Big Cats

and (almost) nothing about the election

Jaguar mothers will eat their cubs’ feces to cover their scent and keep away potential predators. Adult jaguars have no such need for protection, as predators they have none. A wildlife biologist in Sonora told me about finding mountain lion skulls with jaguar bite marks.

They’ll kill bears, too. But jaguars have been trophy-hunted and trapped and helicopter-shot by ranchers and government officials for so long that there may only be two of them left in the United States.

These magnificent creatures were extirpated from the country until they started stealthing back north, crossing the international divide and cruising sky island to sky island in southern Arizona. Part of their survival tactic is also one of their hunting tactics: they are so well camouflaged and move so smoothly that sometimes remote trail cameras — even when jaguars walk right in front of them — aren’t triggered by their motion. They’re like ghosts. They’ve learned to stay away from humans.

Earlier this year I went down to a jaguar reserve run by the Northern Jaguar Project in a remote section of Sonora in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

I reported on the trip for Arizona Luminaria, laying out the relative success conservationists have found in Sonora — convincing ranchers that jaguars are good for the ecosystem.

Photo courtesy of Northern Jaguar Project

One other tidbit I picked up: unlike lions or other big cats, jaguars don’t mind water, and trackers have noticed they won’ break stride when walking through a puddle.

Leopardus pardalis

An ocelot also made an(other) appearance in Arizona. My good friend and wildlife camera wizard Russ McSpadden captured a beauty of an ocelot drinking from a watering hole in Southern Arizona. Ocelots are sleek and spotted felines about the size of a bobcat. They too were nearly hunted to extinction in America, but now there are a few dozen of them in Texas and at least two in Arizona. This one made it at least 30 miles from its last sighting, having crossed both a highway and a river.

Ocelot captured on wildlife cam by Russ McSpadden

As resilient as both cats are, they stand no chance of establishing viable populations if the border wall is finished. Much of the wall cleaving in two the relatively healthy breeding populations of jaguars in Mexico and the few forayers north of the border is already built, but gaps in the wall remain. Despite repeated promises not to build another foot, the Biden administration has recently been filling in those gaps.

Meanwhile, if we have a Trump redux, the rest of the wall in Southern Arizona and New Mexico will almost certainly be built. Experts are convinced that finishing the wall will kill any hope of jaguars making a comeback in the United States.

Reading

I recently engulfed Senegalese-born French writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s gorgeous and inspiring novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, which is a Bolañoesque paean to literature, as well as a continent-hopping literary mystery.

Two quotes from Sarr celebrating the impact of and passion for books:

“Great works impoverish us and must always impoverish us. They rid us of the superfluous. After reading them, we inevitably emerge emptied: enriched, but enriched through subtraction.”

“If you’re not willing to fight to the death for an author’s carcass, like in a game of buzkashi, then fuck off and go drown yourself in that warm puddle of piss you take for quality beer: you’re anything but a reader, much less a writer.”

The book pairs well with the recent film Io Capitano, which is a devastating and beautiful story of trans-Sahel northbound migration from Senegal to Italy.

I also just read Casa Vacías, or Empty Houses by Brenda Navarro, a surprising novel by a Mexican author about a young autistic child who goes missing from a park. I wasn’t convinced by the novel for the first third, but the writing tightens and the plot builds pace and then surprises in a nice way. Definitely going to give her other novel, Ceniza en la boca, a try soon.