In January, the door of an enormous corral swung open in northeastern Argentina and marked a biodiversity-conservation milestone: the jaguar’s return to the wild in the region’s vast Iberá Wetlands for the first time since going extinct there seven decades ago. The jaguar in this case, to be precise, consisted of a three-year-old female and her two four-month-old cubs. Their release culminated a nearly seven-year captive breeding effort undertaken as part of an ambitious wetlands habitat-restoration project begun by the late conservationist Douglas Tompkins, a former U.S. outdoor-clothing entrepreneur.

Tompkins, who died after a kayaking accident in Chile in December 2015, first visited the Iberá Wetlands in 1997 and was dazzled by the vast expanse of grasslands, swamps, lakes and woodlands. He soon began buying up cattle ranches, restoring the ecosystem and reintroducing native wildlife in the region, which is located in the province of Corrientes and is home to the second largest wetland in South America behind Brazil’s Pantanal.

Much of the region’s native wildlife had been devastated by hunting and the encroachment of cattle ranching and rice farming, so the restoration work has involved the reintroduction of a variety of species. But the most difficult and closely watched work in that vein has been on behalf of the jaguar (Panthera onca), which once roamed Argentina as far south as Patagonia.

“It’s the first time this has been done,” says Howard Quigley, executive director of conservation science and jaguar program director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. “I have certainly seen people who have taken orphaned jaguars and put them in jaguar range in the Americas, but never in a place where there are no jaguars. Unfortunately, we are losing jaguar range, without doubt, so something like this will become more and more important in the future. The project is very exciting and is absolutely reusable.”

Tompkins’ jaguar-restoration plan was inspired by the return of the gray wolf to Yellowstone Park in the United States, says Sofía Heinonen, executive director of the foundation, now called Rewilding Argentina, that Tompkins created to conduct the Argentine conservation work. In Yellowstone, the presence of wolves has touched off an ongoing chain reaction of positive and far-reaching ecological impacts. “He had seen this [Yellowstone] process up close and wanted to do something similar in the Iberá to restore the health of the ecosystem,” Heinonen says of Tompkins, who before his death also initiated vast land-conservation projects elsewhere in Argentina and in Chile.

Founder of The North Face and Esprit clothing lines, Tompkins acquired 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) of ranch land in the Iberá Wetlands during the period 1997-2002 and repurposed the land for conservation. As native plant varieties reasserted themselves, Tompkins’ team over the years reintroduced various animal species that had gone extinct in the region, including the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), Pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) and the collared peccary (Pecari tajacu). These species were reestablished largely by using animals from other areas of Argentina where they still lived in the wild and could be obtained from rescue centers. Restoration of the South American tapir (Tapirus terrestris), also was attempted, but the effort failed due to parasitic illness. Though reintroduction of all the targeted species posed challenges, that of the jaguar involved extra layers of complexity. “When reintroducing a species of wildlife into an ecosystem, relocating wild animals from another place is always recommended since they already are adapted to the natural world and know how to hunt or procure their food,” says Heinonen. “But this was impossible to do with the jaguar because there are very few in Argentina.”

Scientists say just two viable jaguar populations remain in the country, one in the woodlands of Misiones Province on the border of Brazil and Paraguay, and the other in the Yungas region, which borders Bolivia. The cats’ numbers overall are estimated at only 300. Though there is a third population in Argentina’s portion of the semi-arid Chaco region shared with Bolivia and Paraguay, experts say it is near extinction. “We had no alternative other than to bring jaguars from zoos, but not to free them, because they wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild,” Heinonen says. “The objective was to use them to reproduce so their descendants could be freed.”

The strategy made the project complex as well as costly. One of the greatest expenses was the construction of enormous corrals in San Alonso, a 10,000-hectare (25,000-acre) island in the Iberá that is only accessible by boat or plane. The biggest of the corrals, within which captive-born jaguars would learn to hunt before being freed, has an area of 30 hectares (74 acres) and contains a variety of environments to replicate those of the Iberá region. Heinonen estimates that in all, US$9 million has been spent on the jaguar-reintroduction project since planning began in 2012.

