When do jaguars migrate

Those figures are considered outrageously inflated by opponents of the mine. They predict that most mining jobs would go to existing Hudbay employees, with the bulk of the copper being sold to China, and the profits banked in Canada. Meanwhile, El Jefe sleeps away the days under shade trees, rock outcroppings and in caves. He comes out to hunt in the star-studded Arizona nights, stalking his prey with precise micromovements, and then charging with overwhelming force and crushing their skulls in his jaws.

White-tailed deer are abundant, and smaller, slower animals make easy meals. El Jefe eats everything except the rear end, which contains the noisome scent glands, and the fluffy tail. The dog known as Mayke is a pound Belgian Malinois with long pointed ears and an affectionate disposition. She was born in Germany, where the breed is often used in aggressive police work, and shipped off to the U.

Border Patrol. Her new handlers trained her to detect drugs and explosives. She flunked out. Mayke is a highly intelligent dog with an excellent nose, but she scares easily and hates loud noises. Faced with a big, rumbling wheel truck with hissing air brakes at a highway checkpoint, her tail would tuck and she would tremble.

The Border Patrol gave up on her in early Neils, who had studied black bears in Florida, was doing her PhD at the University of Arizona, hence the move to Tucson.

While Neils was at school, Bugbee was training dogs not to attack rattlesnakes. He heard about Mayke from a Border Patrol dog trainer, and dreamed up an entirely new profession for her. A Border Patrol helicopter pilot had reported seeing a jaguar in the Santa Rita Mountains in June , but the first documented sighting of El Jefe was in the nearby Whetstone Mountains in November A mountain lion hunter named Donnie Fenn and his year-old daughter were riding with their hounds, 25 miles north of the Mexican border.

The hounds treed a big cat, and when Fenn arrived on the scene, he was thrilled to see that it was a jaguar. El Jefe was 2 years old and weighed about pounds, but he looked so menacing and powerful that Fenn guessed his weight at pounds. He was used to mountain lions also known as pumas or cougars , which vocalize aggression by snarling, but jaguars roar and growl like African lions.

After the jaguar descended from the tree, the hounds gave chase, sustaining minor injuries as El Jefe swatted at them before Fenn called his dogs off. When the hounds backed away, the cat was able to make his retreat. To train Mayke for her new profession, Bugbee procured some jaguar scat from a zoo, and put it inside a short length of PVC pipe drilled with holes.

He added a smear of scat from an ocelot, another rare and endangered spotted cat that turns up in southern Arizona. Then he started hiding the toy, so Mayke would use her nose to find it. He trained her to bark when she found it. The next stage was to remove the jaguar scat, and hide it in the desert scrub behind the Bugbee-Neils house on the edge of Tucson.

When Mayke found the scat and barked, Chris gave her the toy as a reward. It was overseen by the U. The idea was to do something for wildlife, and wildlife advocates, after a new security wall was built along sections of the Mexican border. The wall has shut down many wildlife migration routes, but jaguars, ocelots and other species are still able to cross the border through rugged areas where no wall has been built.

Bugbee began by placing and monitoring motion-activated trail cameras in the backcountry of the Santa Rita Mountains. Then he got clearance to use Mayke, though the chances of finding jaguar scat in the mountain range seemed incredibly remote, even to Bugbee himself. It took several months and many hard steep miles, but finally, Mayke found some fresh scat under a manzanita bush and barked.

He collected the scat and took it to the lab for genetic testing. Sure enough, it was jaguar. In a four-wheel-drive truck borrowed from his father-in-law, with camping supplies in the bed and Mayke curled up on the back seat, Bugbee turns south from Interstate 10 toward the small town of Sonoita, Arizona. The landscape is reminiscent of Kenya. Mountain ranges climb up into the sky from lion-colored plains and rolling grasslands.

Thorny trees line the dry watercourses. The biggest mountains in sight are the Santa Ritas, rising to 9, feet and mantled with pine forest at higher elevations. Ranges like the Santa Ritas, marooned from each other in a sea of desert and grasslands, used to be the main strongholds of the Chiricahua Apaches, under legendary chiefs like Cochise and Geronimo. The mountain lions are still here, and the jaguars and ocelots keep showing up. He turns into the Santa Rita foothills on a rough, rocky dirt road, passing cactuses and mesquite trees, and ocotillo plants with long thorny wands tipped with scarlet flowers.

