Christina Martin pointed out, however, that according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, jaguars thrive in and prefer tropical forests. “Tropical forests provide ‘primary’ habitat, while the arid regions of Mexico, and small portions of New Mexico and Arizona provide only ‘marginal,’ ‘secondary,’ and ‘peripheral’ habitat,” she wrote. “Leave it to a bureaucrat to decide that ‘marginal’ and ‘secondary’ habitat can simultaneously be ‘critical’ and ‘indispensable’ habitat. It’s not only an abuse of the language – it’s also an abuse of authority,” she said.  Martin pointed out that the federal government anticipates that at best, the United States will be home to only a few jaguars, and none of them will breed. “In contrast, experts currently estimate that around 64,000 jaguars roam the tropical forests of Central and South America. In other words, the key to conserving jaguars lies hundreds of miles south of the U.S. border.” Nonetheless, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set aside lands in New Mexico and Arizona for jaguars, which haven’t been seen in the United States for decades at a time. PLF is representing the New New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau, New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association and New Mexico Federal Lands Council...MORE

Mexico jaguar population grows 20% in eight years

Mexico's population of wild jaguars has grown 20 percent in the past eight years, according to a study released Thursday, a bit of good news for an iconic species whose numbers have been declining. There are an estimated 4,800 jaguars in Mexico, found the study, carried out by a consortium of institutions and academics with remotely activated cameras triggered by sensors. That was a 20-percent increase from the first edition of the study, carried out in 2010. "The presence of jaguars ensures that these ecosystems function, by controlling the population of herbivores, and is also an indicator of the ecosystems' good health," said Heliot Zarza, vice president of the National Jaguar Conservation Alliance, in a statement released by the World Wildlife Fund. The jaguar, the largest feline in the Americas, can weigh up to 100 kilos (220 pounds), though the ones found in Mexico rarely weigh more than 60 kilos. The yellow, black-spotted cats are found in 18 countries across the Americas, 90 percent of them in the Amazon rainforest. There are some 64,000 jaguars in the wild, a number that has been shrinking, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has declared the animal a "near threatened" species...MORE

So there are 64,000 of these critters, with 90 percent being located in Amazon rainforests. And yet, our all-wise government has designated 764,207 acres in the desert Southwest as critical habitat. This has all been endorsed by the courts, which found that even though the habitat was unoccupied, it was still essential for the conservation of the species, based on the opinion of the USFWS.

What has Trump and the Republican Congress done to reform the Endangered Species Act?

Its as if Congress itself was unoccupied.
 

Wild jaguar makes rare appearance on Arizona wildlife camera

A conservation nonprofit shared wildlife camera footage of a rare wild jaguar found living in the mountains of Arizona. The Center for Biological Diversity posted a video Thursday to Facebook showing the jaguar, recently dubbed Sombra by students at Paulo Freire Freedom School - University Campus in Tucson, wandering the Chiricahua Mountains. The jaguar seen in the footage, recorded by a remote-sensor camera placed by Russ McSpadden, is believed to be the same animal previously photographed by the Bureau of Land Management in the Dos Cabezas Mountains in November 2016...more

Feds want to ease jaguar protections to build border wall

While one branch of the U.S. government reviews a plan to bring back the endangered jaguar, another branch wants to waive legal protections for the species to build the border wall. This week, new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a ranching advocacy group that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “will put forward a waiver on the border, which will allow me much more flexibility” in managing the jaguar there, according to E&E News, an environmental news service. Zinke’s talk to the Public Lands Council in Washington, D.C., didn’t elaborate on how that would happen. “Secretary Zinke is committed to carrying out the president’s vision for an immigration system that is lawful and includes border security,” Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift wrote in an email. Zinke’s comment Tuesday came eight days after the Fish and Wildlife Service took final public comments on a detailed jaguar recovery plan. The 508-page document proposes a complex blueprint of measures costing about $56 million over five years and $605 million over 50 years to help the jaguar recover from what many believe is a precarious state. Under the 2005 federal Real ID Act, the government has the right to formally waive restrictions under the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws in pursuit of building border fencing. Homeland Security used that law to help it build about 650 miles of border fencing and walls during the 2000s. The jaguar does have legal protection in the U.S. in the form of the wildlife service’s formal designation of much of the Arizona-New Mexico border with the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua as critical habitat for the large mammal. The jaguar is known to live in 19 countries including the U.S., but it is considered vulnerable to a wide range of threats including habitat destruction and illegal killing. Seven jaguars have been documented in the U.S. since 1996 — five in Southern Arizona and two in southwestern New Mexico, including one near the Arizona border. Two were photographed in Southern Arizona late last year...more

