Jaguar population on the rise

Jaguars on the rise!

I’m starting again the blog on my website. I pretend to add mostly day-by-day photo trip reports here, but eventually some other content as well. So I’ll start on a positive note: on March the Wildlife Conservation Society released a statement saying that, “Jaguar populations have grown at an average annual rate of nearly 8 percent across field sites where the WCS works in Latin America from 2002 to 2016. In the sites analyzed, which include areas throughout Central and South America, the jaguar population either held steady or expanded, with a 3-fold increase in jaguar density in Bolivia’s Madidi National Park alone.

This is great news and something that I have been saying for a few years, that jaguar populations are on the rise in a number of places, specially the Pantanal, where they are starting to be regularly seen in many areas, even places that no jaguars have been sighted for several years!

I think this is a result of a new culture emerging from younger generations of cattle ranchers, who can better appreciate nature and wildlife for what it is, so the hunting pressure on jaguars as retaliation to livestock kills is getting lighter. Also, ecotourism is a strong driving force in the Pantanal – your dollars spent on photo tours will pay people whose jobs depend on a healthy population of these cats.

Click here for the original WCS article.

Jaguar population on the rise