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Last month, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service put forward a proposal to protect 838,000 acres of land for jaguars. The land, spread across six sites in southern Arizona and New Mexico, will reintroduce the animals to the southwestern United States and will be a designated critical habitat for the endangered jaguars. The proposal comes after the Center for Biological Diversity obtained a court order in 2009 that directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to implement a recovery plan for the jaguars.
“Jaguars once roamed across the United States, from California to Louisiana, but have been virtually extinct here since the 1950s,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Today's habitat proposal will ensure North America's largest cat returns to the wild mountains and deserts of the Southwest. Jaguars are a spectacular part of our natural heritage and belong to every American — just as surely as bald eagles, wolves and grizzly bears."
“You can’t protect endangered species without protecting the places they live,” he said. “Species with protected critical habitat recover twice as fast as those without it. This wild expanse of habitat is a huge boost to the return of jaguars to the American Southwest.”
Although jaguars’ habitat now ranges from Mexico to Argentina, the wild cats once were found mostly in North America, 60,000 years ago during the Pleistocene era. Federal and state government programs to capture and kill animal predators led to the elimination of jaguars from the region, but in the past twenty years, the large cats have started to repopulate the area. However, without critical habitat protection, the new jaguar colonies still were not safe: the last jaguar that crossed into the country from Mexico, a cat named Macho B, was killed in 2009. The government’s predator plan, which was carried out from 1918 to 1964, killed an estimated dozens of jaguars but focused on killing gray wolves and coyotes.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal is expected to be finalized within one year, and will grant jaguars protections in Arizona’s Pima, Cochise, and Santa Cruz counties and New Mexico’s Hidalgo County. The region is the northernmost part of the jaguars’ habitat, and jaguars in the region are considered a fringe species that cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Center for Biological Diversity has concentrated its efforts on protecting jaguars for the past two decades, and a lawsuit by the Center and petitions by scientists led to jaguars being listed as an endangered species in 1997. Ten years later, the American Society of Mammalogists joined the cause and determined that, due to climate change-induced alterations in jaguars’ natural habitat and ecosystem, the species’ survival depended on the establishment of a significant jaguar population in the United States.
Some conservationists believe that, in order for jaguars to secure the best chance of survival and recovery, some of the U.S. resources provided under the Endangered Species Act should be spent in Mexico, where jaguars are more abundant than they are in the United States. Resources provided to Mexico include tracking and surveying jaguars, particularly in the Jalisco and Sonora states, by photographing them instead of capturing and killing them.
Other conservationists believe that that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan is good, but wish it was implemented in more areas. “These sky island mountain ranges near the border with Mexico are vital for jaguars to move into the United States. But we propose adding the Gila and Apache national forests in, respectively, New Mexico and Arizona, where roads are few and prey plentiful, in order to provide habitat for more jaguars, which could genetically bolster the population in northern Mexico,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Read more: http://greenanswers.com/blog/288191/us-fish-and-wildlife-service-proposes-protected-land-jaguars#ixzz29UgpL7kV
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