Here are the facts, to much coffee room talk.
Sightings
A jaguar passes into New Mexico
© Warner Glenn
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• Malpai Borderlands Group
• Matador Ranch, Montana
• Private Lands Conservation
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Return of a Native Cat: Wild Jaguar Spotted in New Mexico
by Curtis Runyan
Arizona rancher Warner Glenn has now had two once-in-a-lifetime encounters with jaguars, the latest in February during a mountain lion-hunting trip in the Bootheel of New Mexico. “I thought it was an old tom lion,” says Glenn. “But when I got closer, I saw it was a jaguar—it was an absolutely beautiful cat.”
After spotting it, Glenn walked back to his mule and reached into his saddlebag. “This is a really remote corner of the country, where a rancher might easily say, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with an endangered species anywhere near my land,’” says Jonathan Adams, a Nature Conservancy biologist. “But Warner Glenn didn’t reach for his gun; he reached for his camera.” And he did the same in 1996, when he took the first pictures ever of a live jaguar in the United States.
The jaguar—the largest cat native to the Americas—has been making its way north from a core population of a couple hundred cats 140 miles to the south, according to biologists. “Historically, jaguars ranged as far north as the Grand Canyon,” says Peter Warren, a Conservancy grassland manager in Arizona. “The return of these big cats is an indicator that conservation work near the border is paying off.”
Glenn is part of the Malpai Borderlands Group, a team of ranchers that works with scientists, conservationists and public agencies to protect its lands from encroaching development by maintaining a “working wilderness” in the rugged and biologically diverse lands along the Arizona and New Mexico borders with Mexico. The Conservancy has partnered with the group since its beginning in 1994, assisting with more than 75,000 acres of conservation easements and helping to apply prescribed burns to about 150,000 acres.
Like most people living in the hardscrabble border region, Glenn needs to supplement his work as a rancher, and he does so by guiding hunting trips. He first hunted mountain lions on his ranch with his father more than 60 years ago to protect the livestock. “I know it’s difficult for some people to stomach,” says Warren. “But hunting a few animals is fairly benign when we’re talking about significant benefits to an entire ecosystem.” Recent in-creases in mountain lion populations have led to declines in bighorn sheep and other Southwestern species, he says.
“These ranchers live on land that is very difficult to manage, and the Malpai group is working to manage their land in a way that is responsible and sustainable,” says Nathan Sayre, a University of California geographer and author of a recent book on the borderlands. “The jaguar’s return is a symbol of that success.”