Cattle huddle in patches of shade, having grazed the land around them into dust. Despite the overgrazing by privately owned cattle in this national forest, Bugbee says, the native wildlife is doing remarkably well.

Bugbee has spent four years trailing, studying and dreaming about El Jefe. Thanks to Mayke, he has come across very fresh scat, but he seldom finds a track, because El Jefe prefers to walk on rocks whenever possible. And I like my dog. She was terrified. It had to be him. The road gets steeper and rougher. Crawling and jouncing in four-wheel-drive, we pass through a patchy forest of junipers, oaks and pinyon pines, with slashing canyons falling away on either side, and the pine-clad peaks high above us.

Bugbee parks on a small bench of level ground, pulls on a daypack with water and food, and clips a radio collar on the excited Mayke. He sets off boulder-hopping down a canyon. Mayke scrambles and disturbs four deer that bound away with white tails lifted. A troop of coatimundis studies us, then scatters. These bowlegged, long-snouted, raccoon-like animals are yet another species whose northern range extends into southern Arizona.

After an hour of hiking in degree heat, we reach the first motion-activated camera. In the last ten days it has taken 70 photographs. Thumbing through the files, Bugbee notes squirrels, a bobcat, a gray fox and two men with big heavily laden backpacks. Mayke lies down in the shade and pants like a speeding train. Another half-hour, and a rattlesnake encounter, brings us to the second camera.

Take the controversial reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the s, which was fiercely opposed by ranchers and hunters. This is already playing out in the jaguar reintroduction. In , a joint Arizona-New Mexico big cat conservation team stalled amid concerns from ranchers, who largely view the predators as pests that prey on cattle.

The tension around jaguars feeds into a broader urban-rural divide over managing big predator species that is supercharged in the current political moment. Extrapolating from surveys of values related to nature and society, the study found domination prevalent across the rural US, whereas mutualism was concentrated in cities.

A county-level map seen below showing domination in red and mutualism in blue could easily be mistaken for the US presidential results. And the study authors warn the divide is just as bitter. But the final vote was a narrow win, with support concentrated in the urban Front Range corridor. Rural residents had turned against the measure over the perceived threat wolves could pose to homes and ranching. Indeed, wolves continue to be a political touchpoint across the West.

In his own work in Mexico and South America, for example, Quigley meets one-on-one with any ranchers who might be affected by jaguars to get buy-in from within the community.

In the meantime, the groups behind the CANRA proposal are focused on establishing the habitat, above all, and working with local tribes, state governments, and landowner groups to build the case for reintroduction. Based on other reintroduction efforts, it would likely be a mix of federal, state, and private funding. Two forthcoming studies — one on climate change and the other a population viability study — will help supplement the scientific record as the cultural work continues, according to Sanderson.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The controversial plan to bring jaguars back to the US Bald eagles, bison, and Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. A male jaguar photographed by motion-detection cameras in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona in Courtesy of BLM The proposal calls for transplanting jaguars from existing populations in northern Mexico or Argentina to land owned by Native American tribes and the US federal government.

The rise and fall and rise of the jaguar Jaguars prowled the southwest for millennia. Down to Earth Animals need infrastructure, too. Explainers 5 things to know about the big climate conference in Glasgow. Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for The Weeds Get our essential policy newsletter delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

For more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. Monitoring jaguar, however, is difficult, with GPS collars and remote camera traps see video below offering some of the only opportunities to monitor animals regularly. Morato, R. Carrillo, E. Carvalho, M. Jaguar movement database: a GPS-based movement dataset of an apex predator in the Neotropics. Ecology , 99, Resource selection in an apex predator and variation in response to local landscape characteristics.

Biological Conservation , , Fleming, C. Calabrese, J. Space use and movement of a Neotropical top predator: the endangered jaguar. Plos One , 11, p.