Christine Dell’Amore writes Ocelots once roamed the U.S. Can we bring them back? (‘Ocelots are a quintessentially American cat—yet a single tropical storm could wipe them off the U.S. map. Will a pioneering new partnership make a difference?’):
Only a few centuries years ago, the northern ocelot was a quintessential American cat, prowling places as diverse as Louisiana, Arkansas, and Arizona.
But decades of widespread hunting and habitat loss have winnowed their numbers in the United States to fewer than a hundred individuals, which now roam the thorny scrublands of South Texas. They’re split into two populations, one that lives on private ranchlands, and the other in Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, located farther south in the rapidly developing Rio Grande Valley along the Gulf Coast. Though ocelots are plentiful in parts of Central and South America, the northern subspecies is listed as federally endangered in the U.S.
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To protect the species, in 2021, several non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and private landowners launched a major effort to establish a new ocelot population in Texas, which aims to increase the total number to at least 200 animals for a period of 10 years—the benchmark needed to take it off the endangered species list.
“We’re optimistic,” says Grant Harris, a chief biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the southwestern U.S. “It’s a very pioneering partnership. This is how it should work—you have all these groups pulling together for a common goal.”