In May of 2015 the first female jaguar was donated by the Batán Zoo in the province of Buenos Aires, and more were donated by other Argentine zoos subsequently. But the jaguars turned out to be too old and too closely related; as a result, they did not successfully reproduce. Not until 2019, when jaguars were obtained from Brazilian wildlife rescue centers, did the project begin to gain consistent traction.

One jaguar, a female named Mariuá by project personnel, was donated by a rescue center near Brasília shortly after being found as a cub, her mother having been killed by hunters. She was the jaguar released into the wild in January along with two cubs of her own, a little over two years after she had been transported from Brazil to Rewilding Argentina’s Experimental Jaguar Breeding Center in the Iberá. Her cubs, Karai and Porá, were born last September. Their father, Jatobazinho, had been donated to the breeding center from a wildlife-rescue facility in Brazil’s Pantanal region.

“The most important thing when it comes to large carnivores bred in captivity is they can’t be accustomed to receiving food from people, so when they are freed they don’t approach people and [prompt] conflicts,” says Heinonen. “We feed them at all times with live prey [typically capybaras, caimans and wild pigs] that are put in the corral so [the jaguars] learn to hunt.”

Before the jaguars were set free, Mariuá was outfitted with a GPS collar that transmits her location every three hours to a monitoring station. “When she is in the same location for a couple of days, we know that is because she hunted and has food,” biologist Agustín Paviolo, an advisor to Rewilding Argentina, told EcoAméricas this month. “She has done very well so far. We’ve been able to determine that she has captured capybaras and wild pigs.”

The conditions that led to the jaguar’s extinction in the Iberá in the mid-20th century have gradually eased over the past 40 years. In 1983, Corrientes provincial authorities declared the entire Iberá region, an area of 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres), a natural reserve. Much of the area comprises private landholdings where ranching, rice cultivation and other activities were occurring at the time and have continued. But the provincial government prohibited hunting throughout the reserve and required landowners to conduct environmental impact studies in connection with proposed land-use changes.

Ten years later, in 1993, a 550,000-hectare (1.35-million-acre), publicly owned portion of the Iberá reserve was declared a provincial park, a more restrictive conservation status. Then in 2016, Tompkins’ widow, Kris McDivitt, donated the 150,000 hectares of ranch property that Tompkins had purchased and ecologically restored to the Argentine government, which in 2018 designated the land as a national park. McDivitt and Argentina’s president at the time, Mauricio Macri, hoped Corrientes would donate its Iberá parkland to create a single national park, an idea provincial authorities rejected. But the earlier creation of the provincial park and then of the national park alongside it has nevertheless ensured that 700,000 hectares (1.73 million acres) of the Iberá region is subject to a strict level of environmental protection.

For visitors to the Iberá today, the abundance of jaguar prey such as capybaras and caimans is plain to see. Still, it was important for project organizers to confirm that conditions for a return of the jaguar and other locally extinct species were truly favorable. “To ensure a [wildlife] reintroduction process is viable, it is fundamental to ascertain that the threats that had made the species disappear no longer exist,” says Paviolo, who was part of a team that in 2012-13 determined there was sufficient prey in the Iberá to sustain a jaguar population. “In the old days there was a large rural population in the Iberá, and hunting was widespread, which is the main reason the jaguar and other species disappeared. Mammal hides and bird feathers were sold.”

Garnering community support has been important, too. “One of the biggest difficulties posed by the reintroduction of a large carnivore is that conflict can occur with ranchers and [other local] residents,” says Argentine biologist Verónica Quiroga, who has worked on the jaguar reintroduction project. “That’s why it is impossible to go forward without acceptance on the part of the neighboring communities.”

Diana Frete, until last year vice mayor of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, a town on the eastern edge of the Iberá, says local support for conservation has grown over the years as communities have gained an economic stake in tourism. “This traditionally was a community of rice farmers, ranchers and hunters, many of whom moved away after the reserve was created,” Frete says. “There were 2,000 residents in the 1970s, but the census of 1991 showed there were just 513.”