Jaguar photographed in southern Arizona’s Cochise County

The third jaguar documented in southern Arizona since 2012 was photographed by a Bureau of Land Management trail camera in Cochise County. The image was taken on Nov. 16, 2016, in the Dos Cabezas Mountains 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border; the camera data was only recently retrieved. This is the only jaguar photographed by this BLM-deployed camera since it was installed in August 2016. The camera remains on site. A Five Arizona Game and Fish Department scientists have independently completed an analysis of the photo, comparing the jaguar’s spot patterns to other jaguars sighted previously in Arizona. They concluded that this animal has not been previously identified. The sex of the jaguar cannot be determined by the photo. “Since 2012, an increase in trail camera monitoring of mountainous habitat in southern Arizona has provided increased documentation and a better understanding of jaguar presence and habitat preferences,” said Steve Spangle, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Arizona field supervisor. “This supports the phenomenon that jaguars seeking territories outside of competitive breeding areas in Mexico continue to occasion Arizona.”...more

U.S., Mexico wildlife officials draft jaguar recovery plan

A team of wildlife officials in the United States and Mexico on Monday released details of a proposed recovery plan for the endangered jaguar, prompting criticism from environmental groups who say more needs to be done to restore a breeding population of the elusive cats north of the border. While jaguars are found in 19 countries stretching from the American Southwest to South America, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday that the focus is on efforts in northern Mexico and the U.S. As part of the proposal, scientists are not prescribing jaguar reintroductions in the U.S. They’re focused instead on efforts to sustain habitat, eliminate poaching and improve social acceptance of the animal to accommodate jaguars that disperse into the U.S. so they can survive and multiply. Federal officials are seeking comments on the proposal and any additional information that could help shape a final version of the plan. Since 1996, as many as seven jaguars have been documented in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Federal officials say these jaguars are believed to be coming from a breeding population centered about 130 miles south of the U.S. border in the Mexican state of Sonora...more

Steller: Jaguars belong in Southern Arizona, whatever the number

...In the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s official statement on the confirmation of a new roaring cat, Jim deVos, the assistant director for wildlife management, put the department’s position this way: “Jaguars are a unique component of this state’s wildlife diversity and it is exciting to document a new visitor. However, in the absence of female jaguars and with the irregularity with which we document any jaguar presence in Arizona, this sighting in early December is important, but not an indicator of an establishing population in the state.” This and other comments deVos and another Game and Fish official made Thursday are both correct in their particulars and diversionary in their spirit. To say the new jaguar is a “visitor” suggests they aren’t really supposed to be here. But historical records show that’s clearly wrong. Before white settlement, jaguars lived at least as far north as the Grand Canyon and were permanent, reproducing residents of Arizona. In fact, their range stretched from California to Louisiana. Over the last 20 years, at least five males have crossed into Southern Arizona, at times apparently overlapping in their time here. A hunter shot the last female known to have lived in the state in 1963, near Big Lake in the White Mountains. My colleague Tony Davis interviewed that hunter, Terry Penrod, about four years ago at his Lakeside home. In that case, the Game and Fish Department recently concluded the female was planted by a hunting guide, even though the accused guide denied it. In other words, this is a pattern. Political pressures mean Game and Fish must both celebrate the existence of the jaguar in Arizona and deny that it really belongs...more

Donald Trump’s Border Wall Would Have Wild Victims

By Eric Scigliano

If pronghorns, ocelots, and jaguars could vote, Hillary Clinton would get an additional boost in Arizona and Texas. That’s because, aside from questions of feasibility and political impacts, the Great Wall of Guadalupe Hidalgo that Donald Trump promises to build would have a devastating impact on these and other four-legged border jumpers.

Likewise the endangered subspecies of black bear that inhabits the borderlands along the Rio Grande. These bears, which have been nearly extirpated in Texas but hang on in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua, are much rarer and shyer than their prolific northern cousins—hardly cut out for a world of helicopters, searchlights, and high-powered rifles.

