Clearing a Path for the Jaguar

National parks around the world provide important refuge for people and wildlife. They’re places where humans can reconnect with the natural world and where animals are protected from human encroachment. But parks rarely provide enough habitat to ensure the survival of an entire species. This is especially true of large predators like jaguars. Jaguars are the biggest cats in the all of the Americas. And in Central America, scientists are trying to protect Jaguars by finding and protecting the corridors that the cats use as they roam from park to park. Julia Kumari Drapkin reports from Panama.

Drapkin Biologist Melva Olmos and her team tunnel through the tropical forest with machetes. They’re just twenty-six miles from Panama City. But here – in Chagres National Park- it’s prime habitat for jaguars. To keep tabs on the cats, she ties cameras with motion sensors to the trees.

Olmos “One camera on each side of the trail. So there will be chances to photograph both sides of the same animal at the same time.”

Melva Olmos

Drapkin Olmos keeps an eye on jaguars for a living. She tracks where jaguars are in Panama and where they’re going.

Olmos “I’m going to mark the point on the GPS, so we have the position in the map in the office.”

Drapkin Olmos knows that jaguars live in this park, and in another park, called Soberania, to the West. Between the two parks lies a strip of scattered towns.

Rabinowitz “What you have are big green spots and just humans in between.”

Drapkin Alan Rabinowitz is concerned about the area that separates the green spots – the area between the parks. Rabinowitz is president of Panthera- a wildcat conservation group. He says, jaguars have always traveled through this landscape. But overtime, it’s filled with more people. Rabinowitz fears that eventually the jaguars in these parks will be cut off form one another, and he wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Rabinowitz “One main way to prevent extinction is to try to keep – at least a little- it doesn’t take much- a little genetic flow between breeding populations.”

Drapkin To keep that flow between the parks means first figuring out how jaguars cross the human landscape. So Melva Olmos is helping Rabinowitz find these jaguar pathways. But that’s not so easy. Jaguars are expert sneaks: they tend to pass unseen. So Olmos looks for clues: she breaks out the field map.

Olmos “Aqui hay un mapa, yo quiero saber. Este es Lago Alajuela. Y aqui es Soberania.”

Jaguar track

Drapkin She looks for jaguar friendly landscapes- areas with water that offer a bit of cover. Areas like this along Lake Alajuela- On the edge of Chagres National Park. Women bathe their children by the shore lined with small tin roof houses. She enters one with a big window overlooking the lake- She asks the owner- Senor Cervantes- what kinds of animals live here.

Olmos “El mas que ve aqui es el iguana.”

Cervantes “Okay, the green iguana is common in the area. Nkeyes, el gato solo. Conejo pintado si”

Drapkin Iguanas, agutis, coatimundi, and deer he says, counting on his hand. Olmos nods. These animals are typically eaten by jaguars. With prey species running around, there’s a good chance jaguars are running around here too. Even if Cervantes and his neighbors haven’t seen them.

Cervantes “No no por aqui, no. Cerca no”

Drapkin Olmos has another lead. She’s heard rumors about jaguars north of here. So she heads to the Sierra Llorona Highlands-a stretch of ranches and farms that lies between the two parks. Here the ranchers call out to each other among the rolling hills. On a clear day, you can see both the Carribean to the north and the Panama Canal to the west as the dirt road winds through fields and forests.

Olmos “Senor Illario??”

Drapkin Olmos stops along the road and asks people if they’ve seen animal tracks. She shows them pictures of four types of wildcat tracks. The men on the road point to the biggest paw marks on the page- the jaguar tracks.

Men on the road “Oh, big big big” “They were like this?”
Olmos “When was this?”

Drapkin Yes. They’ve seen those tracks. Melba then shows them a picture of a jaguar. Have any of them actually seen one of these cats, she asks? No. But they’ve heard them.

Men on the road “Grrr! Tan duro que me despierto!”

Drapkin The growls are so loud, an old woman says, she’s woken up in the middle of the night. Olmos is pretty sure that jaguars are using this area to move between the parks. But she’s not done collecting all the data yet. When she is, all that information about habitat, prey items, jaguar tracks, and jaguar sightings will be sent to New York City.

Scientists at Panthera will create a map of so-called jaguar corridors. But even as Olmos discovers these jaguar corridors, they’re already being severed by new human ones. A multilane highway is under construction right between the parks. It’s not just the highway itself that poses a threat to jaguars but the development it’s likely to bring. More access, brings more people, more houses, more stores.

Olmos ” That will stop jaguars. Cuz then basically you’ve got a city growing.”

Drapkin But Panthera’s Alan Rabinowitz says saving jaguars in this area won’t necessarily mean setting aside more parkland. Jaguars already tolerate some human development. Rabinowitz hopes that once his team finishes mapping the jaguar corridors, he can convince Panama to zone these areas for jaguar-friendly use, coffee farms, ranches, or even citrus groves.

Rabinowitz “Things which can create a mosaic that allow a few individual jaguars to sneak their way by. “It’s ambitious, but highly doable.”

Drapkin And Rabinowitz has the ambition to do this across the jaguar’s entire range- from Mexico all the way to Argentina. Melva Olmos has done jaguar conservation across that range, for ten years. But she admits the work can be exasperating. The cats are so secretive, she’s never actually seen one in the wild.

Olmos “This is very frustrating for me.”

Drapkin So she sometimes visits them in captivity. Here in the zoo near the entrance to Soberania National Park. A male jaguar stares from behind bars with yellow within yellow eyes. A few years ago, Olmos says, the zookeepers found jaguar tracks around this cage. Perhaps it was looking for a mate, the story goes. Olmos worries that if her efforts to protect jaguar corridors fail, many jaguars WON’T be able to find mates in the future.
They’ll be surrounded by too many people. And the parks they live in will be little more than large cages.

For The World I’m Julia Kumari Drapkin in Panama.

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