Jaguars and Resilience in the Borderlands: A Podcast with Russ McSpadden

The recent sighting of a new Jaguar in southern Arizona bodes well for the borderlands, says McSpadden of the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Environment
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February 27, 2024

In January, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity confirmed an exciting discovery near the Arizona-Mexico border: the first sighting of a jaguar never previously identified in Arizona. Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate at the center, has been tracking the jaguar population in the borderlands for several years.

The rare and elusive creatures once lived throughout the American Southwest. But they’ve nearly disappeared over the past 150 years due to habitat loss and government programs to protect the livestock industry.

For decades, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity has worked to protect jaguars, successfully lobbying for them to be listed in 1997 as an endangered species. And in December 2022 the center petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce jaguars to New Mexico and designate more critical habitat in New Mexico and Arizona.

In this Border Chronicle podcast, McSpadden discusses this exciting new discovery and the work that the center and others are doing to bring back the endangered jaguar population in the United States.

Russ McSpadden in January 2023 at the Arizona-Mexico border preparing to document with a drone the environmental damage caused by a shipping container wall built by former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. (Photo credit: Melissa del Bosque)

Get involved: Organizations protecting jaguars and their habitat include the Center for Biological Diversity, Northern Jaguar Project, Sky Island Alliance, and Conservation CATalyst. Also read this piece on cultural considerations and the current debate over naming this newly identified jaguar.

Author
Melissa del Bosque

Melissa del Bosque is Co-founder and Executive Director of The Border Chronicle. Melissa has written about the U.S.-Mexico border since 1998 for various media outlets, including ProPublica, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Texas Observer, and The Intercept.

Her work has been recognized with numerous U.S. and international journalism awards, including a Gabo Award and the Internacional Rey de España de Periodismo award, as the U.S.-Mexico investigations editor for Lighthouse Reports. In 2020, del Bosque received the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award as part of a ProPublica group reporting project “Inside the Border Patrol.” In 2016, she received the Hillman Prize for her investigative feature “Death on Sevenmile Road” about the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2015, del Bosque’s four-part series with The Guardian on migrant deaths in South Texas won an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. 

Del Bosque is also the author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty. She has a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master’s in Public Health from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health, and a Bachelor’s in poetry and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

In her spare time, Melissa loves to travel, spend time with her family, and explore the Sonoran Desert.

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