The region’s next-largest carnivore, on the other hand, has shown a remarkable determination to keep coming north against all odds. Jaguars, the third-largest of the big cats, aren’t just jungle cats. They once ranged widely across the Southwest and Southeast. But what was thought to be the last wild jaguar in the United States—a female—was shot in 1963. Over the past two decades, however, one after another male tigre has been spotted or recorded by trap cameras wandering north in a vain search for mates.

Federal officials, picking their battles amidst vehement resistance from ranchers, have declined to import female jaguars or designate critical jaguar habitat. But biologists suspect that climate change is already driving not just jaguars but ocelots, coatis, javelinas, brown-nosed opossums and hog-nosed skunks northward. As warming continues, refuges north of the border will become increasingly important for many Mexican species—if fences and walls don’t hold them back.

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Jaguar scat study suggests restricted movement in areas of conservation importance in Mesoamerica

A research group led by the American Museum of Natural History and global wild cat conservation organization Panthera has published the largest gene-based survey of its kind on wild jaguar populations in Mesoamerica. The analysis, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, is based on nearly 450 jaguar scat samples collected in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. This work identifies areas of conservation concern for Mesoamerican jaguars and underscores the importance of large-scale genetic monitoring efforts when prioritizing conservation and management efforts for this near-threatened, and elusive, carnivore species. "Mesoamerica has one of the highest deforestation rates worldwide, potentially limiting movement and genetic connectivity in forest-dependent jaguars across this fragmented landscape. Large-scale conservation genetics studies on wild jaguars spanning across several range countries assessing these threats are rare and suffer from low sample sizes for this region," said Claudia Wultsch, the lead author of the paper, a scientist in the Museum's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and a conservation research fellow at Panthera. "Over the last 100 years, jaguars in Mesoamerica have been pushed out from more than 77 percent of their historic range." To get a better idea of the genetic health and connectivity of jaguar populations in this area and the effectiveness of the existing wildlife corridors (i.e., stretches of habitat that facilitate movement between local populations), the researchers turned to DNA obtained from field-collected jaguar scat...more

Center of Biological Diversity files notice of intent to sue to protect El Jefe's territory

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act for its approval of a controversial open pit copper mine in the heart of the home territory of El Jefe, America’s only known jaguar. The agency issued a formal biological opinion in April that would allow the proposed Rosemont Copper Mine in southern Arizona to harm or kill El Jefe and destroy his home, despite the fact that it’s located in protected “critical habitat” on public land that’s essential to the recovery of jaguars in the United States. "If we want jaguars like El Jefe to roam wild again in the mountains of the American Southwest, we must protect places like Rosemont,” said Randy Serraglio, conservation advocate with the center. “Rosemont is not only prime jaguar habitat — as El Jefe proved by living there the past few years — it’s also a critically important movement corridor for all jaguars that attempt to return to ancestral territories in the U.S.” The Rosemont mine would create a mile-wide, 3,000-foot-deep open pit in El Jefe’s home territory and bury thousands of acres of surrounding public land with more than a billion tons of toxic mine waste. The mine would also pump a vast amount of groundwater, which threatens to dry up springs and creeks in the area that are critically important to jaguars and several other protected species. In draft biological opinions, Fish and Wildlife’s own scientists concluded that the mine should not be permitted, but the agency ignored their findings in issuing its approval...more

Arizona's Only Jaguar Prowls a Difficult, But Hopeful, Path

On video, the United States' only jaguar is a graceful presence. He pads through the forest of Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains, sunlight dappling his spotted coat. The phrase "charismatic megafauna" never seemed so apt. After the release of this jaguar video by two conservation organizations in early February, El Jefe the jaguar became a national name (he's been well-known around Tucson for more than three years). But this glimpse of the great cat is only the tip of an enormous iceberg of history for jaguars in the United States. Once driven out of the United States by hunting and ranching, jaguars are now in the eye of a more sympathetic public. But there is debate over the protections they need from threats like copper mines and border walls, and bad blood between the groups responsible for conserving these cats.  El Jefe's presence in the Santa Rita mountains near Tucson has been known for years. For a time, scientists with a University of Arizona program were tracking the big cat using camera traps and a scat-sniffing dog. Funding for that project has since dried up, and Conservation CATalyst is the only group keeping an eye on El Jefe at the moment, Neils told Live Science...more

Here's the Video:

Drug traffickers wiping out the jaguar in Central America

The jaguar roams jungles and riverbanks from the Amazon to Mexico, and even into the southwestern United States. It’s a powerful and cunning hunter, and a single cat’s territory can stretch hundreds of miles. The Aztecs called their most fearsome warriors “ocelotl” — jaguar soldiers. But now the jaguar is being defeated by a ruthless, modern-day warrior of a different sort: Powerful drug cartels are carving up its Central American natural habitat. In some areas, particularly in Honduras and Guatemala, the big cats are at risk of disappearing entirely. “Drug dealing in Honduras is definitely affecting jaguar conservation,” said Jorge Guardia, a conservationist with a major international environmental NGO in Honduras (his name has been changed and his employer’s identity concealed for fears of attacks by narco-traffickers). “Habitat destruction is the No. 1 threat, and money from drugs is fueling illegal activities in protected areas — mainly cattle ranching.”  Cocaine and cows may seem like an odd combination, but ranching has proved to be an ideal way to launder drug money. It’s even happening right inside supposedly protected forests. The connection between the drug trade and habitat loss is simple. Drug traffickers prefer to operate in remote areas away from government control, which often means protected lands. They quickly move in and begin constructing clandestine roads and airstrips, according to Kendra McSweeney, associate professor of geography at Ohio State University and lead author of “Drug Policy as Conservation Policy: Narco-Deforestation,” a 2014 paper published in the journal Science...more

As we have documented here many times (see here and here for two examples) the drug and human traffickers are destroying protected lands on the U.S. side of the border.  Now we see the same happening in Mexico and other countries.  As the article states, "Drug traffickers prefer to operate in remote areas...which often means protected lands." 

Thanks to Obama-Udall-Heinrich, the traffickers now have a half-million acre National Monument right on the border which places strict limitation on border patrol access.  Not satisfied with that, Senators Udall and Heinrich want thousands of those acres to be designated Wilderness, which further limits all law enforcement, and have introduced legislation to accomplish such designations.

Protected areas draw illegal traffickers.  Do Udall and Heinrich not understand that?  Or do they just not care as they hurry along to support the environmentalists agenda?

PLF sues over feds’ regs for ‘phantom jaguar’ in New Mexico

The designation of tens of thousands of acres as “critical habitat” for the jaguar is illogical — and illegal — because the species hasn’t been present in the region for years

Albuquerque, N.M.; May 21, 2015: Attorneys with Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) have just sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for illegally designating tens of thousands of acres in New Mexico’s Hidalgo County as “critical habitat” for the jaguar even though the species has not been sighted in the county, or anywhere else in New Mexico, for years; indeed, the state doesn’t even have any environmental features that are essential to jaguar recovery. 

 

M. Reed Hopper Principal Attorney Tony Francois Senior Staff Attorney

Donor-supported PLF is a watchdog organization that litigates nationwide for limited government, property rights, and a balanced approach to environmental regulations.  In asking the court to overturn the designation of jaguar critical habitat in New Mexico, PLF attorneys represent three broad-based organizations with members who are harmed by this reckless and unjustified expansion of federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulations in the region — the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau, New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, and New Mexico Federal Lands Council.

PLF represents these organizations free of charge, as with all its clients.

Reckless regulating:  Roping off “critical habitat” for a species that isn’t there

 

The jaguar’s global population is estimated to be at least 30,000; 90 percent live in tropical, jungle, and swamp habitats in Central and South America.  According to the FWS Recovery Outline for the species, there are no jaguar populations in New Mexico — or anywhere in the United States.

The jaguar has been listed as “endangered” under the ESA since 1972; but the FWS did not designate any terrain as “critical habitat” for the species until more than 40 years later (in 2014), and then only in response to a lawsuit by environmental activists.  This long practice of not designating jaguar habitat reflected a basic biological reality, at least in New Mexico:  The state has not been occupied by jaguars in many decades, and it is not home to any environmental features that are essential to the future of jaguar recovery.  Indeed, the closest jaguar population to New Mexico is a small one (100 animals or fewer) living fully 130 miles south of the border, according to the FWS’s Recovery Outline.

Hurting landowners and wasting environmental resources

 

“Habitat designations mean significant — sometimes crippling — restrictions on property owners and managers, both private and public,” said PLF Senior Staff Attorney Tony Francois.  “They also compete for the limited money and resources available for environmental protection.

