The jaguar is South America's biggest cat and the Americas' undisputed apex predator. Unlike most felines, which asphyxiate their prey by latching onto the throat, jaguars kill by sinking their teeth through their victims' skulls—they have the strongest bite of all cats. Indigenous peoples considered them sacred and mostly left them alone.
Deforestation has more than halved the jaguar's original range. At around 9m square kilometres it is a quarter smaller than it was in 2000. The cats are considered extinct in Uruguay, El Salvador and the United States, where they used to roam the woods of New Mexico and Arizona. They are threatened in Bolivia and Suriname, where traffickers poach them for their fangs, which are used as a substitute for tiger in traditional Chinese medicine. About half of the world's remaining jaguars are in Brazil, mostly deep in the Amazon.
Remaining jaguars are often isolated in patches of undisturbed forest surrounded by degraded land. Male jaguars instinctively leave their family territory after adolescence to search for new land hundreds of kilometres away; human expansion prevents this roaming, increasing inbreeding and genetic diseases. Since 2018 organisations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and the UN Development Programme have been working to create corridors across Latin America to connect fragmented territories. Sixteen Latin American countries have signed up. In September 2025 they launched a regional plan involving standardised methodologies to monitor jaguar populations and defuse conflict with landowners.
In the national parks around the Iguazú Falls—on the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay—the jaguar population fell from around 800 in 1990 to just 40 by 2005 as towns expanded and landowners shot jaguars that preyed on their cattle. Conservationists visited thousands of farms to teach locals how to coexist: electric fences around farmland, secure chicken coops, and advice not to leave cow carcasses lying around. Today more than 100 jaguars roam the park.
The Mamirauá Institute, a charity, teamed up with Brazil's government to create two reserves straddling 35,000 square kilometres in the Amazon, where the jaguar population is stable at around 1,000.
Cowboys in the Pantanal, an area of tropical wetlands in Brazil, used to slaughter jaguars. In the mid-2000s tourists began paying guides to take them out in boats to spot the cats. In 2017 researchers found that jaguar tourism netted the area's guesthouses almost $7m in annual revenues, while attacks on cattle cost just $120,000 a year. Roberto Klabin, who owns a cattle ranch housing the Caiman reserve in the Pantanal, says jaguars take about 3% of his herd every year—tiny compared with the money the farm makes from ecotourism. The reserve tracks four of its 70 jaguars with GPS collars.
There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones the magpies know themselves.