This week, I'm wrapping up a pair of stories on jaguar conservation. Along the way, I got to interview the grand daddy of big cat advocates, Alan Rabinowitz. To help me prep for the interview, my editor suggested I listen to this amazing RadioLab broadcast on zoos. Alan comes at the end, and the intimate interview is well worth waiting for.
So was Alan. My editor had interviewed him a few years back, and she'd promised that "tracking him down would be worth the effort." Uh oh. That sounded like trouble -- but I had only to wait a week until he returned from a trip out of the country. He called him as he was flying down the NJ turnpike, and we had a wonderful chat.
I also interviewed Santiago Espinosa, a graduate student from the University of Florida in Gainsville, who is doing the first jaguar count in Ecuador. Here's how Espinosa describes his field work, from an email he sent me:
My PhD fieldwork started April 2007. In these last two years I have surveyed three different sites to look for jaguars. In each site I have covered an area of approximately 25,000 acres –that is I have surveyed a total area 75,000 acres total-. In each site I have set up 26 camera-trap stations. A camera trap station is a place where I put two cameras facing each other, and in both sides of a trail, so I can photograph both left and right sides of a jaguar when it walks through the trail and passes in front of the cameras. The 26 camera-trap stations I set up in each site are spaced from 1to 2 miles from each other. In each area that I have surveyed, that is in each 25,000 acres, I have set up the cameras for three months. In these three months I have had to check periodically each camera-trap station to make sure cameras are working properly. Cameras may run out of film or batteries, or malfunction because the high humidity of tropical forests. Once the camera grid system –that is all the 26 camera trap stations in one area- is working, I have to check each camera every 10 days. To do so, I have to walk 6-10 miles through the forest every day I am checking cameras. In one they I can check a maximum of 3 stations… so you can imagine how much walking me and my assistants have to do… and all of this, most in the times in very hard conditions, camping in a tent in the middle of the forest for weeks, with no bathroom, lots of rain, mud, mosquitos…. You can see I really love these animals!
Jaguars in the U.S.
In February of 2009, the Arizona Fish and Wildlife Service collared the first wild jaguar in the United States. Sadly, the animal died soon after being collared, apparently of old age. He was 15.
Jaguars and the Endangered Species Act
Although jaguars are listed as "endangered" in the United States, they lack a management plan or designated habitat. (See the different designations here.) This situation may change under the Obama administration.
Here, the Center for Biological Diversity explains the jaguar's status.
