In 1996, an Arizona hunter photographed a wild jaguar and chose not to shoot; the encounter helped inspire a project protecting a Mexican refuge

A jaguar (Panthera onca), in a wildlife rescue & rehabilitation centre in Formosa Province, Argentina. Image credits: Wikimedia CommonsWarner Glenn, a rancher and hunting guide, was hunting mountain lions on March 7, 1996, in the Peloncillo Mountains on the Arizona, New Mexico border when his pack of hounds cornered a large cat that he later discovered was a jaguar. He photographed the animal, and his images are recognized as the first ever taken of a wild jaguar in the United States. This adult male jaguar was not intimidated and simply sat on the bluff, watching the hounds below. Glenn was an experienced hunter and before the jaguar was listed as endangered in the United States in 1997, there was no federal prohibition on taking the animal. But instead, he decided to pull back his hounds and snap some photos of this magnificent animal.A rancher photographed a wild jaguar in 1996 The photographs prompted biologists, including the Mexican zoologist Carlos López-González, to ask why a jaguar had appeared so far north when the species had not been seen alive in the wild in the United States for decades. The search for an origin population then took him into Sonora, Mexico, where he discovered a small, reproducing population of jaguars in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. The above-mentioned information was known to Peter Warshall, an ecologist and his wife, Diana Hadley, a historian and former rancher, who, together with other conservationists, founded the Northern Jaguar Project in 2003, as stated on the project’s website itself. With the help of the Mexican nonprofit organization Naturalia, the land of 4,000 hectares near the village of Sahuaripa was purchased to form the Northern Jaguar Reserve by taking away the cattle, according to the Northern Jaguar Project website.Camera traps produced a first population estimateWith jaguars impossible to count directly due to the nature of the terrain, the value of the reserve has been assessed primarily through the use of camera traps. For instance, in Estimation of the density of the Near Threatened jaguar Panthera onca in Sonora, Mexico, using camera trapping and an open population model, published in Oryx in 2012, Gutiérrez-González, Gómez-Ramírez and López-González made use of sixteen months of camera trap photographs (February 2009 to May 2010) from the reserve and ten cattle ranches adjacent to it and identified 10 jaguars to arrive at an average density of 1.05 jaguars per 100 square kilometres based on their unique spot pattern.Peloncillo Mountains on the Arizona, New Mexico. Image credits: WikipediaAnother study further analyzed the data over a period of 13 years. Are Private Reserves Effective for Jaguar Conservation? Published in PLOS ONE in 2015, the same lead researchers, along with Doherty, used the Barker robust design method, which combined closed sampling periods with resightings to estimate both apparent survival and abundance. They identified 467 jaguar photographs with 48 individuals and noted that digital cameras significantly increased the probability of detection in comparison to film cameras, with a mean density of 1.87 ± 0.47 jaguars per 100 km².Thirteen years of data showed 48 individuals The paper states that the establishment of the reserve in 2003 and its subsequent enlargements were observed, but that none of these factors can be shown to explain the change in survival estimates. Apparent survival, as reported in the 2015 PLOS ONE study, rose from 0.47 (±0.15) to 0.56 (±0.11) by 2012, a period that overlaps with the no-hunting ranch agreements adopted in 2007. The researchers stopped short of linking the rise to the reserve's presence, since jaguars are long-lived with low reproduction rates, making short-term changes hard to attribute to any single cause; they also noted that 13 years of data were still not enough to reliably detect changes in density or survival. What can be said is that neither the ranch agreements nor the sanctuary appear to have decreased survival rates.The reserve kept growing with local support The purchased land at the core of the reserve, reported at roughly 20,000 hectares in the 2015 study, has grown since then to more than 56,000 acres (about 22,700 hectares), according to the Northern Jaguar Project's own recent reporting. That figure covers purchased reserve land only; the separate 13,000 hectares of no-hunting ranch agreements are tracked apart from it and aren't included in the acreage total. According to the Northern Jaguar Project's website, the project also operates Viviendo con Felinos, a program that pays ranchers in the region for documented camera-trap images of wild cats. The reserve still hosts a small breeding population of jaguars today.