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Wildlife: The Comeback Cat
Picture this: A jaguar living year-round in the American Southwest. That's exactly what remote motion-detection cameras did in July.
Dubbed "Macho B," (pictured) the jaguar was captured on camera cheek-rubbing and claw-raking a tree—the actions of a resident jaguar trying to communicate with others of his kind. "He's not just passing through," says Emil McCain, co-founder of the Borderlands Jaguar Project, which formed following the confirmed sightings of two male jaguars in Arizona in 1996. "Given these three different forms of territorial scent-marking, Macho B is a territorial resident, trying to communicate with others, possibly even a female."
Between 2001 and 2006, the project documented two adult male jaguars—and possibly a third—with 53 photographs and 24 sets of tracks. Jaguars can be individually identified by each one's unique, roseate spot pattern on their fur coats. Macho A—macho means male in Spanish—had his picture captured in three different locations from 2001 and was last seen in 2004. Macho B, it turns out, had the same roseate pattern as one of the males photographed by the project's other co-founder, Jack Childs, in 1996. "This means he's at least 13 years old and still occupying the same haunts," says McCain.
Although there is no evidence of a female in Arizona—the last breeding female on the U.S. side of the border was documented in 1963—McCain figures that if only one were present in those 13 years since Macho B's been here and she had cubs every two to three years, if half survived, she would've had three to five young in the borderlands area in the last 10 years. "If one of those was a female cub, there could be more," he says.
With 30 percent of the land in Arizona suitable habitat for jaguars and only 12 percent surveyed, the idea of a resident female isn't that farfetched. But either way, the survival of a U.S. jaguar population is absolutely dependent on the Mexico population, says McCain. The 700-mile border fence being erected to stop Mexican immigrants from illegally entering the United States will dash any hopes of establishing a larger population in the cat's historic northern range. "Without cohesive habitat spanning the border, there can be no gene flow and no dispersing cats," he says.