“Clearly, the government doesn’t have the luxury of careless overreach when it comes to roping off property as critical habitat,” he continued.  “But that’s exactly what we see with the jaguar habitat designation in New Mexico.  The bureaucrats have cordoned off tens of thousands of acres for a phantom species.  This amounts to reckless regulating, and a heavy-handed power play against landowners.

“At most, only two jaguars have been credibly sighted anywhere in the state over the past four decades,” Francois noted.  “There are no breeding pairs or evidence of resident jaguars in the state.  This species’ connection to New Mexico is a matter of distant memory, not recent reality.  There is no justification for bringing down the regulatory fist on property owners, and wasting scarce environmental resources.”

Jaguar regs’ threat to fire prevention

 

A significant portion of the New Mexico habitat designation lies within the Coronado National Forest — creating an impediment to fire-prevention and fire-fighting initiatives in that region.

Indeed, the FWS’s “Final Critical Habitat Designation” for the jaguar admits that the designation of critical habitat creates new regulatory hurdles for forest-fire management strategies, such as “fuels-management activities, and some prescribed fire.”

“Over and above the legal issues, it’s simply poor public policy to designate a fire-prone National Forest as critical habitat for an animal that isn’t there,” said Francois.  “Important projects to reduce fire risk will be impeded by new layers of bureaucracy and a time-consuming approval process.  It will be harder to implement effective, flexible fire-prevention strategies.  This means increased danger of catastrophic wildfire, with potentially devastating impacts not just for people, property and natural resources — but also for species.  That’s right:  The environment is at greater risk because of unjustified regulations by the very bureaucrats who are paid to protect the environment.

“The jaguar habitat designation can also impede development of community infrastructure like road improvements and pipelines, and range improvements for cattle ranches that are important to the local community and economy,” he noted.

Statement from the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau

 

“Food producers in New Mexico are under the gun as the federal government continues to endanger their livelihood,” said Chad Smith, CEO of the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau.  “The designation of tens of thousands of acres of prime New Mexico ranch lands as critical habitat for endangered jaguars is one more example of how endangered species have taken precedence over people.  We must restore balance, and members of the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau ask the federal government to ensure a successful future for ranchers in Southern New Mexico by overturning the designation of jaguar habitat.”

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, the lawsuit is New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau, et al. v. Jewell.  More information, including the complaint, may be found at PLF’s website:  www.pacificlegal.org.

About Pacific Legal Foundation
Donor-supported Pacific Legal Foundation is the leading legal watchdog organization that litigates for limited government, property rights, and a balanced approach to environmental regulations, in courts across the country.

Press Release

$200,000 of Homeland Security funds spent on jaguar “attitudes” surveys

by Cindy Coping

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has given the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) more than $2 Million of its own funding to spend on jaguar recovery in the United States border region instead of securing the border. USFWS has already spent $775,000 of that funding to place camera traps around southern Arizona and New Mexico in hopes of photographing jaguars and ocelots. More recently, according to Greenwire, another $200,000 of Department of Homeland Security funds were spent to study ranchers’ attitudes toward jaguars. The survey results are to be incorporated into a jaguar recovery plan that is likely to be released in 2015.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) claims that human hunting and habitat destruction is a primary threat to jaguars. The linked article from the news service Greenwire spins this global statistical finding into misleading  innuendo that ranchers and hunters are the primary threat to jaguars in the southern USA. To the contrary over  the last 28 years, no jaguars have died at the hands of poachers, hunters or ranchers in the United States. In contrast, unprofessional, unethical and even illegal attempts by biologists to snare jaguars for study have inhumanely finished off at least four of the endangered beasts in the United States, northern Sonora and the Yucatan within the last decade.

This is not to say that information quoted directly from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees is by any means accurate. The Greenwire article quotes Mary Anderson, FWS border mitigation coordinator as stating,

“There’s a lot of concern by the public regarding the presence of jaguars in their area, and we’re just trying to find out what those concerns are so that we can educate the public.”
For instance, she said, if people don’t realize that jaguars mainly eat deer and javelinas, then that fact could “lessen concerns of the public regarding the threat of jaguars to humans.”

Apparently Ms. Anderson is unaware of the recent study by Cavalcanti and Gese showing that in Brazil, nearly one-third of a jaguar’s typical diet is beef cattle. She may also be unaware of several lethal attacks on humans by jaguars in Colombia, Belize and Guayana in the last five years, in addition to a three year old child that was taken from the front steps to her grandmother’s home by a jaguar that fractured her skull with its massive jaws. When we interviewed the world-class 1960’s-era jaguar hunting guide Curtis Prock, we learned that he was called upon twice in British Honduras to track down jaguars and recover the remains of children they had taken.