Starting 30 years ago, she says, residents began getting involved in tourism activities. Today, the town has 900 residents and some 30 lodging businesses, as well as restaurants and firms offering tours of the Iberá by water or land. Says Frete: “Pellegrini reinvented itself. Today it lives on tourism in an alliance with nature. And the reintroduction of wildlife is a great contribution to our natural riches.”

To spread the wealth, Pellegrini authorities prohibit construction of hotels with more than five rooms. “People understood it is more valuable to observe wild animals than kill them and sell their skins, and today practically all town residents make a living from tourism,” says Valeria Verdaguer, the town’s director of tourism.

Ripple effects
While a successful return of the jaguar would help propel the ecotourism trend, biologists involved in the effort hope it will also contribute to the ecosystem as the reintroduction of wolves did in Yellowstone Park.

“Big predators such as the wolf and the jaguar [benefit] the ecological health of the places they inhabit,” says Sebastián Di Martino, conservation director of Rewilding Argentina. “One thing we hope will happen over time in the Iberá is that capybaras, which now graze everywhere, as tourists can see, begin to avoid the most open areas so as not to run risks. If that happens, the vegetation will grow better in those places.”

Rewilding Argentina’s efforts are not limited to the Iberá. The nonprofit announced this month that in the Chaco region of Argentina, two jaguar cubs were born in a large corral the organization has built there as part of a reintroduction project in El Impenetrable National Park. The cubs were born to a wild male and a female born and raised in captivity. Jaguars are only vanishingly present these days in the vast, semi-arid Chaco woodlands, which cover some 600,000 square kilometers (232,000 square miles) in northern Argentina.

“In the past five years we have confirmed the presence of just 42 jaguar paw prints in the entire ecoregion,” says Quiroga, who works in the Chaco as a researcher for Conicet, a scientific arm of the federal government. “But that doesn’t mean they were from 42 different animals. We estimate that at most only 20 individuals remain.”

In 2019, an image of a wild jaguar was captured in the Argentine Chaco for the first time in seven years. It was snapped when a male jaguar triggered a camera trap set up near the Bermejo River, one of the region’s principal water courses. When they had determined the jaguar was male, they took one of the females living in captivity at the Iberá site and transported her to the Chaco in hopes of using her to attract the male. The strategy worked. The male, dubbed Qaramtá in an online poll of 3,200 people, was captured, outfitted with a GPS collar and released. “That’s how we learned that he covered an immense territory in the Chaco, some 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres), to look for a female he probably would never find,” Di Martino says.

Intricate date
Last year a nearly two-hectare (five-acre) corral was built in El Impenetrable Park, and a different female that was ready for breeding was moved there from the Iberá center. The same male that had received a GPS collar eventually appeared, entering the open corral, and the pair mated. After the female gave birth to the two cubs this month, Chaco Province Governor Jorge Capitanich took part in the announcement. He called the births “an extraordinary contribution to environmental restoration.”

“It was a risky move that turned out well, because never before had there been a cross between a wild jaguar and a captive-raised one,” says Di Martino. “The cubs will be freed when they are adults—they can fend for themselves in three years—because we cannot free the mother, who is accustomed to the presence of humans and could not survive in the wild.”

Still, conditions in the Chaco are not favorable due to agricultural land-clearing and a lack of infrastructure to support the kind of tourism development that might fuel habitat conservation. Ecotourism barely exists there, and poachers frequent the banks of the Bermejo, a known hunting ground of Qaramtá.

In the Iberá, by contrast, conservationists aim to accelerate what until now has been a long and gradual wildlife-reintroduction process. Three other female jaguars with cubs will be freed this year if all goes to plan. Then the first male will be released. “We hope that in three or four years there will be 10 wild pairs, which would be a healthy population,” Heinonen says. “And we dream that one day, 100 jaguars will inhabit the Iberá.”