SPOTTED IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA

On a cool August morning, we stand at the edge of hills rolling green and lush to the Santa Rita Mountains. There are prickly poppies everywhere, a gift of monsoon rains, and, somewhere in canyons we cannot see, a jaguar. Captured on remote, motion-activated cameras several times, it has wandered this landscape at least since autumn 2012, when a hunter photographed its tail. It is not the first jaguar in these mountains. From here to beyond the Santa Ritas, where the country extends southeast to the Patagonia Mountains straddling the Arizona-Sonora border, there is almost unbroken wildland into Mexico.

“It’s an easy shot for a jaguar to get over into these mountains,” says Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity. Three distinct wildlife corridors meet in this area: the Whetstone Mountains to the east, Mexico to the south, and the Santa Catalina and Rincon mountains to the north, through Davidson Canyon under Interstate 10. Because no wall exists in the most rugged sections of the border mountains, jaguars can easily move across them.

While locations of remote cameras are known only to those who place them, Serraglio, guessing from released photos, leads us up an old mining road cut high into the green hills. It’s a white scar of road where I walk on my imagination’s track of a cat I will not see. Rare, magnificent, it leads me past old junipers, shrubby oaks, mountain mahoganies, the gray forms of dead branches, the brilliance of yellow flowers. I imagine the jaguar sees us. I always imagine that animals I long to see are watching.

Lower down, we drive a road following a long, sandy canyon past the headquarters for the controversial proposed Rosemont Mine. The canyon, shaded by old oaks and pines, seems an oasis. We pass a spring corralled into a concrete trough, a place where deer must come to drink, a place the jaguar knows the deer must come to drink. Ocotillo,
agave and yucca back away from the roadsides and scatter themselves among luxuriant green grasses.

It’s easy to be passionate about jaguars. Third-largest cat in the world — after tigers and lions — secretive and elusive, it seems too exotic to be native. Yet it has belonged here since the Pleistocene epoch. Fossilized bones have been found in Arizona, Nebraska, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Florida. Moving south, jaguars colonized Mesoamerica, where their power, strength and beauty imbued them with the clout of gods. In Mexico and Central America, the jaguar’s image appears on temple friezes and in sacred sculpture. But depictions of it also turn up north of the border, at Anasazi and Mogollon rock-art sites, on pottery and other artifacts, in Navajo and Apache traditions, on a shell-carving in Missouri, as a deity in Mohave myth, and in a Comanche tale of an epic battle between a jaguar and an alligator.
 

Nineteenth century records from California to Louisiana contain references to jaguars. John James Audubon wrote about sightings in Texas in his 1854 book The Quadrupeds of North America. Spencer F. Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and preeminent 19th century scientist, discussed jaguars north of the border in his 1859 Mammals of the Boundary report. More recently, in Borderland Jaguars, David E. Brown and Carlos A. López González provide a long list of jaguars reportedly killed or photographed in Arizona and New Mexico from 1900 to 2000. In Arizona, they’ve been documented as far north as the Grand Canyon.

Janay Brun saw one. In autumn 1999, she was hiking near twilight in the Baboquivari Mountains with her two young dogs. Sensing something, the dogs suddenly raised their noses. Brun became equally alert. There, a hundred feet ahead on a granite boulder, was a large cat. Although everything was shrouded in shadow so she could not discern spots, she could see the cat look at them. It began vocalizing.

“It was like a wild cough,” Brun says, describing the cat jumping from the boulder to run the opposite way, its voice now echoing off rocks. Her dogs took off after it, then quickly came running back, not stopping until they were home. She stayed on the trail, searching for the cat unsuccessfully, before turning around.

A year later, listening to cat vocalizations on the Internet, she knew she’d seen a jaguar. Seven years later, volunteering with the Borderland Jaguar Detection Project, she placed a remote camera on the spot where she’d seen the cat in 1999. The camera caught the jaguar in the same spot.

