Environmentalists want jaguars reintroduced to U.S. Southwest

PHOENIX —  An environmental group on Monday petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help reintroduce the jaguar to the Southwest, where the big cat roamed for hundreds of thousands of years before being whittled down to just one known survivor in the region.

The male jaguar, named Sombra — Spanish for “shadow” — has been seen in southern Arizona several times since he was first captured by a wildlife camera in 2016 in the Dos Cabezas Mountains, including in a 2017 video by the Center for Biological Diversity. There are a handful of jaguars known to be living across the border in the Mexican state of Sonora.

The center wants the federal agency to help expand critical habitat for jaguars in remote areas and launch an experimental population in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest along the Arizona state line.

“Over 50 years since the jaguar was placed on the endangered species list, we should not be facing the realistic prospect that this sole jaguar in Arizona will be the last,” Michael J. Robinson, senior conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote to Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

“This could be an amazing opportunity for us to restore a native species that was here for hundreds of thousands of years and deserves to come back,” Robinson said in an interview.

Jaguars ranged throughout North America before they were killed almost to the point of extinction for their stunning spotted pelts and to protect livestock.

Robinson said failing to act could also affect efforts to save the dwindling jaguar population in Mexico, which needs the kind of genetic diversity that mating with a new group of the big cats to the north would provide.

Jaguar populations in many places, from Mexico to South America, are shrinking as well. They are being reintroduced to their historic range in Argentina through a program in which they are bred in captivity and released.

The Center for Biological Diversity was among environmental groups involved in the successful work to launch the recovery of the gray wolf population, which had dropped nearly to extinction half a century ago.

Like jaguars, gray wolves once ranged across most of the U.S., but by the 1930s they were wiped out in most areas under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns.

A remnant population in the western Great Lakes region has since expanded to some 4,400 wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. And more than 2,000 wolves occupy six states in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest.

The rarest subspecies of gray wolf in North America, the Mexican wolf, was listed as endangered in the 1970s, and a joint U.S.-Mexico captive breeding program was started with the seven remaining wolves.

The results of the latest annual survey of the Mexican gray wolves, released in March, showed at least 196 in the wild in New Mexico and Arizona — the sixth straight year that the population has increased.

Robinson said efforts to protect the jaguar never enjoyed the momentum of the gray wolf campaign.

“People forget or don’t know that the jaguar actually evolved in North America, ranging from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and then spread to the south,” he said.

Concerns about the jaguar’s future were mentioned in a letter that his group sent to outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Oct. 19, giving his administration a 60-day notice of its intent to file a lawsuit to halt the placement of shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border as a barrier.

The letter says the San Rafael Valley in southeastern Arizona is among jaguars’ and ocelots’ last established corridors between the two countries.