More importantly, lives are threatened directly by the failure of the U.S. Government to secure our southern border. The current policy compromises the safety and security of the nation so that transient, lone male jaguars can cross the border to hunt for nonexistent mates in Arizona and New Mexico. No naturally occurring female jaguar has been seen in Arizona since at least 1949, and that one is questionable. No naturally occurring female jaguar has ever been documented in New Mexico. There is no verifiable evidence that breeding populations of jaguars ever occurred naturally in Arizona or New Mexico. Many ranchers live between the border and the so-called “forward operating bases” of the U.S. Border Patrol. One of those ranchers, Robert Krentz, was murdered on his own property by a man he identified in his last radio transmission as an illegal immigrant. SACPA opposes this perversion of the Endangered Species Act which seems to be employed as a political excuse for continuous border insecurity.

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Seeking justice for Corazón: jaguar killings test the conservation movement in Mexico

Eight years ago, a female jaguar cub was caught on film by a motion-triggered camera trap set in the foothills of canyons, oak forest, and scrubland that make-up the Northern Jaguar Reserve, just 125 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. "This first-ever glimpse of a jaguar cub revealed the importance of this area's protective habitat and would catalyze the Northern Jaguar Reserve's expansion to the 50,000 acres that are safeguarded today," noted the Northern Jaguar Project (NJP) in Tucson, Arizona in a press release. Three years later, in 2009, the jaguar reappeared on film as an adult. They called her "Corazón" for the distinctive heart-shaped spot on her left shoulder. During the next five years, she was photographed 30 times on the reserve and became an icon for those working to expand conservation efforts in the area. In 2012, Dr. Rodrigo Medellín and PhD student Ivonne Cassaigne, researchers with the Instituto de Ecología at UNAM (Mexico's national university), began working to safeguard and monitor jaguars as they moved across unprotected areas adjacent to the Northern Jaguar Reserve, in partnership with a group called La Asociación para la Conservación del Jaguar en la Sierra Alta de Sonora. They were thrilled when they captured Corazón (or "Jaguar Female 01") and fitted her with a satellite GPS collar. But on February 25, 2014, the collar transmitted a mortality signal, and an email was sent to the UNAM researchers noting that no movement had been detected for more than five hours. Corazón was lost. Using Corazón's last known GPS location, a field technician traced the signal to her collar and found Corazón's carcass burned to conceal the crime of her illegal killing. Her $4,000 satellite collar—the device responsible for documenting the crime of Corazón's murder—was also destroyed, according to a UNAM bulletin. When tracking the last movements of Corazón back to her den, the footprints of a cub were found. Sadly, researchers believe this cub would have been unable to survive without its mother. Medellín told mongabay.com that while there is only one jaguar currently known in the U.S. (in Arizona), Mexico's jaguar population remains viable at around 4,000 individuals, a number his team verified in a 2012 published study. "We're still in good shape," Medellín told mongabay.com. "We have the right conditions to secure the future of the jaguar as a species in the country. But unfortunately the wheels are still turning very slowly."...more

Jaguars' protection does not extend into the Gila

Federal wildlife officials last week set aside nearly 1,200 square miles along the U.S.-Mexico border as habitat essential for the conservation of the jaguar, according to the Associated Press. That area includes neighboring Hidalgo County, but U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stopped short of designating the Gila National Forest as part of the endangered species' protected area, according to Pinos Altos-based Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. "While we're disappointed that the protection omits the best U.S. habitat for jaguars — the rugged Gila headwaters in New Mexico and the pine-clad Mogollon Rim in Arizona — this decision is a milestone that protects much of the borderlands that the first generation of returning jaguars is exploring and inhabiting," Robinson said through a news release. The critical habitat designation consists of six units, each containing one or more mountain ranges in which jaguars have been recorded in recent years or through which they are thought to have traveled. The designation includes the Baboquivari, Pajarito, Atascosa, Tumacacori, Patagonia, Santa Rita and Huachuca mountain ranges in Arizona; the Peloncillo Mountains that straddle the Arizona/New Mexico border; and the northern tip of the San Luis Mountains in New Mexico's bootheel region, according to a news release...more