The Center for Biological Diversity reported yesterday that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife folks have actually made a formal recommendation for critical jaguar habitat totaling 838,000 acres in southern Arizona and New Mexico.......If after all the challenges and protests from rancher/mineral/business stakeholders are overided and this habitat actually does become protected, we call on the PANTHERA big cat conservation group to include the Southwestern USA as part of its Jaguar Protection Corridor that currently is at play getting protection from Patagonia to Mexico...............Remember, that Jaguars roamed the USA from San Francisco to the Carolina's during the pre colonial and colonial era and still bred in our Southwest in the 19th and early 20th century

CRITICAL HABITAT ACTUALLY TO BECOME AREALITY FOR THE JAGUAR IN THE USA?

Just minutes ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally proposed to protect 838,232 acres as "critical habitat" for endangered jaguars in southern Arizona and New Mexico -- an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
            
            When finalized in the next year, and joined with a developing federal recovery plan, the decision will ensure jaguars return to the wild mountains and deserts of the American Southwest.
           

              The decision has been a long time coming. The agency listed the jaguar as an endangered species in 1997 following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity that ended protection delays stretching back to 1978. But to our astonishment, it refused to protect the jaguar's habitat or develop a recovery plan! Instead it declared that jaguars should not be recovered in the United States -- despite the fact that the beautiful cats historically ranged all the way from Monterey Bay, Calif., to Louisiana and north to the Grand Canyon and Colorado.
            
Refusing to allow federal bureaucrats -- for the first time in U.S. history -- to consign an endangered species to extinction in the United States, we went back to court. In 2009 we won our case: The Fish and Wildlife Service was ordered to protect the jaguar's habitat and create a plan to fully restore the species.
            

            Like wolves and grizzly bears, jaguars were killed en masse by federal trappers and sharpshooters paid to make the West safe for heavily subsidized public-land ranching. By the 1950s jaguars were virtually extinct, but in recent years began to show the first signs of recolonizing Arizona and New Mexico. Individual animals from a Mexican population have been exploring the borderlands of the two states recently. Macho B, the last jaguar to be seen, was killed in a botched capture in 2009 -- the very year we won a court order requiring the species' protection and recovery.
            
Thanks to all our members who wrote letters, made phone calls, and funded our jaguar protection campaign over the past 15 years. With today's habitat protection proposal and a recovery plan on the way, the full recovery of the American jaguar is finally in sight.
             
        

Kierán Suckling
                                    Executive Director
                                    Center for Biological Diversity