During the 19th century and most of the 20th, jaguars were hunted, poisoned and hounded off the land, victims of predator-control programs aimed at making land safe for cattle. With jaguar populations decimated in Arizona and New Mexico, Sonora is the last refuge for the remnant northern jaguar population. The Northern Jaguar Reserve, 130 miles due south of the Arizona-New Mexico border, was created in 2003 as a cooperative effort between the U.S. and Mexico. The highest number of jaguar sightings in the region have occurred on its 55,000 acres. But because Sonoran habitat is increasingly compromised by development, restoring Arizona and New Mexico populations becomes doubly important.

For the continuity of the species, “re-establishing multiple populations in historic ranges is vital,” says Craig Miller, head of the Jaguar Project for Defenders of Wildlife. Along with the border area, he and others working on jaguar recovery include the White Mountains — where, in 1963, the last female jaguar in Arizona was shot — an adjoining area in New Mexico, and the Central Arizona highlands as historic ranges.

“An Arizona-New Mexico population of jaguars would help bolster the genetics and the survival of jaguars in Sonora, and help balance our ecosystems, which evolved with jaguars,” says Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The goal should be to re-establish a population, through reintroduction if necessary.”
 

For northern jaguars to return to stable numbers, a strong link between genetic populations in the U.S. and Mexico is essential. Preserving recovered populations at a size large enough to ward off the various threats is also crucial. And given the fact that climate change affects even unendangered animals, protecting habitats at the edge of the jaguar’s range becomes critical.

For Arizona jaguars, life could be easier now than through most of the previous two centuries. Prey is more abundant. Besides deer, bighorn sheep and javelinas, there are elk that had been hunted out of existence in Arizona more than a hundred years ago. Public lands are better protected, and some large, private ranches are devoted to conservation. Perhaps most important is the greater recognition that predators native to an environment help balance that environment.

The species was listed as an endangered species in 1972, but only south of the border. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged its “oversight” in the 1979 Federal Register. Still, not much happened — except that a jaguar was killed in the Chiricahuas in 1986 — even in 1992, when conservation biologist Tony Povilitis petitioned the service to list the jaguar as endangered in the U.S. Not until the Center for Biological Diversity sued was it finally listed in 1997.

Being listed means critical habitat — intended to protect the ecosystem upon which the species depends — is required under the Endangered Species Act. It is illegal for any federally approved project to render that area unfit for the species. It took 16 years and more Center for Biological Diversity litigation, but the service has designated approximately 850,000 acres across several “sky island” ranges (including the Santa Ritas) south of I-10 in Southeastern Arizona and Southwestern New Mexico as critical habitat.

That last female jaguar was shot in the White Mountains by a young hunter out calling in predators. Remains in her stomach showed she had fed on elk. Less than four months later, a second jaguar, a male, was shot on nearby White Mountain Apache tribal land. Were the two siblings? Females, who don’t wander far from their birth area, also choose the best possible habitat because it makes caring for their young easier. If a female chooses a territory, it probably means it’s a good one for jaguars.

After suggesting we meet in the White Mountains to explore the area where the jaguar was killed, Robinson calls the hunter for directions. The man clearly remembers his route of 50 years earlier.

We drive across open meadows south of Big Lake under a storm-cloud sky. Several miles into deep forest, we stop at a spot that seems right. That we are not quite on it (we find out later) is irrelevant for my imagination. On a high point of lichen-covered volcanic rock, I have a 180-degree view of the forest floor, brilliant green from all the rain, crossed by animal trails of rich, brown earth. On a rain-wet day in a dark forest, it is easy to imagine the jaguar. Ferns growing around the bases of charred ponderosa trunks give this area a sense of the primeval, of a time before roads and absent jaguars. Because I want a jaguar here, I feel its presence. Or is it the presence of a ghost, the memory of a jaguar I’ve never seen?

When an animal belongs, however long it has been absent, the Earth remembers.