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From the Yucatan rainforest —

Plus a coyote/whale side trip in Baja California

— to the arid north,

— estimated numbers of the wild jaguars in Mexico are rising, according to this AFP video that can’t be embedded.

The news video was uploaded six years ago.

Another census reportedly is underway.

In October 2024, Mongabay still quoted the 4,800 number but also looked at the bigger picture here at the northern end of this American big cat’s current known range:

…At the start of the 20th century, there were nearly 40,000 jaguars roaming across Mexico; today, that number is down to just 4,800. Poaching, retaliatory killings for livestock deaths, and the expansion of agriculture and livestock pasture into forest areas are responsible driving a nearly 88% decline in the big cat’s population.

Historically, jaguars could be found throughout Mexico’s mountains and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, from Chiapas in the very south and Quintana Roo in the east, to Sonora in the north and Tamaulipas in the northeast. They also occurred in a corridor along the Neovolcanic Axis, the mountain range that runs across the center of the country. Although this distribution has largely persisted, population and habitat loss have led to a 40% decrease in the jaguar’s territory and fragmented what remains, isolating populations and compromising their genetic diversity, among other things…

Meanwhile, north of the Rio Grande as of about a year ago, wanderers have been sighted but, as far as I know, no breeding population:

More information:

• Article: Living with the great cats
• Are jaguars a keystone species?
• There is a two-year-old report that Mexico’s Reino Animal sanctuary planned to rewild some young jaguars, but I haven’t been able to find follow-up on it. Hope it went as successfully as some programs in Argentina have.

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Featured image: Angela N. Perryman/Shutterstock

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